Slashdot Mirror
Cortical Cybernetic Implants
Floody writes "Wired is running a story with amazing cyberpunk "wow factor." Implanted visual cortex stimulation, complete with "percutaneous pedestal"; a metal jack installed directly into the skull. Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?" We've posted a couple of previous stories about Dobelle and his work on bionic eyes, but this one has more details: one frame per second, $100,000. Wow.
I could see how in some wierd way this might be used to help blind people. Yucky!
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
...to get all these paid stories onto slashdot?
Steven V>
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
In other news, the Russians, Chinese and EU are working on ways to use EMP pulses to fry your brain using those handy wires plugged into your cerebral cortex.
The United States Goverment will continue working on a NMD instead...
Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?
.. uhh .. nevermind ;-)
Forget that, where can I get an x-ray enhancement? Nothing like seeing through
Yeah! It'll make me smarter! I'll be like all cyber and stuff!
No, Beavis. It'll just make you a moron with a fucking nail through your head.
I'll sell my Quake III gaming machine for $6,000,000. Any takers?
Not to complain too much, but check the date at the top of the article (thats what 10-99 is in case you are wondering). nevertheless, quite cool. /.'ed but hey) are hella cool, esp the simulation of what the patient seeso .html
and though their website looks pretty lame at a first glance, its interesting to read,
http://www.artificialvision.com/index.html
The videos (which will be
http://www.artificialvision.com/vision/vide
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Now even the blind can view porn when they eventually make this thing internet capable.
Which means... you no longer have to shut the monitor off or other such nonsense when someone walks in. You can even view on an airplane without fear of a mother slapping you. You can even binge on your favorite pics while driving. Hell, if you got contacts to direct eye movement, you got TWO hands free!
I am the Geekinator, I will kill you my demonstrating my knowledge of COBOL.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
I don't know...I think that when it ships with the ability to cortically realize "Selective X-Ray Perception" I'll be much more likely to shell out the dough.
I wonder if I can get x-ray vision now?
I wuz going to post anonymously but I'm too lazy to check the box.
.. that when it was written, VA Linux's stock was actually worth something.
Did anyone else think Borg when they saw the first picture on that site?
Especially so after seeing the second one. The one with the wire coming out of the back of the skull.
The article states that the device was set at 1 frame per second initially. The first part of page 4 states then they would "...gradually work the frame speed up...".
The first version of this device installed in Jerry 20 years ago could acheive at least 4 FPS, so this version should be faster.
Quote:
[i]Suddenly, the color drains from the patient's face. His deadened eyes roll back. Then another warping convulsion.[/i]
What do you mean, Matrix Reloaded? Matrix Relived!!!
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Maybe I'm just too much of a lamer-gamer, but the world becomes more like ShadowRun every single day. Congrats, we have the beginnings of cyber-eyes right here.
And kinda like ShadowRun, I wonder if these things will be able to use alternate forms of vision (thermographic, for instance), or will accept vision magnification.
Just be careful that you don't lose too much essence...
the vision-gadget should be enchanced so that it detects when you are going to see something you do not like. For example, all chicks should be photoshopped, if you know what i mean, all cars should be ferraris (well, for my neighbour, let's choose Lada), and all drinks should be Pepsi. :)
this is pretty impressive technology. now for the lung implant...got a pack a day habit i need to fear less!
No...it's okay...I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway
Yes, very cool technology. The description however drove me nuts.
"My arms are under his, trying to steady the weight. His head snaps toward mine, and I take it on the chin with the force of a solid right cross."
Do we care about this? Can't he just say "occasionally, he has convulsions", rather than ranting on for multiple paragraphs about this mysterious device like its a sci-fi book.
Yeah, sounds like oodles of fun. Shiver...
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
in the same iridescent blue as Tally Isham's Zeiss Ikons?
j ec ts/garza/cp_optic.htm/ ~tonya/cyberpunk/projec ts/garza/cp_info6.htms .com/gibson/gibson.html
For those of you who don't get the above joke see the link below.
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~tonya/cyberpunk/pro
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu
http://www.antonraubenweis
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
The happy sound of Borg kids helping each other train their pattern recognition systems -- "I spy, with my little eye piece ..."
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
Will be required to send a signal to headquarters everytime copyrighted movies are seen.
when I can sit down at a desk with maybe just a keyboard, and plug in the sound screen and everything directly into my head.
:-)
:-)
Sound would be amazing if they could get the entire range (including that which is naturally lost after childhood) to work. Imagine hearing music absolutely perfectly clear. Wouldn't that be awesome.
And screen would be even better. Considering I have contacts as is, so the screen isn't 100% clear, just good enough.
Imagine if they could have the screen show up with clarity beyond that of 20/20 or even 20/10 . Movies where everything is perfectly clear.
If scientists were to actually work on ways to "jack" ourselves in. There are so many things we could do with it. Even just the sheer speed increase of data entry if we just had to think about it.
The possiblities are endless...
~ kjrose
It only uses the surface of the visual cortex, not all of it. There's other technology being researched which embeds itself into the brain. This makes a more complicated procedure, but in the long run makes it possible to do a lot more.
The technology using the damaged retina seems much more promising in the short term, and the embedded procedure in the long term.
However, if i'd go blind, and had the bling, i'd be all about it. Just imagine though, watching Hardcore Slapazz Porn and no one would know it!
Now the question that would be interesting...
What happens with copyright laws when people have these (types of) implants in them?
If you can record, verbatim, (i.e. through the use of some static ram, etc) what you see as a "perfect" digital copy, then would that be copyright infringment? Is the implant going to be considered the same as other (external) hardware?
Its a sticky issue, imho- Will the copyright holder "rights" force us to unlearn what we have learned because they have a patent or copyright on the idea? What happens when the electronic thought ends up being the same as normal "human" thought because the devices are a part of us?
I imagine that "our" lawmakers havn't even considered considering such a thing. The lack of foresight isn't suprising, but it is disheartening.
-R
That was a nice read. Something to smile about. I'm happy to see that we can still help eachother sometimes.
I will NOT be volunteering for beta-testing of. No, no and no. I'll wait for other people to pioneer this field. I like my brain, and until they get the "regenerate and repair of brain damage" thing down pat I'll wait. For people who need this, I'm happy it's advancing, but I want to give the tech a bit to mature to the point it's a viable elective option.
Impressive! This thing is amazing. If they can get this sort of thing to work in the eye, imagine what they could do in the future, implanting electrodes in other parts of the brain. Even if they never hooked it up to a big ol' machine and had the subject control stuff with his mind, the implications for research are staggering. I mean even Sun Tzu agrees: "Know thy enemy, but above all, know thyself."
Good stuff. If I were independently wealthy, I'd give these researchers blank checks and tell him to go nuts.
Er, wouldn't it be easier to use wireless communications and transdermal power rather than poking holes in you're #1 infection prevention mechanism (your skin)?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Don't let this guy get his hands on this.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
All I've got for my cyberpunk WOW factor is this insulin pump. "Hey! It's like a pancreas... except I have to fill it up, and program it, and, uh, it's outside my body!" But hey, atleast I'm more cyborg than most people.
Fuck that, just get a GeForce4 MX, $59 on Pricewatch and 80+ FPS. Even with a monitor it'll be a lot less than 100 large.
Wow, me neither: I can't wait to experience something like this...
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
I would be interested in knowing how beneficial this would be across different types of blindness. Patient Alpha grew up with sight (two words - safety goggles) and one can presume he knew how the world was supposed to 'look' prior to decoding the phosphenes.
Would a person born blind be able to use this technology? If so, better or worse than a patient who had sight? On the one hand, a person born blind may not have any preconcieved notions about how the world is supposed to look and may be better at interpreting the phosphenes as the 'real world'. On the other hand, I wonder if the phosphenes would be interpretable at all to a visual cortex that has never learned how to see.
http://insight.med.utah.edu/research/normann/norma nn.htm
I reckon his system looks better.
Dude, Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
11*43+456^2
hehe =) Just felt compelled to say something Gibsonian.
It sure costs a lot... they'll probably get advertisers to co-pay it so they can run their advertisements over your sight every 10 min :D
You know that's where it's going.
Why is a mouse that spins?
If they can do eyes, which I would have (apprently wrongly) assumed would have been the most complicated, when will they be able to wire up people to take electronic input from the other four senses?
And what about the other direction? Taking signals for muscle movements directly out of the brain?
I heard at one point that there was speculation about injecting cell-sized machines into the blood stream that would find their way to the brain and interface themselves with the host's neurons, without any surgery. Obviously, there's a long way to go before anything like this, but it might actually be possible 50 years from now.
The "Matrix Experience" would be a lot more attractive if it didn't involve someone opening your skull up and poking around inside your brain.
In the article they had to map his sight first, which worked easy because he used to have sight, so they could ask him what it looked like (Plum, lightning streak, circle, etc)
Now with a TRULY blind person this could be a problem - a person who has been lind all his life does not know what a plum is, or what a lightning streak looks like, I wonder if he'd even be able to pick out a circle when he saw one.
Why is a mouse that spins?
1 frame a second... imagine the crazy strobe-light effect.
It would be a 24/7 dance party.
With the headache that thing would give you, maybe you'd rather not see.
This definately gets a tip of the hat from me.
up until recently, the extent of electronic implants has been limited to physical aids or recording/information gathering devices.
While it aesthetically might be awkward, this is the first step towards effectively resolving bodily deficiencies through direct interfaces with the nervous system (and more specifically the brain).
This sounds straight out of star trek. Is what they claim is really true? Kinda hard to believe for me. If this is true, why isn't anyone talking about it other than in slashdot ????
Slashdot these days freaks me out on a daily basis .. :)
Where can I get a night vision enhancement module for this with HUD and distance finder?
How about you just be thankful for having working eyes at all? It's something too many of us take for granted
Read more about why Saudia Arabia may be a better
target than Saddam Hussein here:
The End of the Bush Cabal?
Thank you and have a marijuana induced weekend.
Here's the Dobelle Group's Website....
www.artificialvision.com
There's a bunch of cool videos on here too.
try ripping out the microdisplays from a Tek gear spectre http://www.tekgear.com/product.cfm?sku=0066 and wiring its camera and illumination system to your brain. Look out La Forge, you've got company!
heck, you could even get one of those spectres for free on the evaluation program...
The first person ever to receive this [technology] was Patient Alpha. His given name is Jens -- pronounced "Yens." Twenty-two years ago, at age 17, while nailing down railroad ties, an errant splinter took his left eye. Then, three years later, this time fixing a snowmobile, a shiv of clutch metal broke free and took out his right.
Man, what terrible luck!! On two seperate occasions this guy managed to gauge out one of his eyes. You would have thought that he would of learned his lesson after the first instance.
Good thing his mother didn't by him a Red Rider BB Gun when he was little.
c'mon then... most impressive program wins by totals of trolls' votes!
It is exciting tech, but a little frightening. Consider a world where "cortex technicians" come out of schools no more accredited than the tech institute down the street. They can play with your head, fiddle with the juice going into your visual centers. One mistake, and you (or a loved one) is fried.
I'm glad that there are researchers looking for lower amperage alternatives.
Yeah, okay, that's exactly what I want. Right in the middle of sex our respective plugs pop out and in the ensuing chaos, we plug them into the wrong outlets and I get to see precisely how stupid I look when I have an orgasm.
No thanks.
My
Limekiller
No dude! The Matrix is all around you. Don't create a new one inside it!
I would imagine this would come in pretty handy for anyone in the "cleaning business".
I'm wondering why they did not make a small chip
with wireless receiver that would fit into the
implant (it is like a "fat quarter", plenty of
space to fit a chip in). This would save the
trouble of having 1K wire connector on the side of
your head...
At least they could've make it 2-3 wires (power and data) + a demux chip inside.
Paul Bu
I wonder how that interface goes through the membrane (can't remember the name) that surrounds the brain - as well as how it heals. This membrane (from what I understand) has nerve endings to feel "pain" (the brain cannot feel pain), and also acts to protect the brain from infection as well. It lies between the brain and the inner surface of the skull, so I wonder if the socket pierces this, or if only the electrode wires do (which would be better, but not much).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Is this for real? If it is i have a few questions. The pictures show the man has a camera on only his right eye.
The cords only appear to be going to one side of his hemisphere. This would appear to the subject as half an image. (The left field).
This guy would not be able to see an entire image.
secondly why would they put the imput node so close to the somatosensory cortex? This guy would only be able to interact with the world. The "concept pathway" for images occurs up the center of the brain from the parietal cortex. (Btw these concepts can be shown through studies on visual agnosia, just in case you feel like bitching about my references).
Something is fishy here.
What is with the policy of Slashdot to post 100% of all Wired articles a few days after the new issue comes out?
It is happening month after month. Maybe you should just add a link on your page to Wired.
When I got my ZX Spectrum and found out that you could visualise any of a bagillion-gazillion images by using random numbers or starting at 1 and making images from the pixel values I started wondering... Using a computer... is there an image that you see that makes your brain like... shut off... and you die... and is there one that makes you just like... orgasm... then I started working out the permutations... 4x4=16 pixels... 8x8=256 pixels... colour... if I started now how many could I see before I died... what were the limiting factors... and how many would be garbage or meaningless... and how many would be something I didn't understand... and how could I refine it...
then I forgot about it and got a job.
Seemed to say instead that they started out the alpha patient at 1 fps (a la the topic description), and increased it as he could handle (thus allowing him to drive the car.)
Chew: "I designed your eyes."
Roy: "Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Can we please just get a Wired slashbox and not have to feature every fucking article from their site on the front page of Slashdot? Come on...2 in one day? And more on the way I'm sure.
Though I agree with you fully, it wouldn't have done FASA any good to have players running characters that had all kinds of body ware AND the ability to cast magick, would it? Borg bits stripping out essence was there as a pretty obvious way to enforce game balance.... which, as we all know, is something Real Life doesn't have. :P
Me, I just want the flying cars. And ninjas. Definitely Ninjas.
The world is becoming more Cyberpunk, than Shadowrun. IMHO Cyberpunk is more about reality than Shadowrun will ever be...
Of course, that is unless magic, dragons, elves, dwarves, Ogres, Trolls and the such start appearing all over the place.
Until that day, the world is becoming more Cyberpunk, with the rampant corporate control of the governments, the use of cybernetics, computers and the loss of basic freedoms for the people. The only thing that I don't see happening in our Cyberpunk future is regular firearms fights in the streets.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I bet the mpaa would love to get their hands on this one, 'gives pay per view a whole new meaning.
At first, he is shown a lower res image (lower than 32x32) - he then is upgraded to 32x32 and asked if he can see anything. He can see blobs of color and such - but then suddenly, he says things "resolve", and he can see things more clearly. He asked if they upped the res again, and they responded "No", that his brain was re-learning the "see" the new image.
Now, I don't know what kind of image processing software and such they were using (for all I know it may be some simple image mosaic tiling software like is used to mask peoples faces on TV), but I wonder how "sharp" or well defined the image he saw was? Further I wonder if you did look at one of those mosaic images on a TV in the right conditions (ie, through an HMD with no outside light penetrating like the reporter wore), if the res would "pop up", and you could see who the real person was?
Also, this effect seems real similar to what was noted a long time ago back when VR was just getting started (early 90's), in that when using a low-res HMD (320x200 or less pixels), you had to "learn" to "look past" the pixels, and the image would slowly become clearer.
So, in the area of VR HMD research, I am wondering if resolution really matters at all, or if there is a minimum resolution you can give the eyes, and let the brain fill in the rest? If this is really the case, then wide FOV HMDs, using lower-res displays and some training (so the brain can learn to "see" in one of these things) could possibily bring VR back in the limelight.
Anybody have any thoughts or comments on this?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The topic speaks for itself.
This article is bogus. He claims to have perception across his entire visual field. How can this be if the wires are attached to one hemisphere?
Secondly, how can he possibly see if the connection point is at the somatosensory pathway. He could interact with the world but not see it. Cognitive psychology people.
That's already being thought about. It's called 'augmented reality'. Check out an into webpage here.
:) Think big.
How about this; your braininfo chip contains an image of yourself that's transmitted to your friend whenever you call him (and his image is sent to you). Each AR systems puts an interpolated image of the other one standing in front of him and the two of you are able to have a face to face conversation while your physical bodies are miles apart. Add in pervasive movement sensor fibers sown into all your clothes communicating wirelessly with your skull-implanted cell-phone chips to send your movements to your friend and it will be just like you're there in person.
Just think...
Forced unsolicited advertising that you can't avoid, because it's being pumped directly into your brain.
We haven't even figured out how to lock down individual computers and LANs from unauthorized access in most cases yet. How can we protect humans hard-wired to computers?
1) This is fantastic. Perhaps blindness will be extinguished within my lifetime. This is something that I never thought I'd see.
2) 1 fps is about what I was getting last weekend when I installed Serious Sam the Second Encounter on a Pentium II 450. It really sucked. But even that would beat the crap out of being blind.
And its much better re-write, Cyberpunk 2020.
With the improved combat system (the first was taken from statistical analysis of real shooting statistics (system was called Friday Night Fire Fight) but the second made it easier to play!) and the ultra improved net-hacking section (so good it made me peak) forget magic.
And yes you had to avoid the dreaded cyber-psychosis if you got too much metal.
But to get back OT- YES. YES YES YES.
THis is exactly where this technology is going. And you know thousands who would literally give an eye to have night vision/scanning/HUD/etc. So while it seems private practice and academia are pushing the envelope for the disabled, the military will have it first (some cyber-soldiers) and pioneer the field of augmenting those with two functional eyes.
Whats super exciting to me is that it seems our technological future has been sufficiently influenced by our science fiction. Wether that be our science is better or our fiction was just closer to reality, I don know. (the Gernsback Continuum by our man Gibson is a neat-o little story related to the future that never was).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Hmmm... Maybe that Chris Walken movie isn't too far off.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
This story suddenly reminded me of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. In that, many people (especially starship crews) have 'neural nanonics' implanted. They act as kind of an onboard computer system for an individual, allowing them control over their nervous system, letting them run programs to enhance their vision and affect their state of mind (like drug-programs), and even leave 'to do' notes to themselves (how many times have you made a mental note about something, but forgot about it?). At first, I thought 'wow... that's really cyberpunk. Yawn'. But after reading through the whole trilogy, I was amazed at how well Hamilton integrated this potentially overused technology into the story, making it quite seamless and natural.
Plus, I think it would be totally awesome to be able to choose what kind of window manager I'd want overlayed on my eye's input.
Here is some more information on technology in the Night's Dawn trilogy, and a good description of nanonics are near the top.
no thanks
We have a long way to go before we have to worry about the ethical implications of augmented abilities. What such stories stress too rarely is that none of these add-ons work nearly as well as the factory-standard equipment that most of us were born with. Never mind customization--we're still trying to get halfway-decent replacement parts.
That would be interesting...
I wonder how they would solve that kind of problem. I can imagine a system in which your implant asks you if you would like to accept someone's connection. If neural networking became very common, this might become very annoying, but if you think about it, it wouldn't be difficult once we got used to it. Think about how natural driving is. I doubt it would be much harder to make quick decisions about what incoming connections/requests are OK.
Software to prevent overload would be pretty easy to install as well.
-------
Here's a thought- what about force feedback? Imagine falling off the level in Quake and *feeling* that sensation. Or of being blown up and feeling some sort of out-of-body sensation (or pain for the masochists). The implementations of porn take on a whole new meaning.
I think I can honestly say that if I can be given an 80% change of no ill-side effects, I'll be the first to have this put in my head.
I hope it doesn't take them long to figure out a system of stimulating the brain without placing a bunch of hardware in the brain - that way, we can keep the 'modules' outside of the skull and continue upgrading our systems without major surgery.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
They'd prolly wanna use the Bill Gates Borg image. That would just confuse everyone...
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
why isn't anyone talking about it other than in slashdot????
20/20 will not be covering this issue as it has nothing to do with rape, murder, kidnapping, or anything else equally negative, nor are we getting $20 million for advertis^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfunding.
Regards,
Bahbwa Wawa
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Anyone worried about computer virus being written for and transfered directly to the human brain? Especially so if a certain gargantuan computer software company, with its tentacles in everything and its views on security, wrests the software side of the interface away from the rest of the market.
Tin foil hat time:
Will they come with mandatory GPS transmitters like cell phones, too? (Got to make sure they aren't bein used for terrorism, now...)
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
This is without a doubt of the more impressive HCI developments I have seen in the last decade, and steady progress is being made.
I note that progress is also beging made in the reverse process (generating an image by monitoring neurons firing in the visual cortex). Check out this paper:-
Visual Decoding
Which details images generated directly from a cats brain.
One point to keep in mind is that sadly this technology can only help people whom had sight at birth, but lost it after early childhood. If the patient has been blind from birth, the parts of their brain that would be normally used for vision have not developed and have been "reassigned" to other sensory tasks. (Which is why blind people tend on average to have more actue senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste - there are more neurons available to process them!) If this device was deployed on such a person, it is doubful that they could make much sense of what they could "see".
I would be extremely curious to know what happens to this device when it passes too near an area with a lot of background energy. Magnetic field. Cell sites. HERF.
best web host ever
Man, I can't wait untill they come out with a wireless version. Makes you wonder what protocol they will use- 802.labotomy?
I've got to see Zarniwoop. Where's Zarniwoop?
How about having extra eyes that you can use while the main pair is resting from computer work? Just put on your cool glasses and plug into your other eyes.
How about having 10 eyes at the same time that show you a panoramic view of the space around you, can our brains handle that?
How about wireless eyes? All of a sudden a frase: "I've got an eye on you" has a whole new meaning to it!
How about using eyes with much more surface to receive more light for better magniffication?
How about being able to actually *see* what other people see by sharing the same eye among many people?
What about new types of entertainment where you are plugged into millions of eyes doing crazy stuff or into gigantic eyes... Computer games with Virtual Reality? You don't need a better monitor, your brain is your monitor.
Going to Las Vegas and using your super vision during a game of Black Jack? Why not - if your frame rate is high enough and you have a video buffer built in, just record how the cards are shuffled and play back at much lower speeds to see the positions of cards in the deck.
The possibilities are enormous.
You can't handle the truth.
Some guy did this 2000 years ago...
Wait a minute... what was it he was doing as a kid artificial hip something... Helping people walk at the age of 13, giving blind their vision back...
If this guys starts gathering 12 people around him he's in for a lot more fame than the Wright brothers.
Isn't this in their fiction section?
peace,
core
"There is no Death. Only a change of worlds."
After one day of calibration and one day of the patient being plugged in so his brain learns to interpret the signals, patient alpha got into a car and drove it around the parking lot. Sure it started at 1 FPS when they turned him on, but it is clearly operating at a much higher level than that, and all with only one eye calibrated.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I work as an assistant for a blind piano tech. Mostly I end up helping him with his computers, and have seen the price lists for software for the blind. Everything is right around the $1000 mark. For example Kurzweil has an OCR program, it scans text and reads it aloud, or converts it to mp3 (using LAME), price? $999.95. Same goes for screen readers, speach synths, tape decks. A lady online sells tapes with lessons on using various applications at $50 a pop.
If the implants got good enough that the wearer didn't need all that other specialized crap, it might just end up saving money in the long run. Not to mention, getting the benefit of being able to see.
I remember reading about this kind of technology years ago, back in college. I didn't think it would have advanced this far, this soon.
:)
There's a history of macular degeneration in my family, and my vision is currently around 20/800. I always joked about getting my eyes replaced when they got too bad, assuming my vision would hold out until my mid-50s and the technology got that far. It seems as though I might not have been joking after all
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
We shouldn't be messing with humans. God created us and we shouldn't clone or alter humanity. God bless you. God. Damn atheistic libertarian slashdotters.
Here's what I want:
* not just the ability to implant images, but also to extract them
* something that reads my eye muscles and knows where my eyes are pointed
Then every time I look in the lower right corner of my FOV I would see a super-imposed clock. Everytime I looked in the lower left corner of my FOV I would start or stop recording video to the computer. I'm sure I could come up with useful functions for the upper corners, maybe some sort of zoom, or super-imposed edge detection. Then I want a couple buttons easily accessable to navigate a super-imposed menu, to play back recorded video, snapshots, etc.
I would be willing to pay more then $100k for this, and would gladly be a beta tester.
---
"To know recursion, you must first know recursion."
Wow, I got 3/4 of the way through the article, still unsure whether this was more Gibsonesque fiction, before realizing that it was real. primitive, scary, but real.
Of course most of us have thought about this kind of thing: a laptop with LCD glasses for the plane.. contact lenses that modify the wavelenght of light passing through them..
Interesting to note that for someone with a visual prosthetic, a computer is using the visual cortex as a display device.
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli
cortical implants for everybody! prefrontal implants to start with. no more messy lobotomies. just a remote automated click from headquarters.
But damn if this isn't cool.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
Keyboards are good! I don't wanna see all those barely-smart-enough-to-go-online people that type at 1 wpm be able to talk normally on the internet :)
Also, you can't beat the clickety clack sound of the keyboard typing... yes it's sweet.
Also don't forget the occasional words that you speak that will end up in word recognition.
Spouse:so how do i look?
You: Pretty Good[mutter: more like damn ugly]
your spouse gets: Pretty good more like damn ugly.
she thinks !?!?
After all, what if someone decided they didn't like him and dumped a bucket of water on his head? Would the eyes short-circuit, possibly killing him? What if it rains?
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
This sounds great for an average blind-person who wants to have some vision back. Currently though, its far to expensive and doesnt provide high enough resolution, despite the brain 're-learning to see'.
But after thats worked out, theres still some major problems with it; It looks so un-natural, it (all computer componets) is clearly sizable, and having it implanted can be dangerous.
I love the prospect of Augmented Reality in our lifetime and ponder how it and other key technologies will work out in out daily lives daily. I'm convinced the near-term future of AR usefulness approaches or even exceeds the promises of nano or bio-tech. The problem, size matters. attractive-ness of the tech matters. and how it gets implemented matters.
That said, AR wont catch on if you have to where funky gear such as Steve Mann does. In-fact, any external gear is unacceptable for it to really catch on. (There are some exceptions, but is why PDA's havent caught on in a main-stream way)
This is exactly what makes this sort of thing so interesting. Except of course, the artificial eyes part. From the pictures and explantion of who this thing looks, its completly unacceptable.
Long story short, there needs to be a way to retro-fit someone's natural eye with artificial eye gear. Or at the very least one that looks natural. It needs to be far smaller and with further computer advances; everything needed needs to be retro-fitted to fit in said eye.
And yet still, theres a problem of getting many people to under-go the surgery required. Besides the blind and some nerds like ourselves. The number of people willing to do something like this is probably very low.
if you read the article in more detail, thats what they started out with, but slowly upped the frames, to the point when he got to drive the car
when i first read this, i saw "cervical cybernetic implant". *boggle*
what might that be used for?
The short answer unfortunately is no, a person blind from birth will not be able to benefit from this. I've done a lot of research in this area because I'm amblyopic, which means that I have two physically functional eyes but only one is actually fully useful. They don't point at quite the same angle (though you'd have to look pretty closely to tell), so my brain gave up on combining them into a stereoscopic image and basically let the left one go hang.
It wasn't spotted until I was five, which means I missed the window to fully develop that side of my visual cortex; it's useful for peripheral vision, but I can't distinguish shapes and lines well enough to read with it. Had it been spotted early enough, just putting a patch over the good eye while the laggard developed could have let me see all these 3D images everyone's always on about... grrr!
Still, I'm lucky to have sight and I know it. I can't provide a reference, but IIRC there's a study in which cataracts were removed from the eyes of children who had been born blind. They were still not able to see. You have only a narrow window of time in which to develop parts of your brain. If you lost your sight after about five or six years old then you could probably benefit from this, but if you were born blind you're going to have to substitute other senses. For example, it would still be possible to translate a camera signal into a grid of pressors distributed over some area of skin.
Parents, get your toddler's eyes and ears checked!!!
I read the article and it says they upped the framerate after a while. 1FPS would SUCK, but it runs at moe like 20.
Carpe ductem: Sieze the tape!
Wasn't Tuffs university working on a device like this? The idea was to send a 40-60khz RMS audio signal (doubly-differentiated and clipped to a square wave to give only time-rate of change) directly to the eighth cranial nerve via the connection that your skin retains [to the eight cranial nerve]?
This is exactly what your talking about (for speech at least) without the need for an expensive implant.
Anyone else remember this?
recompile.org
Can anyone say Deus Ex?
I will not be trained.
The Postnatal Development Of The Visual Cortex And The Influence Of Environment: Nobel lecture by Torsten N. Wiesel [PDF] Google Cache
Development And Plasticity In The Brain by Morten Kringelbach & Adam Engell [PDF] Google Cache
The above links touch upon experiments performed upon newborn kittens and monkeys. Both animals exhibit a window in early life in which visual stimulus must be present in order for proper development of the brain to occur. An animal blinded in one eye during the first few weeks of life will not be able to utilize that eye for the entirety of life. Physical examination of the brain of such an animal shows significant differences in the visual cortex associated in the experimental eye as opposed to the control eye.
Never mind x-ray and night vision. Just let me install the browser of my choice and hook me up to my ISP at maximum speed.
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
I'm sorry sir, but your implant is an unlicensed, non-DRM, digial video device. Please remove it immediately or face a 5 year sentence.
Optionally, we can install software in it which will only allow you to see images generated by Disney.
As a further option, for $500 p.a. we can reconnect your forward cameras, and overlay a mickey mouse icon, and allow this to be passed to your brain.
For those who are looking to get ahead, and have it first, without actually having it...
Save BIG BUCKS and get your percutaneous pedestals here. $7.15 ea on sale.
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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http://www.seeingwithsound.com/etumble.htm
One of the important features of the artificial heart that became newsworthy last year is that its batteries are charged with transdermal power and therefore can run continuously without wires breaking the skin.
Let's just gun down every MF bastard that even tries to mix our brains and stupid laws together.