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Photovoltaic Eye Implant Could Give Sight To the Blind
MikeChino writes with this snippet from Inhabitat: "Researchers at Stanford University recently announced that they have developed a new artificial retina implant that uses photovoltaic power and could help the blind see. The problem with previous implants was that there was no way send power to the chip in order to process light and data inside the eye, so the new device uses miniature photovoltaic cells to provide power the chip as well as to transmit data through the eye to the brain. The new device has great promise to help people afflicted by the loss of photoreceptor cells by using the power of the sun."
s/etc\./me cracking the protocol, and making you see Goatse all day long/ # ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
My brain! The eyelids do nothing!
The good news is that we can restore your sight. The bad news is that do to security concerns we will need to place a mini-USB socket 2mm to the left of your iris... no no, you'll *hardly notice it, really!
Users may become significantly aware of mini-USB port in cases of leakage, corrosion, or static discharge. Please avoid areas near strong magnetic fields. Never fall asleep at Defcon or similar events. Notify your doctor immediately if a Windows Logo appears and persists in your field of vision.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
The eye certainly doesn't have any processors of any sort in there.
It has a detector and some wiring in to the brain.
wrong. the retina does a lot of quite useful processing on the image before sending quite high-level data to the brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina#Spatial_Encoding
there are lots of hard-to-explain cases where somebody can see perfectly; but can't detect movement, or where can't recognize the border between shapes, and therefore is unable to make sense of what sees, etc.
-Kz-