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."

Comments

Nearly Impossible

[lliiffee]

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.

Already being worked on (link included)

[rask22]

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.

link: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99lega cy/10-15-1999.html