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Seeing With Your Skin?
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that a researcher from Tel Aviv University is exploring the possibility that humans may be able to "see" via their skin. Professor Leonid Yaroslavsky hopes to utilize this possible technology to find solutions for the blind in addition to new types of image capture that might be able to work where conventional lenses fail. Unfortunately he has a long uphill battle ahead to convince others that his theories are possible. "The lenses currently used for optics-based imaging have many problems. They only work within a limited range of electromagnetic radiation. Relatively, these are still costly devices greatly limited by weight and field of view. The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses and he believes the devices can be adapted to any kind of radiation and wavelength. They could essentially work with a 360-degree field of view and their imaging capability will only be determined by computer power rather than the laws of light diffraction."
I recall a discussion about this in a cognitive science class I took about 3 years ago. Apparently, somebody developed an aparatus that was hooked to a person's back and used pins to provide a monochrome image of what a camera on the person's head was displaying. The interesting part was that they discovered that the visual part of the brain ended up being used to process the images. Eventually the person could see...sort of.
Of course, this kind of trick won't work at all if the person is blind because of a brain problem rather than an eye problem. People who lose their sight overly early on in life will not necessarily develop their visual cortex enough for this type of technology to work. However, people who lose their eyes as adults or teens due to accidents will be fine.