Chip Allows Blind People To See

crabel writes "3 blind people have been implanted with a retinal chip that allowed them to see shapes and objects within days of the procedure. From the article: 'One of the patients surprised researchers by identifying and locating objects on a table; he was also able to walk around a room unaided, approach specific people, tell the time from a clock face, and describe seven different shades of gray in front of him.'"

Comments

Re:In the land of the blind...

[mcgrew]

Once again reality has trumped Star Trek with an eye implant -- there's now no reason for La Forge to wear that visor.

Reality trumped Star Trek with an eye implant before. McCoy gave Kirk reading glasses for his age-related presbyopia because he was allergic to the eye drops that soften the lens (they don't have those... yet). But they've been implanting mechanical lenses since 2003; I have one in my left eye. McCoy could have just beamed Kirk's biological lenses out and beamed the mechanical lenses in. I went from being extremely nearsighted and farsighted at the same time (age related presbyopia), wearing both contacts and reading glasses, to better than 20/20. Of course, since we don't have transporters, invasive surgery is required. This retinal implant would require even more invasive surgery.

Of all the nerdy devices I have and have had, the implanted lens is my favorite.

Give them time and this retinal implant may surpass normal vision like the lens implant does.

Oh yeah -- you will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!

Re:This is actually pretty cool

[clone53421]

I can only assume no one's that excited by huge sight-replacing devices with 512 "taxel" resolution*, except as a step toward better things.

*I've tried to imagine this and even asked Google to come up with an image that showed what this might 'look' like and come up with nothing

What I found indicated that the 512 taxels are arranged in a 32x16 grid (a 4x2 arrangement of 8x8 separate electrode grids).

Obviously it’s tactile, not visual, but I took an image off google images, reduced it to 32x16, grayscaled it, and scaled it back up using the Sinc (Lanczos3) method. This was the result.