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Bionic Eye Gives Blind Man Sight

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-the-better-to-see-you-with dept.

AmigaMMC writes "A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye. Ron, 73, had the experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye hospital. He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks using the bionic eye, known as Argus II. I wouldn't go as far as claiming he regained his sight, but this certainly is a biotechnological breakthrough."

1 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:When i see things like this... by bencoder · · Score: 5, Informative

    OK. this is the Argus II. Which means the MEA (microelectrode array) has only 60 electrodes. Call it 64 to make it easy. Take a picture from a camera. convert it to greyscale. Shrink it down to 8x8. Then expand it to fill your entire field of vision. (use a good enough editor- one that will do smoothing between pixels as you scale it up).

    That should give you a rough idea of how much data is actually available, and also why they don't want to show a picture- people wouldn't be impressed. But to me, this is exciting.