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Bionic Eyes for Everyone
Rob Riggs writes "As seen on this SlashCode using site, scientists at the University of Rochester are working on a project to bring adaptive optics, technology used in ground-based astronomy, to the human eye. They expect to achieve 20/10 vision and enhanced contrast for everyone, but this article claims 20/2.5 is ultimately possible." The best thing about this story is that the submitter picked the rarely-used "Upgrades" category for it.
Uhm .. yeah ... "Hey ... look at the bones she got !"
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How does the 20 - scale work anyway? Is there a maximum (20/0)? Is it linear or logarithmic with respect to the quality of your vision? Is the denominator just a measurement? Why 20, is it just normalized to average vision? Any opthimologists in the peanut gallery?
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While this would be good if it really works and is safe. Having bad vision sucks. Since its from staring at a TV with a TRS-80 pluged into it to having 3 monitors next to each other, most of my life is spent in from of some kind of image device. Without contacts I get so see shapes and blur. I would like to correct that problem but I dont think now we are at a level where these things have been tested for LONG term usage. I dont need to go blind in 20 years because some company overlooked a problem in it's haste to get this to the market to make money.
Once tested and proven for long term usage these sort of procedures will help people with bad vision from having to deal with contacts and glasses. Maybe then we can all become fighter pilots and race car drivers!
Lord Arathres
stainless steel
I've always been very fascinated with the prospects of bionic eyes, as a visual artist they are my most valued assets. I would be mortified if something ever happened to them, and having a viable replacement available would be the difference between life and death for me.
I currently have 20/10 vision naturally, and I must say it is a huge benifit in daily life. To be able to give this to everyone would not dramiatically improve the quality of life for most, but it would be something worth investing a couple of thousand dollars in.
As I'm sure most slashdotters are framiliar with, most sci-fi that discusses bionic eyes touches on the idea of night-vision, zoom, and theremal imaging. All of which sound great, but now that I come to think about it (since this is apparently becoming a sci-reality) I'm a bit concerned with the idea of everyone having thermal vision. Talk about a huge invasion of privacy. I'm an apartment dweller and would not like for other tenants snooping on me simply by looking through the wall. Being that the world is becoming infatuated with voyerism (how many reality TV shows are out there right now?) I would suspect that as soon as you started implanting this sort of thing into people it would very quickly find malicious use.
disc-chord
I recently underwent corrective eye surgery and I call it a miracle. I have worn glasses since 3rd grade, and contact lenses since 1978. Over 35 years since I've seen sharply without correction. Before surgery, my sight was at best 20/400. Now, I'm a little better than 20/15. It felt like having "bionic eyes". My wife catches me gazing at the clouds, trees, even the brush on the hillside a mile or so away. I'm seeing so much I've overlooked before. I didn't expect this absolute sharpness. I simply wanted to be free of the confines of glasses and contacts. I even expected to perhaps need reading glasses for close work, but I can still read the smallest print on a dollar bill at 6 inches, so I guess that's good too. Another thing I guess I'm lucky about is that I've had no dry eye problem or irritation at all since I awoke Thursday afternoon. I use the drops anyway, just because, but I could probably do without them.
Anyway, at the post-op, they said it would not be unexpected to have the vision get a little fuzzier and then improve even more over the next week a the corneal swelling maxes out and recedes. I can't imagine it getting any better than this...
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
This neural mosaic is relatively coarse compared to the retinal image, which may introduce artifacts into the neural image and ultimately cause a kind of mis-perception called "aliasing".
I'll wait for the anti-aliasing patch, I think. And I thought I was happy about the GTK patch...
signature smigmature
- James
until the MPAA perfects their copy control enhancements for the human optical nerve.
:)
Movies watermarked for joe blow (SSN 101-69-1984) will not appear as black blobs in the eyes of jane doe.
Fortunately, I already patented this technology.
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63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have a certain kind of albinism which not only affects my skin pigment, but also my eyes. On a very good day I can achieve maybe 20/150 vision, and it is much more blurry than normal 20/20 and normal eyes as well. As cases go I am in the 99th percentile of *GOOD* vision for people with albinism. I had a friend who was 20/2000 (2000, yes). This is incredibly exciting for me.
My vision is not correctable with glasses, as the problem exists primarily in my retina (lacking rods/cones). Short of something like this I have no way to significantly improve my vision. No laser surgery does this, in fact there is really nothing on the market to do this. Personally, I would be willing to be a test subject or pay $20,000 for this treatment.
If you have correctable vision (say you can get to about 20/40 or so somehow) I envy you. I can't drive, I have to take a magnifier with me anywhere I go, and it is very difficult for me to get around. The consequences of being unable to drive are manifold, most people can hardly comprehend it. I can't live in places without above average to excellent public transpotation. This means only major cities, and only major cities with good transit. For reference, in the US, there are perhaps 5 major cities with really manageable public transport (for me). Of these, I would need to live typically in or within walking distance of the downtown area. It's basically like being told you can only ever live in a select few places.
If you're curious about the '20/x' scale, here's a brief description. The first number (typically 20) is the average distance (in any unit you like) that an individual can see an object with clairty. The x is the distance at which, if I could see the object at '20' a person with normal vision could get the same image. So if I have, say, 20/150 then what I see at 20 feet, you could see at 150 feet. That is a factor of 7.5x. The thought of having 20/20 or better vision is like a distant dream for me, and the faster this comes around the happier I will be.
Needless to say, I do not play golf.
-wd
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chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
could become useful if you're surrounded by a bunch of supermodels =)
Yes, being in the glamorous world of system administration, that situation comes up often.
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As seen on this SlashCode using site
There was also a story on this slashcode-using site.
Seriously though, looks like they might be rolling this out a lot sooner than we thought, which is pretty cool. I've put off getting lasik myself partly because I'd like to see how far they can stretch this technology first.
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A reader over at Plastic expressed concern that humans should perhaps not be buying upgrades for their own bodies. On the contrary, there are circumstances by which it becomes very benificial to augment our bodies where they would otherwise provide a hinderance to us. Admitadly, there are limits. But this is just an extension of the first neanderthal man with a broken (or missing) leg being constructed a crutch to help him walk. It's part of what makes us human. To try to improve the lives of our fellow men. Of course there are limits to the circumstances that our technology should (and can) be used.
For those who missed it, my original post is here, complete with the chain of responses from outraged laser geeks, my counter response, etc.
To recap: my argument is that the Light/Dark spots you see in the speckling of laser light are the individual Pixels (cones and rods, actually) of your own eyes. I ommitted to mention this effect probably comes from the interferance of Laser light on the retina of your eye. The bottom line is that each sensory cell in the eye, be it a cone or a rod, sends one point of brightness data to the brain, thus the speckle effect. This is noted indirectly by this section from the article mentioned above:
Although there are many potential benefits of super-normal visual optics, there is at least one expected penalty. Given a dramatic increase in optical quality of the retinal image, the photoreceptor mosaic will appear relatively coarse by comparison, as shown in Figure 5. As a result of this mismatch, very fine spatial details in the retinal image will be smaller than the distance between neighboring cones and therefore will not be registered properly in the neural image. This mis-representation of the image due to neural undersampling by a relatively coarse array of photoreceptors is called "aliasing". However, for everyday vision the penalty of aliasing is likely to be outweighed by the reward of higher contrast sensitivity and higher detection acuity.
In this context, this causes the aliasing effect because each receptors reports only one dot of light intensity data back to the brain. If the receptors sent more than one data point to the brain at the same time for a higher resolution, then the aliasing effect would still be there, although at a much smaller point.
See my original comments for the full details, etc. but it is still my contention the the effect of seeing the speckles in laser light is the individual variation of reception of light intensity by the individual cells of your eye.
This is a way for you to notice the granuality, the pixels of your eyes.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Adaptive optics is meant to correct tinier flaws in the curvature of the lens of the eye. As the article said, current Lasik machines typically only correct for astigmatism and prescription, but in a fairly smooth manner over the surface of the eye. All this does is provide a more detailed map of the eye. "Bionic" vision, it isn't. I ended up with 20/15 vision after standard Lasik, and no matter what the people who get all excited about this technology think about it, the retina doesn't have enough resolution in terms of rods/cones for anything better than 20/12 vision. 20/10 could only happen with someone who naturally had a gene for a higher retinal density. If you are lacking rods/cones in the eye, no amount of corrective optics in the lens can help. Its like upgrading your video card so you can do 1920x1280x24bit and only having a 640x480 VGA monitor. Nothing but replacing the monitor can help. Along the same lines, nothing but replacing the retina can help if the source of poor vision comes from it, not a misshapen lens. Don't fret though, this technology won't help, but give it ten years, there are already implanted artificial retinas, and I wouldn't be suprised if in ten years bioengineered replacement eyes aren't happening as well. In both of those cases, as long as the nerve density within the optic nerve is normal, then when technology gets advanced enough it can be fixed. (Plus its worth remembering that the area of the retina that needs to be "corrected" to achieve perfect vision is very small, a millimeter or two in diameter. Peripheral vision in virtually everyone is very bad, dozens, if not hundreds, of times worse than their normal vision -- rod/cone and nerve density both are very low outside the very center of the retina)
I have one good eye and one not so good eye, so norally 95% of my vision is with my good eye. Working on my car I got a piece of rust in the good eye and it was subsequently bandaged for a week. The strangest things happened...I really could see fine but the processing of the info was terrible, especially at first...my judgement of position and velocity was way off, and this was NOT due to a lack of depth perception, as I can operate with just my good eye fine.
The most startling occurrence was when I was later brave enough to drive and I was behind a car on the highway. His brake lights came on, in a flash I knew he was stopping but with only my bad eye, not used to processing this kind of info, I couldn't determine how quickly he was decelerating, tapping his brakes or jamming them. I panicked and ripped the bandage off my other eye and instantly I "understood" how everything was moving around me.
New optics would be great, but I guess I really want a CPU upgrade :)
SuperID
Makes me want to go out and get this surgery right now! Except it's not available yet. Still I'm a bit worried about the side effects. At least we don't have to worry about eyeballs collapsing anymore. Until the military starts using this technology on their own pilots and divers, and it gets a lot cheaper, I'm going to hold back.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Isn't there an upper limit to how much information the brain is ready to handle from the optic nerve? I know in my own experience (and those of my friends), when our vision has been over-corrected to 20/15 or even 20/10, headaches are the usual result, because the brain isn't used to dealing with what it's getting. Is this completely unrelated, or is it something the developers have thought about?
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Vision physiologists have determined that
4K x 4K grids are about the finest you can see.
They run testest displaying sine wave stripes
at various wavelengths, color contrasts and distances. Less if there is a lot of motion, dark, or little color contrast.
It seems to me that as you increase the magnification, you will decrease the field covered. As a result this may not be the best thing, way when you are playing point guard.
A better solution would be zoom vision where you can control the magnification.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
...that service packs for the firmware will be affectionately called 'eye patches'?
Is there a maximum (20/0)?
My understanding is like Brento's -- the numbers X/Y mean you can see at X feet as someone with "normal" vision can see at Y feet. So, of course, 20/0 would mean you can see something at 20 feet away with the same accuracy that someone with normal vision would if they stuck it to their eyeball.
-- dR.fuZZo
I'd swap my eyes out once the replacement offers better resolution, the ability to zoom, IR wavelengths and a wireless computer interface. They'd also have to be secure, though. Wouldn't want some skript kiddie hacking my eyes while I'm driving.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was pleased that the paper addressed the issue of neuronal density, and that even if the optics were perfect, the receptors aren't up to the task.
Really, this is the way it evolved: each part's complexity and accuracy is limited by the others. We wouldn't evolve the optics of eagles unless we also had the neural capability to do something with it.
It doesan't stop at the rods and cones though. The ganglion cells behind them agregate localized cells for transmission to the LGN and then the visual cortex. These too would have to be completely rewired, not to mention the rewiring of the visual cortex, for the increased clarity to do much good at all. The plasticity of the visual track just isn't high enough in adults.
This sort of surgery would have to be done while the brain is still forming its visual pathways, pretty much from 0-8 months. Then, even if we didn't have a higher fovial neural count (and who knows, we might get a higher count if the optic acuity is there early enough), the visual pathways from the retina on back would form based on the higher acuity, helping us make better use of the enhancement, especially, as the paper mentioned, in the area of feature detection, because the bipolar ganglion cells would likely link to smaller clusters of rods and cones, taking advantage of the greater clarity.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
I'm a bit concerned with the idea of everyone having thermal vision. Talk about a huge invasion of privacy. I'm an apartment dweller and would not like for other tenants snooping on me simply by looking through the wall.
That's no big deal... just turn the A/C down to 50 when having sex!
"And like that
It could have been a depth perception issue.
Humans determine visual distance using a several factors.
When both eyes are working our eyes form two vertices of a triangle. The third vertex is whatever we are looking at. We "know" the distance between our eyes and the angles of the eye vertices. This is enough information to determine the distance of the object vertex from our eyes. This works fairly well at close range, but you need both eyes.
We also "know" how big most things in our environment are and can make distance estimates based on perceptual deviations from these sizes.
Thirdly our eyes focus on whatever we are looking at. We can feel how much our eyes need to strain to put an object into focus and derive distance information from that.
You were using one eye so the first, and most reliable method, was unavailable to you. Distance perception via size is not too good because objects come in different sizes and guessing distance based on size is a rather high level process.
Since you can't focus well with your bad eye the third option doesn't work very well either. Thus when you tore of your eye patch you suddenly made your depth perception much more accurate, and since your perception of velocity, in terms of distance from you, is based on depth perception, you could suddenly tell at what rate the car in front of you was accellerating.
With all the talk of increased resolution, what would also be sueful, and far less difficult from a visual pathways standpoint, would be building eyes that could respond to different frequency ranges, or be able to increase contrast and control brightness better than our existing eyes. Look at sunspots one secong, then step into a pitch black room and play hunter with your cat in the dark.
Imagine, just for a second, what life would be like if we didn't have to have streetlights, reading lights, big, bright monitors, or even daylight most of the time. You could hike through the woods at night without even noticing a difference, and driving through fog would be no difficulty for your infrared eyes.
All without having to deal with the problems posed by increased resolution in the visual pathway.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
So, while it's not the typical lot of a sysadmin or programmer, it is possible :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Actually, the definition of 20/20 was purely arbitrary. The guy who invented the eye chart in 1864 (Hermann Snellen) picked somebody who seemed to him to have normal eyesight, and determined that he could read a 3/8" letter at twenty feet, so that's the definition of 20/20.
The 3/8" size of the 20/20 line on the eye chart is arbitrary, but the 20' is not. At ~20' and beyond the eye is "unfocused", meaning the muscle that controls the accomodative lens is completely relaxed. So if you have "normal eyesight" at 20', you also have "normal eyesight" at any distance over 20'.
However, you could debate that the original subject had "better than normal" eyesight. I remember hearing that about 50% of the American population needs glasses, and that in some populations it's as high as 90%!
I believe that society has adjusted to Snellen's definition of 20/20. Driving, schools, and other modernisms require people to have 20/20 (either natural or corrected) in order to function. If Snellen had picked a subject with worse eyesight, probably all the street signs would be printed in a little bit bigger letters. If we were to give superior vision surgery to everybody, society would probably adjust again and 20/10 vision would become "normal".
It's possible that a very small number of people can see better than 20/10 naturally, because the bottom line on the Snellen eye chart is 20/5.
This was great (other than what they call "glare" at night)... a problem of blurring that only shows up in high contrast conditions.
4 years later, my vision is probably about 20/50 (last measured 20/35) in both eyes... it has slowly drifted. But vision is still vastly better than before, and still correctable to 20/12 (or equiv in the nearsighted eye... let's see... 3.3/2).
Also, let me point out a few things:
If yours doesn't, go somewhere else!
The only good weather is bad weather.
..if the optical components of the eye (lens, cornea, the fluid inside the eyeball) are actually transparent to infrared?
I assumed anyone replacing the retina and lens of an eye would also be replacing the ocular fluid and pretty much the rest of the eye, so they could construct it to suit whatever needs. I know it passes UV, because UV can currently damage retinas, indicating it gets through.
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
Snakes sense temperature via two pits on either side of their head. I don't believe the pits actually sense IR though, they sense ambient temperature (convective heat, as opposed to radiative heat). Apparently pirhhana and goldfish can also see in infrared...
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
not because it appears twice as large on your retinas.
Sooner or later you are going to hit the resolution limit of the retina. When this happens the only way to improve the image detail is to increase it's size on the retina.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Another problem with glass lenses is the distortion seen by people I'm talking to. One eye is going to look normal... and the other will be shown as a big gaping hole straight through my head, what with the coke-bottle-bottom sized lense! It'd be very distracting.
:-)
The new disposable contacts are probably my first choice, followed by laser surgery. But, as I said, getting older seems to be helping.
Anyway, it's not a problem right now. I function quite well with things as they are, so I don't see a need to dash out and remedy the problem.
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