Slashdot Mirror
Bionic Eyes
DNAhelix writes: "From NASA: Bionic Eyes - Using space technology, scientists have developed extraordinary ceramic photocells that could repair malfunctioning human eyes."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
After all the years of eye damage from CRT radiation I have a chance to see again :) This will sell well with all the hardcore hackers :)
#include <Xenph Yan>
I think that a large portion of the /. community falls under the "malfunctioning eye" category.
Well, the article is from NASA, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised when aliens contribute to the articles.
Bad grammar aside, anyone know what an Ignatiev is? ;)
-- Dan
For me with a history of retinal detachment since the age of 22 this is good news indeed. Fixing the retina by installing a pea-sized bit of silicone inside the outer layer of the eyeball is such a medical kludge...
Looks to me like a brilliant joint venture between biology and technology. This first step is to see if we can provide some vision to blind people, or to enhance the vision of almost-blind people.
If we can get such things to work, we could be close to getting good night-vision enhancements for people with normal sight as well.
And the best thing... I dont really see how this technology could be abused. Many other implants and biotech research projects are accused of being too much sci-fi (stem cell research, organ transplants, organ growth etc). Some communities are having a hard time accepting those, because they see the risks that follows (ethical questions about life). But this seems to be more like improved glasses, and even the Pope are using those =)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
but I want my 5/20 vision contact lenses from bauch and laumb.
Booty call!
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
as long as i get my vision back from this fucking CRT, i dont care how brave and new it gets. (well, for now anyway,heh)
That's weird, I was just thinking about the artificial eyes in William Gibson's novels and how they'd possibly be done.
I think the most difficult part about this is how the nerves will react. I think they're very right about the brain needing training to adapt to this. I'm pretty confident it could do it, but I don't know how much training it would take.
I thought the process with the dissolving film was an incredible idea too.
I hope this one pulls through. Does anyone with a neuroscience background have any thoughts on the feasibility of this one?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Based on the location within the eye that the surgery would need to take place, it seems to me that the surgery could acctually cause more problems than it fixes. Apart from that, it would be interesting to see what kind of images the brain would actually produce from the implant (no pun intended). Would it mean people being able to see again, albeit in black and white?
-- Never monkey with another Monkey's monkey
"We are conducting preliminary tests on the ceramic detectors for biocompatibility, and they appear to be totally stable"
Hmmm... As a lifelong glasses/contacts wearer, I don't like the sound of the words 'preliminary' and 'appear' in this article. By the time they're actually ready, I bet I'll be long gone. A shame.
Long term testing needs to be done too; since the eyes deteriorate with age (which can adversely affect the results of current corrective surgery, such as LASIK where if you get it done too soon, you'll need glasses again by the time you're 35-40) I'd love to know what will happen to this technology.
Don't get me wrong; it's way cool. But these are my eyes, dammit!
Nothing would be cooler than walking down the street with chrome eyes. Just imagine the reactions of people.
Such extraordinary ceramic photocells are potentially the building blocks of the artificially intelligent Cyborg -- only now coming of age as robotics and massively parallel processing (MPP) and Good Old-Fashioned True Artificial Intelligence march together into the Technological Singularity of an unpredictable future.
Carver Mead saw it coming as he built an artificial retina, but for a long time the intractable problem of computer vision held up the design of the AI Mind that started out in Forth for robots and has meanwhile branched out into Visual Basic Mind.VB and into Java-based Mind.JAVA AI.
These National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Bionic Eyes are just the thing for outfitting AI robots with Machine Vision in a new Manhattan Project to create Artificial Intelligence. Slashdotters ought to see here not only the chance of an individual lifetime but the chance of lifetime-trajectory of an entire species -- humanity, that is -- gathering up all these parts (Bionic Eyes) and theory and Open Source AI code and proceeding to assemble our successor life-form. We have the technology -- we can make it better, faster, stronger.... Only crazy AI geeks need apply.... Put your Bionic Ears to the ground and hear the thundering robot footsteps, then help us, we can't do it alone, we need your brains and your coding skills to take us further beyond where we of limited ability have managed to crawl -- a Bionic Eyes Only message to you from Mentifex.
Xeyes of course!
I can't stop thinking of the economic effect that this magnificent discovery will inflict. Probably all of the people who wear glasses will stop doing that and... this will surely mean that many of the companies in this domain will go bankrupt. Anyway it's a great invention. When and if it gets on the market I'll be the first to buy it!
Pardon me, but reading the article, two major questions came to my mind.
The question of availability has already been asked, and the answer clearly is in a long long time. I'm glad to hear they found some desperate person to accept to test the technology as soon as 2002 (don't misunderstand me, I'd be desperate too if I lost my eyes), but come on. It won't work right the first time, nor the second. And then they'll have to conduct large-scale studies to optimize the huge amount of parameters and tunings such operations involve. I don't expect such operations becoming common before ten or twenty years.
But moreover, how much will this cost? Ultra-thin ceramic films don't grow on trees, and I'd be surprised they'd become cheap, relatively speaking, anyday soon. Besides I guess that people able to put millimeter-sized implants at the back of the eye are not selling their skills for free, far from it. I think only a few crazy millionaires will have a chance to try it in the next few years, if even they dare, or their insurances allow them.
Did you know that about 8% of men have little bit colorblindness, maybe not much but still have that problem?
Could this be the solution for us? Will the humankind be saved?
Australianus Geekus
Well, at least those who are addicted to MAME and NES Emulators will be able to play them again :)
Why can't they understand that a direct plug into the visual cortex is much better ?
And it will not only help the blind but everyone.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Hmm. .
... soon you'll have to choose how many megapixels your eyes can handle. Maybe even digital camera attached to your eyes?
First off, don't be fooled by the date on this article. Steve Austin has been testing bionic equipment since his crash at NASA.
My only question for this "new" technology is: Do we still have to listen to that damned "Bionic" noise everytime we focus on something with our bionic eyes? I mean geez, that noise got old fast, not to mention that it makes it hard to be discrete when you're using your bionic vision on the hot chick standing next to you. She hears the noise, looks over at you, sees your bionic chubber and knows what YOU'VE been doing. C'mon NASA, hook us up.
;)
-- Dan
Using space technology...
"Space technology"? What is this, the 1950's?
"Hey, Space Jimmy, time for your Space Math lesson."
"Spaceriffic!"
"What's space two plus space two?"
"Space four!"
There is also a story in the press today about some Japanese researchers who have developed eyes biologically.
;-)
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
You can order mirrored contact lenses (prescription or non-prescription) from several theatrical F/X shops, including this one.
I used to want those, but now I've upped my sights (so to speak). Now I want tinted contact lenses that change into "sunglasses" in bright light, like those variable-tint "sun sensor" glasses. They'd basically be enhancing the degree to which your iris can vary the amount of light that gets into your eye -- that'd be a "bionic" device I'd happily pay for.
-Mark
screw everybody else
That's Silicone, not Silicon. Silicones are synthetic silicon-oxygen polymers.
You dont get it do you? This thing will help correct retinal problems. Glasses and contacts help fix cornea problems, focus problems if you will. These are two totaly different things. Compare this to a camera. Glasses correcte the lens and the artificial retina corrects the film.
IANAAC (i am not a anonymous coward, i am just too lazy to register)
You American kids. Take one of your lame "classes" and think you can go around spreading stupid paradoxes.
Who are the dummies that modded up this troll anyway ?
What a load of bullshit !
The article mentions that the device replaces the damaged rods and cones in the eye. This is not the same as myopia and hypermetropia (short- and long- sightedness) that people wear glasses for. These problems are caused by the lens at the front of the eye. LASIK surgery would be more useful for people like us, instead of the ceramic microdetector thingy.
On another note, the article doesn't say anything about whether the arrays act more like rods (high-speed night vision) or cones (high-detail colour images). Or does it act like a video camera? It would also make sense to implant the array near or on the fovea (center of the retina, all cones only), so that the array produces the images in the center of the person's vision. If the implant wasn't at the fovea, they would seem to be looking away from you when they're actually looking at you. Also, if the implant acted more like rods, this could be weird for the person.
But all this talk of cutting open the eye and doing all that squishy stuff freaks me out too.
~~Duane
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Finnaly a piece of tech that bean counters and lawyers could appreciate. For those cut throat office enviroments... Eyes in the back of my head.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I wouldn't mod your post as funny. Quite serious. One of my family members has retinitis pigmentosa and is adamant that science will restore (to some degree) her sight before she dies. She refuses to learn braille for this reason. I don't encourage that viewpoint, but do share with her each eye science article that gets posted here.
I'm helping spec her computer and accessibility software now, her first PC since MS-DOS...
Dr. Ignatiev at the University of Houston is in charge of a NASA-funded effort to develop "Space Vacuum Epitaxy", where researchers try to take advantage of the vacuum of space as a growth environment. The problem is, near-earth space simply isn't low enough pressure to work well, meaning that the researchers need to have their experiments behind a "wake-shield" - basically a big metal plate that pushes unwanted gas molecules out of the way.
The upshot is that space vacuum epitaxy is hugely expensive. Better and more controlled vacuums may be achieved on earth at a tiny fraction of the cost of a single shuttle launch. While I'm glad NASA funds research efforts like this, many such projects, even while producing cool results, often end up with the conclusion that doing the work in space is neither necessary nor desirable.
that they don't say anything whatsoever about how they are going to hook this device up to the optic nerve? Without that, everything is for nothing. Do they really know how to do this? If so, why wasn't it mentioned in the article? If not, why was the article written at all?
I wonder if these will be better than my metallic Tleilaxu eyes. They give me decent sight, but my friends say I look creepy with pitted aluminum spheres in my eye-sockets.
----------
I'm sick and tired of being responsible for the preservation of the universe and its outlying suburbs.
I could care less if it works as well; I for one will never use anything touched by filthy Tleilaxu hands!
There are a number of issues with the use of retinal prosthetics. One is the light sensitivity. Silicon based retinal implants have been explored for some time and beyond the silicon toxicity issues, there are issues of the sensitivity of the photoreceptive properties of aritificial circuits. The retina is not simply a CCD and artificial silicon "retinas" are nowhere near the real sensitivities of a human retina. The light required to activate many of these chips is equivalent to shining the full brightness of the sun into the eye.
Additionally, these studies are making several assumptions about the nature of retinal degenerations in that bionic based implants will be able to successfully interface with the ganglion cells or the output cells of the retina. I have read nothing that examines the field effects of these chips. In other words, how do we know that when these chips are activated that they just stimulate the ganglion cells? Basic physics tells us that there should be field effects that also might influence amacrine cells, horizontal cells, remaining bipolar cells etc...
The other assumption that almost no-one in the visual research community has addressed is the intrinsic circuitry of the retina in cases of retinal degeneration. The underlying assumption is that in retinitis pigmentosa and macular degenerations the photoreceptors degenerate from a variety of primary insults (genetic and environmental) and the rest of the retina remains relatively intact. Preliminary research by myself and others indicate that this is NOT the case. The retina continues to degenerate and remodel itself with large numbers of retinal cell subclasses that dissappear and move into other layers of the retina among other dramatic changes.
This does not neccessarily shut the door on retinal transplantation research, rather it indicates that there are other issues that need to be addressed and straightforward transplantations (biologic and bionic based) are not neccessarily going to work in the short term. I think eventually they will work with a combination of pharmacotherapy and/or gene therapy, but we are probably 50 years or more off. Therefore in response to another poster who has a family member who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa and refuses to learn braille, I would suggest that she does not hold out hope that a cure will be just around the corner and make the effort to learn braille and use other methods such as computer mods with large text etc... to compensate.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Blah Blah Blah - *Star Trek* - Blah Blah Blah - *Jordi!* - Blah Blah Blah - Wil Wheaton's mom! - Blah Blah Blah - Warp 3 indeed. Ha ha ha!
Something out of a Dune novel, hmmm, can we say Tleilaxu!!! Damn Nasa and their Duncan Tanks!!! sorry ;-)
O_o
You know what happens when you use a video recorder on a tv, their syncs don't match. I'm wondering would the same thing happen with these eyes, as it would make it hard to use any video monitor.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Umm, I'm going to classify it as pretty funny.
About your sister; her viewpoint does not strike me as particularly healthy. For 20+ years I've been told that science would cure my macular degeneration, and my mother was told the same thing about HER eyes for 20+ years before me. Living life waiting for a cure is unhealthy, as it can lead to depression when that cure doesn't arrive, and unproductive for obvious reasons.
I read articles like this and take them with a grain of salt. They're neat little curiosities, but they get shoved in the same mental pile as all of the stories about terahertz processors, holographic memory, and privatized spaceflight that we'll have "some day Real Soon Now." So don't hold your breath.
A bit of advice (which I'm sure she's heard a hundred times before) for your sister; don't wait for a cure. Assume that it's never going to happen, and get on with your life. It's a whole lot easier than you think.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
My eyes crashed again...
This stinks of those dirty Tleilaxu!
So I can browse through and figure out all the shows of Married ... With Children where Christina Applegate wore a bikini?
... win-win. :)
Wowww
"You Nexus 6?!! I make your eyes."
So, yes, our visual cortex is very flexible to unexpected visual stimuli modifications, and seems to adjusts in a relatively short time...
So does that mean humans could adapt easily to flying through space, similar to what we see in Star Wars fighter scenes and the like?
I'd imagine flying without a "down" would be disorientating at first, but we'd eventually get used to it and adapt for the situation...
I wonder if they could draw a crosshair in the center of the device's output? I've been wanting to walk around with a crosshair for a long time.
It's interesting to see who exactly caters to the wants and needs of us colorblind folk. Being a gamer for the most part, you really pick up on what you can play and what you can't. Those 'bubble' games, are all great, but, you have to line up colored balls. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish what the spinning shapes in the middle are. EverQuest was good enough about having different messages when you 'con' something. So, that helps. I currently play Dark Age of Camelot. And, for those that really haven't noticed (and play DAoC, of course), that's what those little "+" and "-" signs are for next to everything you target. One, two, or three plusses let you know how many levels higher (three means it's just too high) something is than you. Similarly for the minuses.
I get sick of people asking about traffic lights. I live in the USA. *EVERY* traffic light I've ever seen will have the red either on top, or the left. Green has always been on the bottom or the right.
It's kind of amazing once you sit back and just take notice on how dependant we are on colors. And assume that everybody can see them fine.
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
I wonder if this technology can be used to perceive new colours then out normal rgb...saw an articly about people born with an extra colour then rgb but forget what it was.
.
.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
All this visual nanotech is nice and all, but isn't the biggest problem with these electronic implants the actual interface to the human nerve system ? You could build a 40-bazillion pixel LCD for your retinas, but if you don't know how to hook it up to that fat optic nerve you're still in the dark (heh).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Maybe science will eventually restore her sight, but does she really want to curl up in a useless ball between now and then? She really should learn braille so she can keep reading, and doesn't have two tons of unread books to wade through when/if she does get her sight back.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Ahh, but she can keep reading without knowing braille.
1) Books on tape.
2) Scan pages, convert to text, have the PC read it to her. There is software designed expressly for this purpose.
3) E-mail, and web browsing (though browsing is a pain because of crappy web design).
I think the most troublesome issue will be note taking. She either has to have a sharp memory, or use a handheld designed for the blind.
From the article:
The first human trials of such detectors will begin in 2002. Dr. Charles Garcia of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston will be the surgeon in charge.
If she's that serious, then why doesn't she contact Dr. Garcia and try to convince him to let her be in the trials?
I missed the blurb about human trials. (I even visited his web site looking for a submission form. Many research projects let you sign up online.)
Thanks for the alert, I'll send him an e-mail.