Bionic Eyes

DNAhelix writes: "From NASA: Bionic Eyes - Using space technology, scientists have developed extraordinary ceramic photocells that could repair malfunctioning human eyes."

Comments

Next generation of glasses ? :)

[boaworm]

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 =)

Re:Cool!

[Raving]

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.

IANAB, but I remember some experiments about human vision which involved wearing during some days glasses-like devices which comprised prisms and reverted the left/right, up/down or both.

It took people some hours to adjust, but then they could react properly again to their environment (walking and the like).

So, yes, our visual cortex is very flexible to unexpected visual stimuli modifications, and seems to adjusts in a relatively short time...

Olivier.