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Human Eyes as Digital Cameras?
Mad Dog Kenrod asks: "A recent ad campaign for a digital camera had the slogan (something like) 'imagine being able to take a picture from your head and show it to people' - it was basically showcasing how small the camera was. This got me thinking: most people simply want to 'snap what they see'. Given that the human eye already has a very workable lens, and a retina which (I assume) is similar in technology to a digital camera, how feasible would it be to 'tap into' the optic nerve (not the brain, because by then the 'image' is probably something else entirely) and turn the signals from all those rods and cones into pixels?"
"Given we can do C.A.T. scans, would it even be feasible to do this from outside the head (say, with sufficient miniaturization, from the arm of your glasses)?
Of course, you would lack other things like zooms and filters and even an ability to 'frame' the picture (and there'd be problems for people with eye disease), but I propose that, for the majority of us who just want to quickly 'snap what we see' this would make for the smallest, lightest camera possible.
I know nothing about what would be involved in making this happen, so would be interested in people's thoughts."
You don't want to see the world the way I see it :P
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
it would be possible.
But much sooner then that, perhaps real soon if not already, you could simply build a digital camera into, say, a pair of sunglasses...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
that can be answered by popping the question into Google and looking at the first 10 results..
God I hate slashdot!
Just a few cells back from the retina, the visual signals have allready been 'encoded' in a way which would make a straight pixelmap hard to attain. (Each neuron here corresponds to a wierd gaussian thing centered around a given point) Furthermore, the signals aren't sent down a single neural train, they go all over the place all willy-nilly. Theoretically, these things would be overcome but the most serious problem is that our eyes at any given moment only look at a tiny, tiny bit of space. The illusion of a continuous field of vision is created by the brain in an amazing process which is not very well understood.
I do not have any arms or legs.
There has already been research in this area using cats. The researchers were able to reconstruct images of what the cat was actually seeing. Pretty amazing stuff if you ask me.
a cy/10-15-1999.html
link: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99leg
The problem is that you'd probably get a *shitty* picture. Or at best, it wouldn't reproduce "what you saw" any more than a regular camera does.
The majority of what you "see" is exactly because of the post-processing your brain does, as well as your eye and optic nerve. This occurs both in the optic realm (shading, motion, etc), and because your brain applies all kinds of cognitive processes to the visual signal. It isn't simply a passive sensor like a CCD.
Assuming this isn't a dumb april fools joke (are they lame this year, or what?)...
No.
What you see is the result of a whole lot of post-processing by a supercomputer called 'your brain'. The input from the optic nerve is quite inferior to the image you see.
For instance, your digital camera would have a blind spot in every picture. It's also upside down, and probably non-uniform in its curvature.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here you can see where they were on this not so long ago
Short version: They hooked up 177 halfway down a cat's optic path and were able to create images/movies from the info they recieved. One Problem is how hard it is to connect to all the nerves without disrupting their message. the other problem is the image info changes as it moves from the eye to the brain, so it gets processed as it travels. They were only able to interpret the image information at a certain spot on the way to the brain.
You can see pictures here
I have to say that I always thought of 1/4 as "april fools day", not "april troll's day"
Porn will never be the same again... after shooting it with grandma's eyes!
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
This april fools ask slashdot is actually less retarded than a non-april fools one.
Imagine that you are an Electrical Engineer and you are given a new camera technology, the specs are that the red, green, and blue sensors are randomly distributed. The distribution of sensors is also non-uniform spatially, most are in the middle. The number of sensors for each color also varies. Also, the responses from each sensor also overlap in irregular ways, no two sensors have the exact same response to the same stimulus. Oh yeah, the signals from the sensors are unmapped, we have no idea which signals belong to which sensors. And the sensors also return signals independently from each other, so unlike a typical digital camera with a shutter, you have to integrate the signal over a period of time. Unfortunately the assembly that holds the sensors is also jiggling constantly (saccades). And one more just to piss you off, the assembly is filled with water so light entering it will bend depending on the color of the light. You'll have to correct that distortion. Did I mention that the "grayscale" content of the image is from a whole different set of sensors?
It could be done (someone else mentioned the cat experiments) but long before you got the resolution of the eye, you'd run into something we used to call the "pincushion problem" -- by the time you've got enough electrodes to capture the information, you no longer have the tissue of interest, you have a pincushion -- and pincushions don't act like normal tissue.
... well, weird.
But let's assume you did it somehow (nanotech, maybe -- everyone knows nanotech can do ANY magic desired). The eye isn't really like a digital camera at all: each of the sensory cells has a photosensitive dye called rhodopsin which is bleached out by exposure to light, in the process changing its electrical properties. (What I recall is that it liberates electrons, but look it up as I'm not certain.) This degree of bleaching is what produces the signal, which becomes encoded as a series of pulses on the optical neurons.
This sounds like a digital signal, but it's more complicated than that, because the rhodopsin regenerates slowly -- this is why it takes minutes to get your night vision back after exposure to light. The cells in the retina communicate among themselves as well. The result is that the signal from the retina is
The point is that while you might be able to make it work (if you solve the pincushion problem) you wouldn't gain much, because the eye is a crappy camera. It's the signal processing afterwards that's good. If you want to really get a good representation of what the "eye" sees -- or rather what the brain sees -- you ought to use a good digital camera, and try to figure out the signal processing instead,
The way I remember it from biology (which is a stretch at this point ;), each person interprets the information from the cones and rods differently.
... but really, I don't think I -want- people to have access to what I see :)
In other words, each picture taken off the optic nerve would be relative to the person who saw it.
We learn to associate a color with the information we get, but one person might see "red" when a cone is active, another might see "red" when a rod is active.
If you could tap into the light coming direclty into the eye, maybe, but that is a hardware mod, not a signal tap, and I don't see it being taken very well.
Maybe if you could create individual filters for each person easily it would work
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
in the book cyborg by martin caidin (the book the $6e+6 man was based on) our hero had a camera for an eye instead of the spiffy telephoto ir one he had on tv. he had to pop it out to change the film. today he could just stick a usb cable in his eye. also the bionic woman's ear would have ogg playback capability.
Why don't you lay down right here and I'll give it a try? *pulling out a scapel*
Forget the whales - save the babies.
It is conceivable that eyeglasses could be made, ala- Tom Cruise era Mission Impossible. They wouldn't be the greatest, but you could record what the eyeglass-wearer sees.
...I think whoever cracks this one is going to die richer than Bill Gates. The amount of pictures I'd take on a summer day's walk around town looking at the barely-dressed ladies would necessitate a 20Gb hard disk stuffed up my ass. :-)
(Of course, doing it with a camera behind some with sunglasses would be a good start.)
And I'm sure there'd be significant applications in the medical and military fields. I've been thinking how cool this would be for years...
68K.
I would say that only spys, perverts etc. who wanted totally concealed cameras would find that mounting a camera on your glasses wasn't many orders of magnitude better. And slivers of slow glass will be easier for that. ;-)
Anyhow, technology to do this thru glasses will be needed to enable all the various fabulous things we will do once glasses become a favoured ocmputer interface; HUD overlays, for example, will gain tremendously from knowing what it is you are seeing.
As Scott Adams puts it, we all want Terminator style targeting boxes that will automatically lock onto any salesmen we meet while shopping. Also Predator style night vision. (Well, more like in the Computer game than the film I suppose)
Voice recognition to replace the keyboard and eye movement tracking to replace the mouse, those are the UI of the future.
All ths stuff exists in bulky military hardware now, so give it a few years and it will filter down to the consumers. There are already prototype systems for cars that give you enhanced night vision.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
What if someone could intercept those images? Talk about "Being John Malcovich"! That's the last thing I need, someone getting a hold of pictures of me doing obscene things while dressed like Scooby Doo. Talk about humiliating!
Well put.
Its true and I landed up in a psychiatry.
what you see is a private thing and if someone can see what you can see it is just horrible part of the time. But at other times it was fun..swimming and being sure that it can be seen. I hope to God that this notion leaves me..reading all these posts has helped. Thanks and I am not joking.