The Blind Shall See Again, But When?

An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade."

Comments

nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[caffeinemessiah]

If they achieve VGA resolution, it's a steady road to full vision for the blind. I'm more interested in, at this point, exceeding human abilities. Think of the case of HDR imaging -- we currently don't have monitors (most of us at least) that are high dynamic range themselves, so images have to be "tone-mapped" to the dynamic range of our monitors, which often results in those ridiculously sharp but somewhat "unrealistic" pictures you see on Flickr.

It would be cool if, say, the IR spectrum or just more dynamic range in the visible spectrum could be tone-mapped to human perception in this way, resulting in perceptually sharper images by way of a direct retinal implant.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stop at the ir spectrum, why not go full spectrum? Maybe with a remote control. Make Geordi's visor seem like a toy. How much information can we cram into the visual cortex?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Rei]

the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade.

And, if they achieve VGA resolution, you can just get the next upgrade in software!

 

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[natehoy]

If they achieve better than VGA resolution, it's a steady road to needing HDMI cables, and I'm not convinced they will fit. ;)

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[flaming error]

Make sure you include some kind of tuner, because I don't want to have to see Radio Disney nor the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. But full-body scans at the airport might be a fun channel - those x-ray glasses I ordered when I was 12 didn't work.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

those x-ray glasses I ordered when I was 12 didn't work

You must have had a defective pair.

The ones I had when I was living in southern France worked perfectly.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[natehoy]

Actually, quite a lot, as long as we are willing to give up accurate color perception in the spectrum we see in now. The human visual system can differentiate, say, ten million colors (guesstimate). That's across a very small band of the spectrum we could make visible if we chose to. Index the new frequencies to perceived colors and we might be able to differentiate a few hundreds of thousands of colors in our currently-visual spectrum, but we'll also be able to differentiate various frequencies of ultraviolet and infrared light. So, for example anything in shades of blue represents UV light, and anything in shades of red represents IR, and the colors we see today are perceived as little more than shades of grey with a blue or red tint.

I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[jellomizer]

320x200 8 bits. Life would be a game of Doom.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[interkin3tic]

If they achieve VGA resolution, it's a steady road to full vision for the blind. I'm more interested in, at this point, exceeding human abilities.

It's not as if to achieve one goal, we need to abandon the other goal. In fact, being able to give VGA resolution to the blind seems in many ways like it's on the path to achieving beyond human sight. Get an artificial retina that gets VGA resolution perfected. It will take a lot of money to get this right. Restoring sight is a payoff that will help fund refinements on that, like higher resolution artificial retinas, increased spectrum retinas etc.

Furthermore, I suspect the main reason you're more interested in exceeding human abilities is because you personally have no use for restoring vision to the blind, which seems a little selfish.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[insufflate10mg]

I believe the opposite; that the human brain would actually create a new color for the UV/IR bands... the person with the ability to see this color would describe it as being indescribable, the same way it is impossible for a human to accurately describe the colors we have now.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[caseih]

This comment struck me as kind of funny as one of the main, original, purposes of HDR imaging was to try to capture an image more like how the eye actually sees it. The eye can handle much broader ranges of light levels than most cameras, which means you can look out through a window and see the bright sky and still see the interior of the room pretty well.

Our modern light sensors already have a pretty broad exposure range now, though, beyond the capabilities of our file formats and displays, so it seems to me you just plug them in to the optic nerves and voila. HDR (in other words, normal) vision. Tone-mapping is really done on computers because our monitors have such lowsy dynamic range. Of course the funky color maps can be used to artistic effect.

But you're also thinking along the lines of Star trek's "VISOR" that La Forge was wearing. For some reason that no writer has adequately explained, the VISOR took this huge spectrum (well beyond visible light) and either compressed it all into the visual light range, or just dumped the whole range onto the optic nerve somehow, leaving it to the brain to sort out. Neither explanation has sounded right. Seemed a bit silly to me, but I guess it works as a plot device ("special" powers, etc). I kind of doubt the optic nerve and the visual cortex has the range and resolution to resolve a wider spectrum. But who knows.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the opposite; that the human brain would actually create a new color for the UV/IR bands... the person with the ability to see this color would describe it as being indescribable, the same way it is impossible for a human to accurately describe the colors we have now.

Uh...how would you wire up the new signal to the brain, if not in the form the current rods and cones do?

Regardless of the spectrum your artificial eyes can pick up, in the end they must with absolutely no way around it, translate those to inputs that we already receive. Therefore, your brain will not come up with no colors.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[natehoy]

It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.

First, we have to throw out practical limitations on current technology and say we've reached a point where we can accurately reproduce the full resolution of human sight AND we have a sensor that can detect ten million discrete colors per pixel, and that we've found a way to tap into the brain's cortex and send all that data in realtime.

So let's say a specific rod or cone received values we mapped from -5,000,000 to +5,000,000 (I realize color is a lot more complex than that, because we have multiple hues intensities, but a linear scale is a lot easier to deal with for discussion).

Now we have to figure out how to make that receptor detect -20,000,000 to +20,000,000 to handle limited sections of the UV and IR spectra. The easiest way is to map 0-5 as 1, 6-10 as 2, etc. So we have the same actual number of possible color inputs, we're just making them less precise and spreading them out over a larger range of possible values. You'll "see" the same number of colors, but spread out over a much larger band.

Maybe our brains can handle more colors than our visual cortex can currently send. If so, there's a lot of dormant brain cells that are going to come on-line when this data comes in, because we have a lot more data to process to make an image. Either that or our brains will do what they do anyway - interpolate.

More likely, we'll have to map the new data to a somewhat-similar-to-current range so our brains can handle it.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[NotBornYesterday]

Does lack of IR/UV vision stem from a lack of proper optical reception (cones), or lack of neural ability? My guess is that the brain would try and interpret what it is shown, regardless of what our eyes have evolved to do.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Zerth]

I'd be curious what the actual bandwidth/sensitivity of the optic nerve is. Tetrachromats have been shown to perceive a greater distinction of colors, but people with red-green color blindness have also been shown to be able to distinguish varieties of khaki better than normal sighted people.

Are either of those groups gaining or losing bits of discrimination in relation to the number of cone types they have that would show a fixed amount of bandwidth?

I suppose one would have to count the number of shades/tints each group could distinguish, not just the number/bands of colors.

If our ability to distinguish color is limited by the bands each kind of cone is sensitive to, then the VISOR could expand La Forge's capacity to perceive. If the optic nerve was the chokepoint, then he would either compress via tone-mapping or have to develop a "palette swap/filter" reflex/feedback to scan through the spectrum, but couldn't see everything at once.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Hal_Porter]

Oh crap, the upgrade makes the world roll on my fixed frequency NHS eyes.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[pz]

I work in Visual Prosthetics.

Here's the thing with any sort of augmented vision: there's no way you can justify the risks of implantation when a fully external device that shows whatever mapped, morphed, or manipulated version of vision will work as well or better.

If you have normal sight, or even nearly normal sight, then why have an implant that carries significant risk, will be large and potentially painful for some time to come, will require frequent recharging, will be expensive as getout, when you can put on a special pair of glasses with a heads-up-display that does more? Telescopic vision, IR, UV, macroscopic, x-ray, edge enhanced, color shifted, depth enhanced, whatever you can think of, it is easier to do it with a head-worn high-tech display that you can take off at will.

In contrast, having an implant means -- for any kind of implant that is under current consideration -- fixed resolution, and, unless you're willing to undergo significant, expensive surgeries, many of the interface parameters will be technologically fixed. Yes, there's a lot you can do with reprogramming, but it's essentially impossible to change the stimulating electrodes and their drivers.

Trust me, you do not want a visual prosthesis unless you need one. The normal visual system, enhanced with purely external devices, will always be better.

Any visual implant that is currently under discussion

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Fyzzler]

There are already people out there who can see more than the normal human spectrum.
Tetrachomacy

So I think the potential is already there.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[dido]

Well, one could also use the imaginary colors that correspond to those particular combinations of cone cell responses in the human eye which cannot be produced by any physical source of light. The human eye has three types of color-sensitive cone cells, short-wavelength (blue), medium-wavelength (green), and long-wavelength (red). The trouble is, the spectral sensitivity of these three types of cone cells overlap, so any physical source of light would probably excite at least two, most likely all three types of cones at once, to greater or lesser degrees. The upshot of this is that are some combinations of cone cell responses that cannot be produced by any physical source of light. For example, a hypothetical light source that excited only the medium-wavelength cones would correspond to a shade of very deep green, but such a light source would require a spectral power distribution with positive power in the green area of the spectrum and impossible negative power in the red and blue areas.

In short, with artificial color receptors it may be possible to simulate the cone cell responses that would have generated imaginary colors to mean wavelengths outside of the normal human visual spectrum. Or alternatively change color perception entirely with non-overlapping spectral-sensitivity curves that cover a much wider band of the electromagnetic spectrum. You'd perceive color quite differently from normal people in this case though, and that might cause trouble.

We tend to forget that color doesn't really have a physical reality. It's an ongoing philosophical debate whether color is actually a feature of the world we perceive or a feature of our perception of the world. Replacing our sense organs in this fashion is sure to add more fuel to this debate.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[izomiac]

Outside of search & rescue, the military, and research, would seeing beyond the visible range of light be useful enough to warrant implants that are probably twice as large? And what would be the risks associated with overclocking the optic nerve and occipital lobe? It's not like we even really process that much of what our eyes "see" anyway.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, Radio Disney probably looks like a unicorn shitting a cosmic rainbow. Why would you not look at that?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[shentino]

You mean like octarine?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

it could have blue shifted or red shifted it in software, allowing him to scan up and scan down the spectrum. Remember kiddies, the only difference between light and IR is wavelength

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

... if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

Gaaahh! No problem! Wolves do it all the time. Naturally. It doesn't seem to affect them all that bad. Well, except, maybe, around the full-moon. But other than that, how bad could it be ? Who could have something against a neverending flashback ? :>

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[timeOday]

I am really curious what resolution you would need to simulate human vision. Not that many. Our vision is really terrible outside a tiny area (the fovea). We only have 6 or 7 million cones, and those have well under a pixel's worth of information each (they're monochromatic, for one thing, and several might have to fire together to be perceptible - I don't know).

I'm pretty sure you don't need, for example, the 15 megapixels that a modern SLR gives you; the reason you need so many in an image or a monitor is because you can look anywhere in it, so it has to match your maximum resolution everywhere, even though you can only see a tiny bit of it at once. (This is massively wasteful, so you can achieve great compression if you know where people are looking.)

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

You actually can see very faintly in IR. If you wear visible-spectrum opaque, but IR-transparent glasses, you can maneuver through the environment just by its heat output. It's dark, but doable.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[evilWurst]

If you read the linked article, though, they don't see more spectrum: their extra receptors are in between red and green. In other words, they see the difference between certain shades or color more accurately than the rest of us, but they don't see any "new" colors that the rest of us can't see.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[oranGoo]

Hm, I wonder if it is really so - the high resolution part of the eye actually has quite high dynamic range . That is why photos of the scenes with high difference of darker and lighter areas look flat as compared to memory of the scene. Eye adapts, with more or less delay, depending if you look from light to dark or from dark to light, with more resolution/range then the current image formats. HDR (if not overexposed) actually looks more realistic if you concentrate on the details.
We have yet to see a camera with lenses as small as the pupil that will allow for reproduction of the photographed image on the same level of visual quality as the image stored in memory (good test would be that a memory of an scene and memory of looking at the photograph is of same visual quality).

And regarding the resolution - VGA does not mean anything without angle of view. Eye has a resolution of 0.3 arc minutes minutes which VGA would cover if it was applied to approx 2 degrees of field of vision.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[poopdeville]

Regardless of the spectrum your artificial eyes can pick up, in the end they must with absolutely no way around it, translate those to inputs that we already receive. Therefore, your brain will not come up with no colors.

Nope, you are entirely wrong.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[poopdeville]

It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.

Eh, no. You just send them, and let the brain learn how to decode the signals, just like your brain did when you were an infant. You LEARNED to see in the first place.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Shadow of Eternity]

Actually they showed his view a few times and it looked like (as the sibling AC posted) he could see outside the normal spectrum by just shifting his perception up and down, or shifting how something was rendered.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

or just dumped the whole range onto the optic nerve somehow, leaving it to the brain to sort out. Neither explanation has sounded right.

This is how real implants work...

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[kerrbear]

But at least the whole setup is internal so it won't look like you're wearing a hairclip on your face.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed our eyes rely the perhiperal vision to identify targets and then the ability of the eye to move very quickly and assess targets of interest.

Making an artificial eye work like this would require not just feeding information from the artificial eye to the brain but also a fast feedback mechanism to allow the brain to control the artificial eye and either a camera that could physically more quickly or a very high resoloution camera and some image processing.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[nickersonm]

You don't want to bask in the comforting radio glow of the cosmic background?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[iphinome]

Tell me, what would happen if only one (non functioning) eye were replaced with an implant while the other worked normally. Would such an implant at vga resolution improve or degrade the sight of the otherwise one eyed person?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[timeOday]

Making an artificial eye work like this would require not just feeding information from the artificial eye to the brain but also a fast feedback mechanism to allow the brain to control the artificial eye and either a camera that could physically more quickly or a very high resoloution camera and some image processing.

I thought we were talking about artificial retinas? They're mounted in your eyeballs, which already have a nice fast feedback mechanism from your brain.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not how color vision works. It works by differential analysis between sections of the eye, by some very fascinating positive and negative feedback loops in the processing cells of the retina. Unfortunately, these retinal electrodes are so large, and the current spread so much, that the signals *swamp* all the local processing cells. Also unfortunately, if you make the electrodes smaller, you increase the resistance and the current density, until you start electrolyzing the vitreous humor trying to localize signals.

We won't get good visual prostheses until and unless we can get the electrodes onto the optic nerve itself, with far more resolution. For examples of approaches that could conceivably work, take a good look at David Edell's work, at http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/sec_subscribe.asp?CID=2603&DID=110240&action=detail. But his work would involve avoiding the retina and stimulating the optic nerver: so far, it's really only suitable for muscle nerves.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[BananaBender]

Well, just dumping the extended color data onto the brain might not be enough. When a child learns to see, its brain already has the basic visual perception algorithms hard-coded, e.g. there are brain structure for color detection, edge detection, motion detection etc. Those structures are built from the DNA, the genetic material, so the brain does not start learning from scratch.
Only those structures allow a child to pick up seeing as fast as it does (the process of learning to see in humans is necessary because of our ability for 3D vision. Depth perception depends on the distance between your left and your right eye; the hard-coded perception algorithms don't know this distance beforehand, so people have to learn seeing after being born. Animals without 3D vision are far more quickly able to see).
Anyway, there are no brain structures for the extended color data, so how would a brain learn the new input?

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[elsJake]

I don't think the brain has component inputs , it's all composite. Adding a new signal on the same wire might produce a new color. It's the signal that would be different and interpreted differently.Say make it similar to what the rods and cones do but higher/lower in frequency.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[smartsight]

Good points, John. There is still a long way to go for visual prostheses to become usable, convenient and safe options even for totally blind people.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[Ginger Unicorn]

Wow, what thorough and informative rebuttal.

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[rhyder128k]

I just hope it's not DRMed to hell. This could be the breakthrough that some content publishers have been waiting for. What's to stop the makers of this device charging a subscription? If you can't afford the full package, I might decide "Hell, I never get to see boobs anyway so I might as well not bother unlocking 'human nudity' real world content. I'd be better off with the Nerd Package. That gives me 'computer displays', 'films', 'books' and 'games'. I could always get pay per view if I do get lucky."

Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids

[pz]

Your brain works very hard to integrate vision from the two eyes. That said, we can probably guess how a single-eyed prosthesis user would feel by comparing with how sighted people who have significantly different vision in their two eyes feel. Drawing from personal experience, one of my eyes has much sharper vision than the other, and when I'm not wearing my glasses, I can tell that most of my vision comes from the better eye. But, importantly, not all of it. Depth perception, for example, uses both eyes, and, again personally, if I close my poorer eye, there is a large difference.

So, my best guess is that someone with a VGA-grade implant on one side and a normal eye on the other would have better vision than someone with only a single functioning eye, but most of the visual experience would still come from the healthy eye.

For the visually-impaired computer user...

[Tubal-Cain]

Try working on a VGA/DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort/whatever input, too. Bypass monitors altogether.

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[lwsimon]

At some point, we should be able to modify perception via EM, so no need for implants. Disrupt the optic nerve and feed it artificial stimulation via a headband or similar, and provide a full immersive view. Ditto the other nerves, and you have immersive, convincing VR complete with non-tactile sensation....

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine what would happen with a bit of interference... No thank you!

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[ipquickly]

Try working on a VGA/DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort/whatever input, too. Bypass monitors altogether.

Previous story:2010 -- the Year AACS and HDMI Kill Off HD Component Video

Future story:2022 - the Year 'BioDMI' Kills Off Analog Theatres and Viewscreens

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[datapharmer]

The shadow government is already doing this. They are feeding audio signals to my brain by using secret antennas they implanted in my teeth. Clearly they are ready to move on to the next step of their evil scheme because they are making me type this to you too!

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think DRM is bad now...

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[lwsimon]

I wish they'd step up their game and pipe in some porn or something. This going to work every day shit is getting old.

Re:For the visually-impaired computer user...

[lwsimon]

Interference - the waterboarding of the 22nd century?

Great!

[Ziest]

Who says the age of miracles is over?

Re:Great!

[Arancaytar]

It has only just begun... a still more glorious dawn awaits! :D

yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the cyborg tag?

Re:yes...

[ipquickly]

Where is the cyborg tag?

I'm still looking for posts about how much this will benefit those who can't see.
But (this being Slashdot) everyone is posting about how much more they want to see.

(hangs head in hypocritical shame)

Re:yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

No species alive today got where it is by caring more for others than for themselves.

Re:yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a website frequented by people who look at things slightly askance and prefer to explore the non-obvious. The title of the article mentions the blind; of course these people are talking about something else!

Re:yes...

[telomerewhythere]

No species alive today got where it is by caring more for others than for themselves.

...So that's why we're in this mess. I'm glad someone figured it out...

DoE?

[courteaudotbiz]

What does the Department of Energy has to do with the development of an artificial retina?

Re:DoE?

[binarylarry]

It'll be interesting when they start offering bonuses to any military staff who opt in to a "Predator Vision" program.

Re:DoE?

[lwsimon]

Agreed, this seems more like a Dept. of Defense issue.

Re:DoE?

[courteaudotbiz]

Oh, maybe it is some kind of budget issue, and they have to put the expense on the budget of the DoE?

Re:DoE?

[Anonymous Coward]

DoE national labs do quite a bit of basic material research science. Since the first and second gen were basically implanted solar cells (silicon substrate that reacted to light) it makes sense.

Re:DoE?

[courteaudotbiz]

Yeah, but shouldn't they pass on their research work to another, more appropriate Department? Just asking...

Re:DoE?

[Monkeedude1212]

That immediately jumped out at me too.

Shouldn't the Department of Energy be funding startups and projects to solve the looming energy crisis?

Re:DoE?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have the money. Do not ask questions.

Re:DoE?

[interkin3tic]

What does the Department of Energy has to do with the development of an artificial retina?

Ideally they saw good science that needed funding and funded it even though it didn't fall neatly into their mission statement. I'd rather have them spending money on something that appears to be paying off than funding more repetitive studies which will tell us again that clean coal really isn't good for anything.

Re:DoE?

[datapharmer]

Well *someone* has to replace everyone's retinas when one of the nuke reactors melts down and causes a nuclear explosion leading to the "flash of death" which will be suffered by millions...

Re:DoE?

[Surt]

But by eliminating the need for artificial lighting with superior eyes, they could get rid of 38% of the US energy usage. Frankly, nothing they can possibly do will have any substantially better yield than that.

Re:DoE?

[Surt]

Eliminating the need for artificial lighting = 38+% of all energy usage gone.

Re:DoE?

[Monkeedude1212]

Except the issue isn't so much in energy consumption as it is CO2 emissions and Renewable energy sources.

I hope you aren't suggesting that -EVERY- US citizen get optical implants to reduce the US Energy usage. There are so many flaws with that, medical costs, production costs, feasability.

I would much rather them spend their money on getting a decent nuclear project going than better eyesight. Don't get me wrong, it has its advantages, but eyesight should not be our current priority.

Re:DoE?

[the gnat]

Yeah, but shouldn't they pass on their research work to another, more appropriate Department?

Senior academic scientists don't "pass on their research" unless they're exceptionally well-paid for it, or retiring. To do otherwise would be career suicide.

To answer the original question: there are a variety of reasons why the DoE maintains other research programs that don't appear at first glance to be related to energy. One is that it's useful to have a sustainable and adaptable academic culture - for instance, the DoE is now putting a great deal of effort (and money) into biofuels, which is both directly related to the core mission of the Department, and dependent on biologists of every kind. If the DoE were strictly limited to physicists, synthetic chemists, and engineers, no one in the organization would have a clue about how to go about starting up a biological research program. You can always hire outsiders, but it is nice to have in-house expertise.

Another reason is that the very nature both of science and of the DoE labs inherently introduces some mission creep. Because they have always done defense-related work as part of the nuclear weapons program, ever since the Manhattan Project, they have branched into other defense-related areas. The DoE is also probably the world's largest operator of particle accelerators, which have a variety of uses. At some point in the last century, someone figured out that a particular type of electron accelerator called a synchrotron (which the DoE has several of) was most useful as an X-ray generator. As a result, protein crystallographers - biochemists - are some of the most active users of DoE facilities. (This was my background, and I now work for the DoE.) More recently, they've started to work on X-ray lasers, starting with the old Stanford LINAC, and the hope is that these will make possible many new experiments in multiple fields.

(Keep in mind, the time span over which new methodologies develop is typically multiple decades. The first protein crystallography experiment was in 1937; the first cyclotron was invented in 1929. No one actually solved a protein structure with X-rays until the early 1960s, by which time synchrotrons had been invented. It took another 20-30 years to realize the application of synchrotron X-rays to biology, and another 20 years for their use to become standard. It isn't simply a case of government bureaucrats searching for new fields to move into - although that happens occasionally too. Basic research is often inherently undirected and directionless, and you don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you start.)

Finally, don't assume that the funding comes entirely from the DoE. The research group that I work for is mostly based at a national lab, but our funding comes almost entirely from the NIH and sponsoring companies.

Re:DoE?

[Surt]

Why not every citizen? It'd be cheaper than the costs we've already sunk into either fission or fusion power, and would reduce power needed by more than the output of all of the fission power plants we have in this country. Or looking at it another way, if you want to save CO2 emissions, how about we turn off half the coal plants?

Blindness Sucks

[techsoldaten]

My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.

All I have been thinking about the last month is how to do something like this, set up something that can do motion detection and help him avoid collisions.

You know, I would go for low resolution versus no resolution right now.

M

Re:Blindness Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

My sympathies for your father's condition (I have had family members who have had strokes, and it's really quite sad and humbling to witness the consequences), but let's be realistic. I'm no doctor, but I'd imagine blindness after a stroke is neurological. Making modifications to the retina isn't going to fix issues in the brain.

So with that in mind... Blindness doesn't have a single cause, and even if we take some steps in the right direction, it won't be a silver bullet.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[hamburgler007]

Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.

speaking from experience?

Re:Blindness Sucks

[ZuchinniOne]

Unfortunately a retinal implant won't help in this situation. However depending on where the stroke was there are other options such as thalamic and cortical implants.

Unfortunately they carry more risks and generally don't provide much resolution.

If the stroke included areas in V1 (primary visual cortex) then there really isn't anything that can be done.

My condolences.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[interkin3tic]

Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.

Maybe it will turn out to be a good way of bypassing the damage. I'm not a neuroscientist or a medical professional, that statement is based entirely on the fact that weirder things have turned out to work for other medical problems. For example, I think few people would have had the foresight in the 1900's to guess that a substance isolated from fungi would be a revolutionary medicine.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[MrTester]

Not necisarily true.
A stoke (I think this is right, although I may have muddled medical terms)is a blood clot or plaque breaking off and getting lodged somewhere that does damage. Typically its the brain, but not always.
My father in law recently had this happen and had a "stoke in his eye" which left one eye damaged and useless, but the brain is fine.
This sounds like what the parent is talking about IF "no perception on one side of his body" is just visual perception and not feeling as well.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[drainbramage]

You might be interested in reading "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.R. Ramachandran.
It is not specific to strokes, but it was helpful as I tried to understand what was happening to a loved one.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[BigSlowTarget]

Possible approach: I proposed this to a variety of people and was never able to get funding. Maybe it can help your Dad. Let me know if it does. It's cheap (especially compared to medical devices), relatively easy and doesn't require surgery. Please feel free to make a single one for home use, but I do reserve all commercial rights.

Take a low res B&W camera
Use an aduino or even palmtop to further lower the image quality to match the x by y of the 'display' you're going to make
Output the image via appropriate switching transistors and at appropriate amperages to a matrix of individual loops of nicrome wire.
Add a pad over the top of the wire to prevent accidental burns.
Stick the pad to your chest, arm or stomach
For the matrix black is on, white is off. For you hot is black, cool is white.

It will take a bit of time to get used to, but with it you get low-res sight via variation in skin temperature for less than $200. Point the camera in different directions and you can 'feel' what's there, including behind you.

If you need more details email me, the approach has been wildly abbreviated to fit into a slashdot post. - Its s h i p p i n g (at) proboticsamerica (dot) com

Re:Blindness Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. Great book. I couldn't put it down. It changed the way I think about a lot of things.

Slightly veering off-topic here, but... Though Ramachandran writes a lot about disorders, symptoms, and case studies, I think the most powerful takeaway I got from reading it is that even "normal" functioning brains can defy reason. The difference is that most of these instances are benign. The experiment about the blind spot comes to mind here -- our brains lie to us about sensory input all the time.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[Surt]

There's a very similar commercialized solution that involves micro-shocking the tongue.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[BlackSnake112]

Maybe they can 'wire' the left eye to the working part of the visual section on the brain. Or in this case wire his left eye to the left visual center of his brain. Remember the right side of brain controls the left side of the body.

Re:Blindness Sucks

[QuoteMstr]

There's actually a direct spacial mapping from steradians in the visual field to particular areas on the surface of the visual cortex. Under each "pixel" on the surface, if you will, there are several physical layers that each have a specialized function: one detects lines; another circles; another changes in perspective; and another compensates for white point balancing. These layers then send the processed signals to another portion of the brain for interpretation. (It's not a bad architecture, actually.)

Many blind people can still "see" with their memories and their imaginations. What happens in this context is that recorded (or synthesized) sensory inputs are fed back into the same areas that process the higher-level processed signals from the eye's "live" feed. Memory, really is a process of re-perceiving.

It seems plausible that computers could take over the function of not only the retina, but also the visual cortex and send high-level processed signals directly to the area of the brain responsible for interpreting them.

Hell, that might be better than normal vision. Imagine knowing more colors than we are able to naturally perceive, or being able to "see" arbitrarily fine details, as if in a dream. Augmented reality would be trivial.

All that and more might be possible if we bypass the visual cortex.

How often do you do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

How often does everybody else stop and say to themselves, "Holy crap. We're living in the future!" I've been doing that at least once a week since the beginning of the year.

Re:How often do you do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that supposed to be a sign that the Singularity is near?

Re:How often do you do this?

[Hatta]

Me too. I just add "and it's dystopian" to it.

Holy hell

[Anonymous Coward]

They skipped right over the visor. Science is beating Start Trek! What would be cool is if they can have it detect UV and/or infrared, as long as it's not too hard for the human brain to comprehend. Now all they need is the telescoping cornea like Geordi had in First Contact

Re:Holy hell

[HeckRuler]

How come no one ever gives any love to seeing polarized light?

Re:Holy hell

[geekgirlandrea]

You already can see it with just the standard-issue eyeballs.

Upgrade?

[Abdul the Newt]

After the implant, what will be the upgrade path to HD? And what about 3D? Will it require special glasses?

Re:Upgrade?

[hoggoth]

> And what about 3D?

I'm pretty sure we're already wired for 3D. At least I am.

Optical nerve still needed.

[St.Creed]

This reminds me of a small girl we met at the swimmingpool (lessons), who had one visible cochlear implant. This girl turned out to be deaf from birth on both ears. I remarked to her mother that she could actually hear and talk amazingly well - I hadn't noticed anything in her speech. According to the doctors this was nigh impossible, but she had enough input from the 16 nerves to get perfect speech and reasonable hearing. She probably got very lucky with the connections on the nerves. So even with 16 nerves stimulated this could make a huge difference for someone who's blind, if they happen to hit the right connections.

Yeah I know - anecdotal evidence and such. Still, I'm happy they get this far already.

Oh, and I won't be upgrading my retina unless it matches the resolution of my computer display and comes with infrared, zoom and millimeterwave vision options. Preferably with scrolling 6502 assembly code on the left side as well :P

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[FlyingBishop]

I will be upgrading when my current one is running at 50% of its present capacity.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[Ryanrule]

the body is very good at adapting itself to get around problems. have you ever seen the 2 legged dog? sad/funny at the same time, but nature manages.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[jeffmeden]

Is it wrong that, after googling "2 legged dog" and seeing the videos of Faith, I am laughing hysterically? And can't stop?

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[HeckRuler]

and millimeter wave vision options

Pervert.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[telomerewhythere]

Just two days ago I saw a dog with one functioning leg. It was incredibly sad and a little funny at the same time. It didn't seem that he was in pain, but to get around he jumped forward or sideways with its one functioning front leg. the other front leg was held sideways as if in a sling. I so wanted to take a picture or video, but the owner of the dog was facing me the whole time I could have gotten my phone out. The only problem was that he made up for his disability in mobility with barks.

The owner is looking for a wheelchair for him. I have seen paraplegic wheelchaired (word?) dogs before playing fetch. Seem pretty happy.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[maxume]

You are misapprehending how the cochlear implant functions. It is stimulating nerves using 16 electrodes, not stimulating 16 individual nerves (each electrode will stimulate a region...).

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one of the downsides of getting a CI to fix later term deafness, your brain has already mapped out which nerves hear what frequencies. You can retrain them, but everything sounds muddled and can be frustrating.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[dr_dank]

You can retrain them, but everything sounds muddled and can be frustrating.

Wow, it's like Vonage for your brain!

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[jsupreston]

That is exactly my problem. With glasses, I am 20/200 in one eye due to a birth defect. It was easy to fix even in the early '70's, but my family didn't have the money for such a surgery. Now, I could have the surgery, but due to over 35 years of atrophy, my optic nerve in that eye is all but dead. That being said, if it were possible to even give me enough sight in that eye to be able to tell more than light from dark, I'd try the surgery. Just for reference, I can make out large shapes (such as human bodies) at about 3'. I can read 2" tall text a letter at a time from a distance of about 1". Anything more than that is impossible for me at this time. At least my other eye is 20/20 corrected. Without glasses, my "good" eye is 20/200 with the bad eye off the chart low.

Re:Optical nerve still needed.

[St.Creed]

Hey, if I get to have surgery, at least I get to have a REAL improvement :)

Visual vs. Motor Prostheses

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that these visual implants directly stimulate the retina to send signals to the nervous system, while even the advanced cybernetic limbs such as DARPA's "Proto 2" are still using the kludge of reading electrical signals from muscles. As I understand it, the arm research is meant to eventually hook the limbs up directly to nerves (as has been done successfully, to some extent, with biological hand transplants), but the tech isn't quite there yet.

Re:Visual vs. Motor Prostheses

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be related to the encoding/decoding mechanism? For the eye, you ordinary have a set of cells which send electric signals to the optic nerve, and you are simulating those signals. For the ear, you simulate the vibrations as they would have been detected by the ear. But in both these cases, you rely on a preexisting mechanism to encode a stimuli into neuroelectric transmissions. I don't think we have the ability to directly link into the nerve system and e.g. by linking into the spinal cord giving you the feeling of walking in deep mud. Do I understand that correctly? I would guess that the "data density" is simply too high, and that for eyes and ears you rely on the system already being designed to be interpretive.

Re:Visual vs. Motor Prostheses

[Anonymous Coward]

implants directly stimulate the retina to send signals to the nervous system

I want my Na'vi tail, stat!

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, i hate this deaf/blind "culture" crap. Stop trying to build a culture around a defect and pretend it makes you superior to other people. All this catering to people with defects drives me insane.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[lwsimon]

Flip that argument - who's up for preventing blacks from purchasing skin lightening or radical plastic surgery?

See, kids, that's called a false dichotomy.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he just pointed out a basic logical fallacy that proves the parent to be a bit rambly.

Huh?

[Chameleon Man]

...Wait, you're serious? Why would you prevent people from having the choice to hear or see just to keep your "culture" intact?

I guess we should be upset with cars because they destroyed the horse-and-buggy culture.

Re:Huh?

[Rhacman]

For those wondering, the OP stated that this technology will destroy blind culture as he claims the cochlear implant destroyed deaf culture and that this should be considered cultural genocide. Quick question though, is it possible for people to delete their own posts (despite being forced to preview what they wrote) or does that just happen when you get modded down to oblivion?

Re:Huh?

[Surt]

There is no deleting. Modding down to oblivion only makes things vanish for those who have /. set up to hide unpopular posts.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, these are the same people who purposely choose to have deaf children, because they want to relate to their kids.

That's the social difference between deaf and blind people. Deafness isn't a big enough impediment, so they take pride in it and think only being able to hear 16 bands of sound is worse than nothing.

Blindness just screws you over, so the blind are ecstatic to get outlines of light and dark. This is why hearing implants are developing so slowly compared to vision implants.

Whoa

[MrEricSir]

Keanu Reeves approves of this idea.

Re:Whoa

[binarylarry]

[Johnny and Jane have just broken into the computer warehouse]
Johnny Mnemonic: [swipes a pile of circuit boards and components off the desk and says to no one in particular] I need a Sino-logic 16.
Jane: [runs around the computer warehouse finding everything he calls for]
Johnny Mnemonic: Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator... Thompson iPhone.

Re:Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Keanu who?

Major Kusanagi approves this idea.

Re:Whoa

[BlackSnake112]

She already has swapped out her entire body. Well maybe part of her brain and spinal cord are still intact.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[SOdhner]

I don't see it as cultural genocide because it's not really forced - nor is there any reason to artificially maintain a culture that is falling apart on its own. If less people are blind, there may be less blind culture, but it's not being attacked, really.


It's certainly unfortunate for the people who can't be helped by advances such as this and then have less of a culture to work within, but that's no reason to stand in the way of new technologies. Eventually - hopefully - something like this will be available to everyone who is blind or deaf no matter the original cause. Even then there will be some that refuse the treatment, but that's their choice.


Cultures change, and sometimes they go away. It happens.

You think it won't happen ...

[abbynormal brain]

... in military application? Robo-cops, emergency responders, and others of similar categories of future application will most definitely benefit from advanced imaging.
HUD capabilities as well -- non-disruptive arrows near the peripheral regions of your vision guiding you to the nearest McDonalds when you ask for it. It won't stop there, "Aps" for your new vision capabilities will spring up -- virtual retinal compass, retinal level (yes, you only need two hands to make sure that picture frame is straight), and the list goes on. Oh, and don't forget the ever loving popular - pop-ups.

Re:You think it won't happen ...

[hoggoth]

> ... in military application? Robo-cops, emergency responders, and others of similar categories of future application will most definitely benefit from advanced imaging.
HUD capabilities as well -- non-disruptive arrows near the peripheral regions of your vision guiding you to the nearest McDonalds when you ask for it. It won't stop there, "Aps" for your new vision capabilities will spring up -- virtual retinal compass, retinal level (yes, you only need two hands to make sure that picture frame is straight), and the list goes on. Oh, and don't forget the ever loving popular - pop-ups.

Oh great. Then /b/ will be able to hack into my visual cortex and superimpose goatse on everything I am seeing.

Re:You think it won't happen ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What i'm surprised at is this doesn't appear to have come from military research.
You'd think something like this would have been high in the priority list of enhancements.
I guess IR / NV / UV headsets were just more efficient use of money and time.

There is that other one that sounded quite promising and wouldn't require surgery, the device that just gets placed on to the tongue.
I believe this one was actually being looked in to by the military.

Re:You think it won't happen ...

[insufflate10mg]

Why did this post get modded troll?

Re:You think it won't happen ...

[timeOday]

... in military application? Robo-cops, emergency responders, and others of similar categories of future application will most definitely benefit from advanced imaging.

Of course they already do HUDs, monacles, IR goggles, binoculars, eyeglasses.

What improvements are not covered by any of the above?

Ripping out something that works for replacement would be a huge leap,and I don't see sufficient reason to do so. Our eyes already have ample bandwidth to saturate our brains.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

No, a false dichotomy is when they remove your previously-implanted... oh nevermind.

New brain router needed

[TiggertheMad]

My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.

Hmmm, but this isn't really blindness resulting from eye damage is it? It sounds to me like his problem is that the signals coming out of his left eye are being mapped into damaged brain tissue. It sounds like he just needs a new 'optical data input port' installed in his brain.

It sounds so trivial, doesn't it? Just rerouting a few electrical impulses around a damaged network node...

Re:New brain router needed

[JDeane]

Given enough time if the damage is not too horrid, the brain may do this on its own.

My mom had a stroke and lost pretty much everything on her left side. To my amazement she pretty much completely recovered and lived another 20 years.

Re:New brain router needed

[datapharmer]

About as trivial as rewiring a microchip. Unless you are this guy I don't think it is all that trivial.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya'll posting in a troll thread.

Better than that

[Weaselmancer]

Cadmium sulfides - a fairly common photoreceptor - are sensitive to infrared. We might be able to do better than mother nature someday. Imagine being able to see in infrared.

Re:Better than that

[Yamata no Orochi]

If Predator movies are any indication, I'm not sure I'd make the switch.

Re:Better than that

[jo_ham]

A real, modern IR camera while it can provide false colour viewing like the predator (red/white = hot, blue = cold etc), most are pretty good resolution greyscale images.

Just look at some of the footage taken with an IR camera mounted to a police chopper, or a search and rescue chopper - they can even tell the difference in temperature of grass that gets run over by a vehicle, so you can clearly see the tracks. Or the ability to pick out a near-freezing person who is barely above the temperature of the water they are in.

Obviously, these cameras are bigger than something you can fit in your eye, but they do work from 500 feet up!

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Cochlear implants have basically destroyed deaf culture. Retinal implants will do the same thing for blind culture. It's cultural genocide, and we should NOT tolerate this desctruction of memetic diversity.

And don't give me the line about, "but it's *easier* to go through life when you're not blind." Yeah, and it's easier to go through life when you're not black too. So who's up for the skin lightening/radical plastic surgery for all black people? Yeah, didn't think so.

As a half-black, half white person, let me comment on your absurd ideas. For starters, skin color does not impact the ability of my 5 senses. I can see all the same things that white or black people can, I can hear the same sounds. I can smell the same sounds, I can taste the same foods (save the fried chicken jokes. EVERYONE LOVES FRIED CHICKEN), and things feel the same way to me as they do when compared to my multi-colored brethren. So my skin color doesn't inhibit my senses.

How about my life? What if my skin color gave me, say, a 30% increased chance of dying from some horrible skin cancer? Would I do it?

Hell yes.

My skin color is insignificant. I don't care about some racially motivated "culture". I do care about how long I live.

If you want to live handicapped, feel free to poke your eyes and ears out. For the rest of us... If our bodies are broken, we'll let science fix us. Men are men (and not simple beasts) because we can use tools to shape ourselves and our environment. Stop the Luddite ideology!

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[SOdhner]

I don't think so - I've met people with this opinion in person, one of whom felt so strongly about it that she flat out said if she had a child who was born deaf and knew it could be immediately fixed she would decline, even though this would be someone that was never even part of the deaf culture to begin with.

Commercialisation

[YourExperiment]

However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant

So if the government invents it, this company promises to make money from it? That's real philanthropy for you!

Re:Commercialisation

[interkin3tic]

So if the government invents it, this company promises to make money from it? That's real philanthropy for you!

Someone has to do it, unless you think the government should try making and selling these implants. As far as the "government inventing it" half, it would appear that private enterprises haven't invented it yet, and you have to wonder if it isn't because they weren't trying because they didn't think it would be profitable. The government might be selling the tech for a premium, maybe not. This might not be a very profitable enterprise, "Second Sight" might be taking a big risk here. The DoE might say "Here's the perfected version of the artificial retina. It takes a month to make each one at the cost of $300k. Few blind people are going to be able to afford that out of pocket, and the insurance companies are going to say they won't cover this when it's 'experimental' and a perfectly good alternative, the cane, exists, so good luck finding a way of selling it at anything less than a $250k loss."

Re:Commercialisation

[jackchance]

This is standard practice. Government grants fund basic and applied research. Scientists get patents based on these discoveries which benefits the scientists and the host institutions and the venture capital companies which commercialize the discoveries. The government collects taxes. Sounds like a reasonable deal to me.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Yamata no Orochi]

As a half-black, half white person, let me comment on your absurd ideas...I can smell the same sounds...that white or black people can

You may be more mixed up than you realize.

What I want is chicken eyes.

[telomerewhythere]

I read the link, (I know, I must be new here) fascinating stuff. It is for people still with undamaged nerve ganglia. But I wonder about gene therapy. I imagine that could possibly be better. There has been some success in injections, like described here on /.

I read something recently about a chicken's eye and how it differs from a human's. Here's the link Short version: sharp color vision across the field of view and extra cones to see violet/uv, and double cones to see movement.

Could a person who has AMD get an injection of cone/rod dna/proteins in their eye and get regeneration?

Headlines from the future

[martin-boundary]

VGA resolution, cochlea implants? I can already see the headlines for ten years from now:

"Larry Laffer Virus Strikes Again!"

The Larry Laffer virus has taken its tenth victim in two days. Mental hospitals are seeing a surge of new patients admitted for hallucinations. The affected individuals report hearing strange low grade synthesized music and talk incoherently about lizards.

The common connection between the cases appears to be a combination of cheap new electronic sight and hearing enhancements introduced by Microsoft. It appears that the internet enabled operating system which runs the devices contains a notorious email program which acts as the propagation vector.

Investigations are ongoing to find the Chinese script kiddie writer of the virus, although some highly unreliable people in the industry suspect it may actually be a shadowy older Anglo-Saxon individual due to the particular choice of payload.

The Larry Laffer virus is not the first time physically challenged persons with combined sight and hearing enhancements have been targeted by virus writers. Last year, a number of schizophrenia cases were reported about individuals who claimed to see and hear the face of "Bob" hovering nearby. An court battle between the Church of the Subgenius and Microsoft is currently in progress.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[je ne sais quoi]

That was my gut reaction too but I learned something reading the wikipedia page on cochlear implants:

If a child is placed into a mainstream setting it makes it difficult for them because they feel like they do not fit in with their peers and cannot fully identify with the Deaf community. One interviewee in the Christiansen and Leigh study states "In high school it was the worst time for me with the cochlear implant because I was really trying to find my identity with the cochlear implant...I never accepted my deafness. And the cochlear implant in some ways showed me that no matter what, the moment I take it off I'm deaf. I'll never be hearing 24 hours." [37]

I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf). But then again, teenagers or children who don't fit in or feel inadequate for any reason are as common as grass since schools and children tend to try and enforce sociological homogeneity, it doesn't matter if you wear thick glasses, are socially maladjusted, or have any other issue that makes you different from the "average" kid.

As for black people, I think the GP needs to learn a bit about skin tone discrimination amongst african americans and asians before he starts shooting off about skin lighteners and their evilness. Even americans of european descent do it, ever hear the term "redneck"? It immediately conjures a picture in one's mind of someone who is often poorly educated and poor financially and is often overweight.

what happens when they exceed human abilities?

[guanxi]

What happens when they get higher resolution, are sensitive to a wider spectrum, tunable images (contrast, enhancement, etc), connected to storage for recording and playback, cameras pointing in various directions or even remote ... who will get them? You don't think you'll get a job with that old wetware, do you?

Too late

[MrEricSir]

Science already invented the air filter.

URL Shorteners

[emkyooess]

Can we not use bit.ly and other URL shorteners on /.? There's no need to. They're harmful, actually. Thanks!

Re:URL Shorteners

[noidentity]

Can we not use bit.ly and other URL shorteners on /.? There's no need to. They're harmful, actually. Thanks!

It's so the URL will fit in the artifical vision of these once-blind readers.

Re:URL Shorteners

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because if an article gets submitted with a bad TFS, you end up being unable to resubmit the same link. So URL shorteners to the rescue.

Re:URL Shorteners

[cbhacking]

I agree with you, but Slashdot apparently rejects any article submission with a URL that was used in another rejected article. Since people are constantly producing absolute crap article submissions - things even the editors won't post, no matter how interesting or on-topic the material is - it often becomes necessary to find an alternate link to the material you want to submit. Frankly, annoying though URL shorteners are, they're better than links to ad-riddled pages that spread their copy-pasted content out over a dozen click-throughs, add no original content, have no link back to the source, and are hosted on underpowered servers that can't take the surge of traffic.

That said, for all I know, this article points to such sites. It's not like I actually checked the links...

Re:URL Shorteners

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! I was going to post the same thing.
I like to screen links before I click them, url-shorteners make that impossible.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[SOdhner]

save the fried chicken jokes. EVERYONE LOVES FRIED CHICKEN

Some people are born with impairments to their sense of taste which - incorrectly - makes them believe that fried chicken is not absolutely delicious. Fortunately there is now a tongue implant that can correct this terrible condition.

The problem is that this may result in cultural genocide to tasteless people. It is not thought to impact those with bad taste in partners, movies, etc. although god willing we may one day find a treatment for that as well.

let's hope

[hort_wort]

The Blind Shall See Again, But When?

Hopefully after you know who isn't on tv anymore!

Moore's law

[gurps_npc]

Or rather a rough equilevent of Moore's Law for CCD chip resolution, predicts that the resolution problem will vanish by next decade. Welcome Geordi, your visor will be ready before you are born.

Re:Moore's law

[WrongMonkey]

The problem isn't the detectors, its sending the signal in a way the brain can interpret.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[h4rr4r]

Have contact lenses destroyed the basically fucking blind culture?

Only a moron would want to be crippled, I say that as a person who has been effectively blind without corrective lenses since age 6. I can focus on objects within about 6 inches of my face without corrective lenses.

Cochlea implants aren't standard

[djscoumoune]

and aren't recommended at all because the operation destroys the working part of the ear and you still have to learn reading on people's lips and learn a special sign language to help understanding the pronounciation, plus the regular sign language. I just hope the VGA implants will be upgradable (unlike cochlea implants) because seeing in 320*240 may not be much and may need real life adjustments.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[h4rr4r]

If they think we need deaf people so much why not deafen their normal children?

But cochlear implants are oversold...

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The premise of this submission is that cochlear implants are uncontroversially good, but that just ain't so; there's a lot of people who have objections to cochlear implants themselves or the way they're pushed on to deaf children.

The National Association of the Deaf's statement on the implants makes pretty good reading about this topic. They don't come against the implants as their own, but they do point out a number of problems that they perceive on their use:

1. The implants are pushed on to parents of deaf children as a "cure" for deafness, when they are at best a tool for deaf people to navigate a hearing world.
2. The promotion of the implants often comes along with a negative image of deafness, which portrays deaf people as deficient and unable to communicate. The NAD would rather prefer that deaf people be represented by positive role models of successful deaf people.
3. The implants require years of very frustrating training for many deaf children to learn to use, and a lot of that time might be better spent on sign-language based education.

I don't know to what extent this would be a factor for blindness, however. It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.

Re:But cochlear implants are oversold...

[h4rr4r]

1. This is the best cure we have so far
2. They are deficient, they lack the ability to hear. Hate to hurt their feelings, but that is the truth. I am deficient in sight, so I use contacts.
3. Not if they want to communicate with 99.9% of the world that uses sound to communicate instead of gestures.

Re:But cochlear implants are oversold...

[HeckRuler]

which portrays deaf people as deficient and unable to

...hear?

I'm sorry, but deaf and/or blind children are lacking abilities. Specifically, the ability to hear and/or see. Yes it impedes their ability to learn. Some kids rise to the challenge, and others don't. It's like being born with one arm: you're going to have troubles tying your shoes

Unless you have a awesome robo-arm!

Complaining that being deaf is seen as detrimental is taking political correctness too far.

Re:But cochlear implants are oversold...

[Anonymous Coward]

This post and your other posts make you look like one of those odd anti-hearing types.

Your problem is that you think that people who say "not being able to hear is bad" is the same thing as saying "deaf people are bad". Uh, no.

> It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.

Hmm? Actually, people who are blind at the wrong point in their brain development are never able to fully use their vision if it's restored later. They can see, but the pattern recognition wiring is missing; they have an incredibly hard time actually using the ability to see. Likewise, those who lose their hearing after a certain critical point and regain some of it later can adapt to use the regained hearing, but those who didn't have the ability to hear during brain development have a lot of trouble later.

So you're basically promoting a false dichotomy by painting it as an either/or spoken/signed choice. The alternative isn't "learn no language and be rendered a cripple", the alternative is "learn what you can, but if surgery will work get that as young as possible".

Re:But cochlear implants are oversold...

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Your problem is that you think that people who say "not being able to hear is bad" is the same thing as saying "deaf people are bad". Uh, no.

I understand perfectly well that the statement "deaf people are bad" is not a logical consequence of "not being able to hear is bad." What I don't think a lot of people in this discussion understand is that even so, portrayals of deafness that emphasize the negatives do have a negative effect on deaf people. For example, it very often leads to adults directing a deaf child's time and work on overcoming their "deficiency" (the fact that they can't hear, and the consequences of that), when a lot of that time might be better spent on other activities that would be better for the child.

So yeah, going on and on about what a deaf child can't do (hear) does have an effect, even if it doesn't logically entail the proposition that deaf children are bad.

Re:But cochlear implants are oversold...

[Anonymous Coward]

er, your and idiot.
Saying that this is the best cure implies they are sick. They dont have the ability to hear but they do have the ability to communicate. It's just lasy SOB's like you that think I cant be arsed learning how to communicate with them let's fix them. They are culturally deaf. That means that they have a culture based on being deaf. That's like saying french people are sick and we need to cure them by making them American. My wife works with kids that have had a run in with the early intervention cochlear implant team. Most of them are profoundly deaf (helicopters landing next to them wouldn't bother them) but the parents still decide to 'fix' them at 2 or 3 by putting them in for major surgery to implant a large magnet in their head. By age 5 or 6 most of them have rejected their implants. They just get left to deal with balance and inner ear problem, infections in the ear canal from the implant.

Re:astroturfing slashvertisement

[h4rr4r]

Which is a total ripoff of REPO: The genetic opera.

Which is not a bad rock opera, note it is not a good film, just not a bad rock opera.

In the land of the blind...

[f8l_0e]

the man with 640x480 is king.

Re:In the land of the blind...

[cbhacking]

Terribly low though VGA is by modern standards, it's actually plenty for getting around on a limited day-to-day basis. It's certainly enough to avoid walking into a chair, or off the edge of a sidewalk, or into oncoming traffic. It would be possible to recognize people, at least up close, without needing to touch their face or pick out their voice. You wouldn't be able to read a book or something without very strong magnification, but you could probably make out street signs and bus numbers. Color-code your keys and you'd be able to lock and unlock your door, open your mailbox, etc. You'd be able to identify paper money, assuming nobody tries to slip you a counterfeit. You could probably even do basic cooking (use of a microwave, at least) and use everyday devices like cell phones or even computers (get the screen to fill your field of view, and it'd be just like I had back in the early 90s). Movies would be grainy as heck but better than no video at all.

I know people who would do just about anything for this kind of capability today.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Shatteredstar]

Actually this has alot more grand possibilities then simply helping the disabled too. Imagine when it can have IR and UV range visiblity to it. Imagine when you can put some form of built in magnification. Imagine if you could dynamically filter out specific light wavelengths?

The implications of this sort of technology can very quickly become staggering in terms of taking humans beyond the 'visible' spectrum requirement and into so much wilder landscapes.

Yes it starts with helping the disabled because they have nothing and many have experiences and ability or even potential that could grow and help others with the ability to see once more. They also have 'nothing to lose' if the procedure does not work. If the implant does not function did the patient lose anything more then still being blind? It becomes a test base and a possibility of helping people. A win win for the company and society.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Shatteredstar]

Thats actually an interesting psychological aspect. Most everyone needs to find a social group to identify with and most of the child development that I'm aware of (at least socially) requires finding that group no?

By the same token aren't we somewhat moving away from the requirement of direct social interaction as the internet social monster continues to grow. While it may not replace it can perhaps provide some 'assistance' in finding an identity and place socially...even if not too grand of a social culture (at least in terms of how many view such culture.)

I wonder though if retinal implants could really be made to be removable on even a semi consistent basis. The cochlear implant obviously can but retinal seems a bit more touchy of an area ya know?

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

A neighbor kid with a cochlear implant is the same age as my daughter. I was walking her home to swap out her battery the other day & she was saying how it's easy on her school bus if her battery dies because everyone can sign. She's definitely a part of deaf culture, but the implant allows her to be part of hearing culture too. It would be much harder for her to hang out with the neighborhood kids without it. Her parents did have some qualms initially, but I think they all see it as a good thing now.

You think the HDMI cables are bad?

[drainbramage]

Wait till you find out where you have to put the batteries.

Re:You think the HDMI cables are bad?

[bjourne]

That's when they finally plug the analog hole for good.

WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[ZuchinniOne]

During world war 2 some soldiers were given a form of vitamin A that slightly changed the structure of the opsin molecule which the eye uses to detect light.

This resulted in soldiers being able to see further into the red end of the spectrum and there are some reports that a few soldiers even saw the top of the infrared spectrum.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[arthurpaliden]

Urban Myth.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[ZuchinniOne]

Nope, actual reality. I'm a neuroscientist and I study vision for a living.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[ZuchinniOne]

Nope, actual reality. I'm a neuroscientist and I study vision for a living.

It's not only real, but completely understood since we know everything about opsin proteins from their structures to the DNA segments that code for the opsins in the different cones.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[arthurpaliden]

Please provide citation in regards to the ww2 tests. It will be an interesting read.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is an urban myth, then why does vitamin A2 cause a 20nm extension in sensitivity for L cones?

Or are you saying that just the soldier part is a myth?

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[ZuchinniOne]

I'll look for it.

This wasn't done as standard peer-review research, obviously. But several of the texts I've used to teach undergrads Sensation and Perception have mentioned it.

I'll try to find one of them.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[jeffb (2.718)]

Thirdhand is the best I can find:

Summary with offline citations

I was surprised, too.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[arthurpaliden]

Will see if I can track down the refrenced book.

Unfortunately one has to take anything coming out of WW2 research that is not supported by peer review with a good deal of skepticism. The article quoted seems very similar to the following.

During WW2 the British promoted a dis-information campaign about their night fighters increasing their night vision using vitamin A compounds extracted from carrots. This was done to hide the capabilities of the radars fitted to their night fighters. Although it was pure bunk, a cousin of my Mum was a night fighter pilot in the RAF and related this fact to her after the war, the deception and disinformation campaign worked so well that it did enter into non peer reviewed scientific and medical literature both at the time and after the war as 'fact'.

Re:WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision

[arthurpaliden]

Unfortunately one has to take anything coming out of WW2 research that is not supported by peer review with a good deal of skepticism. The article quoted seems very similar to the following.

During WW2 the British promoted a dis-information campaign about their night fighters increasing their night vision using vitamin A compounds extracted from carrots. This was done to hide the capabilities of the radars fitted to their night fighters. Although it was pure bunk, a cousin of my Mum was a night fighter pilot in the RAF and related this fact to her after the war, the deception and disinformation campaign worked so well that it did enter into non peer reviewed scientific and medical literature both at the time and after the war as 'fact'.

The artificial human eye...

[Anonymous Coward]

...can't really see anything faster than about 30 FPS.

Interesting that this is funded by Dept of Energy

[MillenneumMan]

Anyone else find this odd? Is DoE the source of most medical research funding? I know they do a whole lot of work for the Dept of Defense, and actually I wish those projects were rolled up under the Dept of Defense budget for more accurate accounting (but that is another story). That said, this is awesome and I hope this technology advances at the same pace as Moore's Law

Frame rate?

[BoppreH]

A normal human eye has (almost) no frame rate limit since all cells are asynchronous, but this one appears to rely on a single video camera.

I wonder if the severely reduced frame rate perception will have any side effects, such as not being able to tell an object's speed or detecting subtle vibrations.

Re:Frame rate?

[SecurityGuy]

I don't think that'll be an issue. Consider that we don't perceive frames in movie or tv, both media that have frame rates significantly below what we're used to in computers.

I love the ultravoilet - it's so red...

[TiggertheMad]

Actually, quite a lot, as long as we are willing to give up accurate color perception in the spectrum we see in now.

Or give up seeing in the visible spectrum while viewing other ranges. It would also be possible to shift the range and just remap the existing color depths.

WTF?

[joocemann]

If the DOE (tax dollars) is funding the research, why the hell would the technology produced then become commercialized (capitalized) by a private business? Didn't we all pay for this, and so don't we all deserve to not pay the added costs of capitalization?

Corruption is right out in the open. Look at it.

Re:WTF?

[jackchance]

The government gets their cut. It's called taxes.

Re:WTF?

[joocemann]

The government gets their cut. It's called taxes.

That's an idiotic way to look at it considering that the taxes would be taken with or without government funding of the research/development.

Re:WTF?

[jackchance]

The government gets their cut. It's called taxes.

That's an idiotic way to look at it considering that the taxes would be taken with or without government funding of the research/development.

Except for the fact that the government dollars drives research and innovation which creates new markets and results in increased tax revenue.

The alternative (which is, i think, proposed by Ron Paul) is to have a lower tax base and no public funding of science. The problem with this is that corporations tend to be short-sighted and often times basic research finds applications 10 or 20 years after the research has begun.

There are exceptions, especially in the tech sector, of companies like Intel, IBM, Bell, and Xerox funding basic research. But AFAIK the pharmas have been riding the coattails of gov't funded research.

Re:WTF?

[joocemann]

The point I was getting at is not that private businesses build from the foundations of government funded basic research... that is clearly evident and somewhat widely accepted... I was getting at the point in the main topic wherein the government directly funded the R&D of this optic product and then a private company would directly be given the ability to commercialize it. That is not ok. That is corruption.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Yeah, because, you know, depriving a person of access to beautiful creations like music and passionate verbal communication in the name of some misconstrued concept of culture identity is such a righteous cause.

You, sir, are a jealous twat.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Surt]

Just make it into a two part combo device, so you can take out half just like removing a contact lens and render it inoperable.

So, what outcomes do you want?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Here's the difference between you and me: you insist on telling deaf children "the truth" about their "deficiency," outcomes be damned, whereas I really am interested in getting the best possible outcomes for them. So, to address your three points:

1. "Best cure" by what measure? Ability to interpret and produce spoken language? Why is that the best measure of the outcome of deaf children treatment, as opposed to, say, high school graduation rates or standardized test scores (using written language tests)? Have you considered that by focusing on "fixing" deaf people so they can hear, you may miss the big picture?
2. Do you think we would have good outcomes with deaf people if all of our treatment adopted your macho posturing about "just telling those weak deluded people the hard truth"? Do you realize that this type of treatment is uncomfortably similar to how domestic abusers treat their victims?
3. Would you rather have us spend many man-years training a deaf child to understand spoken English with significant effort and difficulty, or rather to spend extra time using sign language to teach them written English, literature, math, history, science, etc.? Which do you think would make a deaf child happier and more productive: (a) struggling for years to learn to talk and hear without ever being able to do what hearing people do effortlessly, (b) getting an education comparable to what hearing children get?

Note that I was careful enough not to simply come out against cochlear implants; I would not be surprised at all if there is some balance that can be worked out between sign language education and implants that produced better results than education alone.

But my point is quite simply that the goal shouldn't be to "cure" deaf children; the goal should be to allow them to become healthy and productive adults. This definitely requires them to be able to manage interactions with the hearing world, and cochlear implants could very well help in that regard, but focusing too much on them just loses sight of the big picture.

I'm going to stress one final thing: learning the native language(s) is one of the crucial parts of child cognitive development. One of the biggest risks of early-age deafness is that a deaf child may fail to learn any real language, and thus will have retarded cognitive development. This is why sign language education is so important: deaf children learn to sign as easily as hearing children learn to talk, and native learning of any language is much better for cognitive development than incomplete learning of spoken language. Again, big picture: is it better to have intellectually normal deaf signers, or intellectually challenged orally-educated deaf people?

Re:So, what outcomes do you want?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I can tell you are a CI bigot.

1. Sign language is useless unless you make a significant number of the hearing learn it. A braille ATM doesn't help much if it is on the other side of a highway.
2. Do you realize you are using the whiny passive tone of a perpetual victim?
3. If we were more concerned about detecting childhood deafness and developing CI solutions for infants, it wouldn't impact development.

Instead of giving up and sticking with a stopgap, push development to a solution that gives more channels, better resolution, and easier implantation.

I think it is hilarious you use "loses sight" twice in your comment when this is a blindness thread.

Re:So, what outcomes do you want?

[h4rr4r]

1. The big picture is making them able to get jobs and have a normal life. Yes, that does mean interacting with the rest of the world who uses sound to communicate. I do not demand that all signs be printed in 14 foot high letters so I can read them without contacts.

2.It is not macho posturing, I deal with my visual deficiency as they must deal with their auditory one. Telling them the truth is helpful, in that they see they have an extra burden to overcome and that many people have such disabilities. It is very important for a child to know he is not alone, it is also important to not shield them from the truth. I attended the same university that hosts the NTID. The reality was many of these deaf kids were setup to fail, by members of their family and community. This is because they expected the world to adapt to them, not for them to need to adapt to the world. This was not the norm, but it was clear that it happens far too often.

3. False dichotomy. For a child to have the best outcome he needs both, if that takes extra time so be it. If you really do care about the outcome.

Lying to anyone is not going to help them, only hinder their progress while making them feel good about themselves. While setting them up for real failure down the road.

You final paragraph also is a false dichotomy. The best outcome is that they learn whatever is needed to ensure they have normal cognitive development and that they be able to live in society as normally as possible. If this means sign language while learning to use an implant so be it.

Re:So, what outcomes do you want?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

1. Sign language is useless unless you make a significant number of the hearing learn it.

You're completely missing the point here. Sign language is crucial even if very few hearing people learn it, because learning any first language normally is crucial for child cognitive development. You see, I actually don't want deaf children to be developmentally retarded compared to hearing children. This means that the deaf children must be able to learn and use some language effortlessly in their early years as much as hearing children get the chance to. The only languages that can fill this role are signed ones.

You say deaf people need to learn spoken languages (and the written versions thereof). Well, that's something very hard for a child who can't hear since an early age, and if you want them to succeed at it, you shouldn't short-change them cognitively by denying them the basic cognitive development that comes from learning a native language.

Bah humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

> Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept.

Yes, I'm sure all the recipients were bitterly disappointed at, you know, being only able to experience very low quality vision for the first time in many years.

DRM i-Patch ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run linux?

Does it have, like, secret copyright protection ?

Does the Chinese version block stuff the Central Committees don't want you to see ?

Where do you download the patch ? How do you apply the patch ? :^

Do you see strange faces if you wear sunshades or dark glasses ?

Is there going to be a 'slow light' version soon ?

Does it stream Flash ? Or will they wait for eye-TML V ?

Er,...

Imagine a beowulf of... no, wait. On second thought. Better not. Trust me on that one ;>

"These eyes have seen..."

How long till the WiFi version is on the market. The Bluetooth version ?

What's the bandwidth for p*nr ?

X-Ray vision!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra...

Screw IR and UV. I'd be happy with just X-Ray vision.

...though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

Ewww!!!

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I agree absolutely. My penchant for eyeglasses has made me a total outcast in the Myopic Community.

Fuckwit.

- T

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really glad I enabled sigs. I will go out of my way to downmod every fucking post you ever make.

You've got it all wrong

[copponex]

Using publicly funded research to improve lives directly by the government is an evil called Socialism. Using publicly funded research to improve lives by channeling the same technology through for-profit corporate channels is an ideal called Capitalism.

I mean, isn't it obvious?

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Doctor Faustus]

Cochlear implants have basically destroyed deaf culture. Retinal implants will do the same thing for blind culture. It's cultural genocide
No, genocide requires actually killing people. I don't understand where people get the idea that cultures have rights other than the rights of the people in them.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Zerth]

Some do, sort of.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[RonTheHurler]

Here's a great book by a guy who actually had the cochlear implant and wrote about the experience -

Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World, by Michael Chorost

It's a great read and made me a little envious of people who can turn-off their hearing at will.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[cdfh]

I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf).

I have a fairly significant hearing loss which caused me a great deal of difficulty when I was at school. My hearing was good enough for me to definitely not be considered deaf, but it often wasn't good enough for me to be able to reliably have conversations with my peers (how well I can hear people varies hugely from very well to not at all).

At the time, I was seriously considering whether I would have preferred to be profoundly deaf for precisely the reasons you outline. Now, my hearing loss is much less of an issue for two reasons: one is that I have better hearing aids, and have had more time to adjust to them, and the other is that I have tuned my life so that I no longer feel any particular desire to socialise, avoiding the problem completely, but at the cost of living a rather more lonely life.

I may, however, just be taking my current level of hearing for granted; I don't know.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Anonymous Coward]

But then they fit into another category in which they can feel right at home: biotech-modded cyborgs!

I, for one, welcome them as our new overlords...

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[fake_name]

I'd like to know why having a deaf culture is preferable to not having any deaf people.

Next you'll be wanting to bring back leper colonies so we don't lose leper culture.

Tricky

[tjstork]

If the DOE (tax dollars) is funding the research, why the hell would the technology produced then become commercialized (capitalized) by a private

Well, building an eye implant in the lab is one thing, and the taxpayer pays for that. Putting it out into the field, borrowing all the money and getting investment bankers to pony up for production costs, sales and marketing, all of the insurances required for the inevitable lawsuits, the technical support, tracking, doctor training and all that manufacturing required to get the eye from a factory floor into someone's head, that's what the private sector does.

So it is ultimately a cost sharing arrangement. What is foobar in this case is that the private sector in the USA is extremely risk averse these days. In essence, the US taxpayer is footing the bill of coming up with products for corporations to product and market.

Outside of that, in order to get an entirely new product out there, you have to be a solo inventor. The mad scientist is apropro, because only mad scientists take risks that other people just wouldn't take.

That's pretty much why you see old companies where the founders have either sold off or died always lobbying for R&D tax credits or gov't aid to labs, because they just want to pick and choose from products that already exist, not, have to take the risk of creating new ones. Some Joe Schmoe who worked his way up from accounting would never have the credibility to bring a new product to market, but, a visionary founder like a Steve Jobs, or, Bill Gates, could say, yeah, I'll bet the company on that, because they've done it already and made it work. It may seem obvious to everyone now, but, just look at why Windows had so little competition - Wall Street in those days was like "why do you need graphics on a business computer". Microsoft just funded the whole thing out of its own pocket (and granted, it could do that because of the DOS monopoly), but, it was the only way something like a Windows, or, for that matter, a Macintosh, could ever get built. You could have never have gone to a banker and say you needed 100M for a GUI based operating shell. You'd have to have a business case, cost studies, market analysis, all of that stuff, whereas, someone with their own company and own guts and glory could say, "Make it like Mac, because its cool", like Bill Gates did.

Even now you can see how Microsoft is turning into a rent seeking pile of shit that's lost a lot of the rough and tumble stuff that made same so entertaining when Bill was at the helm. They listen to their enterprise customers more, for sure, but they don't really lead any more, and any innovation that comes up inside of them just gets drowned out in infighting.

Re:Tricky

[joocemann]

"Well, building an eye implant in the lab is one thing, and the taxpayer pays for that. Putting it out into the field, borrowing all the money and getting investment bankers to pony up for production costs, sales and marketing, all of the insurances required for the inevitable lawsuits, the technical support, tracking, doctor training and all that manufacturing required to get the eye from a factory floor into someone's head, that's what the private sector does."

Yeah, but the gov doesn't need to do all that. They just need to show what they already said they were going to do (the product) to the legislature and call for the follow up. A spending of the public funds to manufacture and distribute the product wherein the costs are not profit oriented and *only* suffice to pay what was paid by the government. And in that way not only will the long term be that the cost was nil, but also that the government intervened only as much as was necessary to catalyze a development and production of a product for its people.

This is not hard to see simply. I have worked for the government and let me tell you, those checks don't bounce.

I see no need for a hand to intervene and put profit between the costs and the consumer (but i'd rather call them a suffering patient than a consumer/customer).

Btw, I appreciate your discussion here.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[eh2o]

Its a complicated situation because in recent history the deaf community has beed badly persecuted, for example by forbidding the use of sign language in schools.

Anyways children who get cochlear implants at an early age have significantly improved reading comprehension. English spelling has a pretty low information rate (only 1.5 bits/character) and its much harder to learn how to read fast if you don't know where the natural dipthongs are in the word. The bottom line is that if you want your kid to be successful in society then implanting is good.

Quit going to WalMart Optical

[jeko]

Damn, dude, you seriously need a new optometrist.

Forgot something...

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.

Actually, people who are blind at the wrong point in their brain development are never able to fully use their vision if it's restored later. They can see, but the pattern recognition wiring is missing; they have an incredibly hard time actually using the ability to see.

You're not seeing my point here (which perhaps I should have spelled out more obviously). The point was that a person who can't see but has full use of language is developmentally much better off than one who can see but has no language, and that this might make vision implants less controversial than auditive ones. Remember, there are people out there who insist that deaf children should be given a completely oral education--something that is risky for the child's cognitive development.

So you're basically promoting a false dichotomy by painting it as an either/or spoken/signed choice.

I did no such thing. What I would insist, however, is that signed education should be the priority over spoken education because of the developmental risks that come from missing out on first language acquisition. If you want deaf people who are competent at communicating with the hearing world, you'd first want not to cognitively short-charge them by denying them a true first language.

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[GreatDrok]

"By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. "

The problem is that if you don't implant children then their brain never develops the ability to process sound so they will always be deaf. I've heard people say that children shouldn't have implants and you should wait until they are old enough to make the choice but at that point the choice has already been made for them because the implant won't work. Which is worse? Having a technology that will give a child a working level of hearing (not normal but enough to get by) or denying them the ability to ever hear anything? If a child is capable of benefiting from a cochlear implant then it is their right to have one and at least be able to hear something. The same will go for visual implants when they become available. Deaf and blind culture are really just support systems for people with a fundamental disability. I simply can't believe that someone who is deaf or blind would willingly wish that disability on someone else if it could be avoided. To do so would be as bad as the parents who amputate their children's limbs so they can beg (yes, I have seen this, it is not something I wanted to see).

If you can "see" your env's heat output, GET OUT!

[jeffb (2.718)]

You actually can see very faintly in IR. If you wear visible-spectrum opaque, but IR-transparent glasses, you can maneuver through the environment just by its heat output. It's dark, but doable.

No, you can't.

You can see near-IR, the kind produced by TV remotes, very faintly -- although, if your source is bright enough to be easily perceptible, it can damage your eyes, just like staring into the sun.

Thermal IR is almost an order of magnitude longer in wavelength. It can't affect your retina's sensory cells, except by cooking them. Even if it could, your lens can't focus it. At all. And even if it could, you'd be focusing the IR into a medium that's already radiating at the same frequencies. It would be like trying to project an image onto the surface of a light bulb that's already turned on.

It is possible to make (or evolve) thermal IR imagers that operate at ambient temperatures, but they're nothing like the human eye. Ask your local pit viper.

But the only "heat output" that your eyes can see is incandescence -- from light bulb filaments, or red-hot heating elements, or glowing coals. If you can maneuver through your environment by seeing its heat output, you'll want to exit that environment as quickly as possible, being very careful not to touch anything while you do so.

The MPAA won't allow this ...

[[KERNEL32]_]

... unless DRM are built-in to the user's brain.

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

read the oliver sacks essay about restoring sight to a blind man. the eyes worked, but the guy's brain had *no clue* what the information *meant*, and couldn't interpret a tree's canopy and trunk as two parts of the same entity. have to replace the retinas before the person has been blind for too long, maybe? or will brain-rewiring be part of the procedure?

Re:This is BAD BAD BAD

[Lord Kano]

What if my skin color gave me, say, a 30% increased chance of dying from some horrible skin cancer? Would I do it?

As things stand, your skin color gives you a decreased chance of dying from some horrible skin cancer.

LK