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Bionic Eye Could Restore Vision
MattSparkes writes "A new bionic eye could restore vision to the profoundly blind. A prototype was tested on six patients and 'within a few weeks all could detect light, identify objects and even perceive motion again. For one patient, this was the first time he had seen anything in half a century.' The user wears a pair of glasses that contain a miniature camera and that wirelessly transmits video to a cellphone-sized computer in the wearer's pocket. This computer processes the image information and wirelessly transmits it to a tiny electronic receiver implanted in the wearer's head."
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
No surgery and apparently it works. What you should see in front of you is converted to sound. Apparently it works great. I've heard a demo on the radio and it really sounds weird. It's different than sonar, which the blind use, in that light levels are converted to sound.
True, but the alternative would be to have a cable protruding from the user's head
If the eye is already defunct, why not remove the eye and implant the camera? It could probably be incorperated into an artifical eye with out much problem. Circuits and cameras are already tiny and the power requirements can't be very high. (nerves deal in microvolts?) A wearable inductive recharger and you are good to go. Reattach the muscle and you could even look around. I can understand the external camera for the early R&D, but I hope the final product is fully implanted.
We are all just people.
The possibilities here are very intriguing. The study that the article mentioned used a pair of glasses with a camera. But there's no reason why those glasses/cameras would need to be on your face. You could literally set up eyes in the back of your head, a security camera monitored by yourself, or expand your field of vision to be much larger. Also, you could set up a virtual reality sim just by playing back a recorded stream of visual data into your implant.
Of course, the possibilities for mischief with such an implant are also endless. These things would be in high demand for poker games and high school locker rooms and about a billion other things that criminals and perverts will think up.
There's too much we don't know aobut infant vision to mess with the brains early development
An interesting tidbit on this topic: Scientists have done experiments in cats where they've blocked all incoming light to the cat's eyes during early kittenhood. A portion of the visual cortex does not organize properly without this input, causing the cats to have permanent non-functional vision. A similar effect is seen in human children who are born with cataracts or develop them very shortly after birth.
(Hubel and Wiesel received part of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for this work done through the 1960s and 70s.)
Another kitten experiment involved raising them in environments with either only horizontal or only vertical lines. As adults, they simply could not see objects of the 'wrong' orientation. A cat who had been raised in a horizontal-only world could hop up on the seat of a chair, but would bump into the legs if he tried to walk under it.
I'm starting to work in the field of artificial vision for mi thesis and the goal on our lab is to replicate Humayun's results. This is a retinal implant (inside your eye), in constrast to a cochlear one (inside your brain).
The cochear implants tends to fry you brain in the long run, but there are so many neurons that this takes a lot of time. The retinal chips are much more easy to build and implant, but the range of deseases cured are less, as not many blind people has a working retina or optic nerve.
SVGA resolution may be overkill for the eye, you have a zone of very high resolution in the center of your vision, and very low on the borders. And the distribution of the "pixels" is radial rather than rectangular.
And i think that a direct connection to the eye is a natural progression of computer interfaces, and a very useful one. I'm not blind and got a perfect vision but if I get the chance, I would get the implant when they become more advanced.
Once this thing gets working well, use cadmium sulfide in the receptors and you'd be able to see in a wider visual band than normal eyes. Infrared and ultraviolet would become "visible". You would see heat signatures in the dark, and have nightvision among other things.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The optic nerve is actually a lot lower bandwidth than you would expect it to be; it has nothing like the capacity to send the amount of visual data you think you see. One of the biggest tricks your eye does is something a lot like run length encoding. It sends differences in light levels between adjacent cones, rather than absolute light levels (this is why many optical illusions work, by the way).
You are right to say that a composite image is used. If you turn your head quickly, you will notice it takes around a second for you to build up an image of the new area. A more scientific test involves anaesthetising the mussels around the eye and locking the head in place. From this, you can discover non-invasively that humans don't see exactly in the middle of their field of view (the blind spot; dissect an eye to see why you have one, but it's basically bad connector design) or around the edges. Another experiment involved tracking eye movements and getting people to press a button when they moved their eyes; around 90% (I think) of eye movements were completely unconscious, and didn't relate to a change of attention.
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