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Implant Gives Grayscale Vision To the Blind Using Lasers
MrSeb writes with a bit from Extreme Tech: "After a lot of theorizing, posturing, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the U.S. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases. ... The Bio-Retina, developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs ... around the $60,000 [and] the 576-pixel vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anesthetic. Once installed, 576 electrodes on the back of the sensor implant themselves into your optic nerve. The best bit, though, is how the the sensor is powered: The Bio-Retina system comes with a standard pair of corrective lenses that are modified so that they can fire a near-infrared laser beam through your iris to the sensor at the back of your eye. On the sensor there is a photovoltaic cell that produces up to three milliwatts — not a lot, but more than enough."
I think if you were unable to see sufficently to function you would take this option! I certainly did when I got lasic.
This is super cool, if it works, but I'll shit golden sunshine before I let someone near my eyeball with a knife!
If you were blind would you care?
You should try CXL surgery for a keratoconus, they don't actually cut anything but they drill away the upper layer of your cornea and you're only under local anesthetic so you see it coming. It looks just like a household drill with a small sander and works just the same. After that it's smooth sailing though and if you've gone from -3/-4 to -8/-10 in sight in less then a year you'll do pretty much anything to make it stop. I'm pretty sure a blind person would go through hell to see.
Eyes ain't the only thing being replaced by tech
A buddy of mine is a type 1 diabetic; he was simply born with a faulty pancreas. For the majority of his life, he dealt with constant insulin injections, as typical for a diabetic. A few years back however, he was upgraded to an external pump. It looks just like an old beeper, and plugs into a semi-permanent* injection point under his shirt. Whenever he eats, he just has to push a few buttons on the pump and it steadily drips the correct amount of insulin into his blood stream
Of course, a pancreas isn't nearly as complex as an eye, so I'm glad to see science and medicine marching onward. Given that these advancements have happened in just a few short years, has me excited to see what will happen in this field within the next decade or so.
*semi-permanent: He stab himself once every few days, and there's a whole bracketing system roughly the size of a silver dollar that glues onto his skin and keeps the needle/tubing at the correct depth.
This signature is false.
I wouldn't get your hopes up too much, they're not really doing anything to map out the neurons in the eye. They're just punching through and stimulating whatever neurons are behind that spot of the retina, which will be "close enough" to give you a low-resolution grayscale image but they haven't got a clue on how to stimulate only one type of receptors so you can have color or to map it accurately so you can have high resolution. A working eye is a helluva sensor and I suspect we'll be using night vision goggles and such to translate invisible light to visible light for many decades to come.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They may not have known that it didn't permanently record. They just saw a camera affixed to the guy's face and acted.
No.
They saw a prosthetic device affixed to the guy's face.
Because they feared what they did not understand simply because of it's appearance, and in addition, despite documentation he carried for this purpose they assaulted him.
I don't know how much clearer this can be made that they feared him because of his appearance with prosthesis.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Obviously it can only go in 1 eye, as the pixels wouldn't match up perfectly 1:1 between the eyes so the user would be disoriented and have no depth perception
Don't underestimate the brain's power to figure out the distortion in sensory inputs and compensate for them. For example, there was that study where subjects wore mirrored glasses so that everything they saw was upside down -- within a day or two they didn't even notice (until they took the glasses off, anyway, at which point they had to re-adapt again).
A more likely reason to limit the procedure to one eye would be to avoid having to double the price to $120,000 for only minimal additional benefit.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.