Bionic 'Eyes' Could Hit the 'Net in 2009

Amid speculation about technology growth areas for 2009, it seems to me that enhanced eyesight is one to watch.

To start with, in 2009 video and graphics displays will become available in glasses and contact lenses.

The progress in eyewear reflects the development of video graphics that offer better-than-human views of worlds both virtual and real. About 60 million polygons or triangles per second is video "reality" for human beings; human perception does not allow us more detail than that without being augmented by something like a microscope. The displays in current gaming systems greatly exceed that level. 

There will also be considerable progress on the creation of artificial eyes; the artificial mouth, nose, and ear are not far behind. Indeed, the cyborgian evolution of humans will continue in earnest in 2009. 

Case in point: San Francisco multi-disciplinary artist and producer Tanya Vlach, having lost one of her real eyes in a car accident three years ago, recently posted a "call for engineers" to help her soup up her existing artificial eye so that it could function as a highly versatile digital video camera for whole life recording. 

The eye-camera's specified features would include Bluetooth, a remote trigger, and even blink-responsive sensors for functions such as focusing and zoom. Vlach anticipates this mini-camera implant -- less than 1 sq cm in size -- enabling her to live what she calls "an experiment in wearable technology, cybernetics, and perception."

In contrast, existing retinal implants developed by Second Sight Medical Products Inc. provide rudimentary sight by direct input to the retina. Patients wear spectacles with miniature video cameras that transmit signals to a 4-mm-by-5-mm retinal implant via a wireless receiver embedded behind the ear.

The device works by transmitting visual signals captured by the video camera to the retinal implant, which contains an array of 16 electrodes. The signal is then recreated by stimulating the remaining healthy retinal cells with the electrodes, which pass on the information to the brain through the optic nerve.

Impulses in existing retinal implants are seen as points of light and full images are not formed, but one can imagine it is just a matter of time before there is a dramatic improvement in image quality. All that is needed is to figure out how to have a large number of closely spaced individual connections, something the body does routinely but technology has not yet mastered at the device level.

The human retina contains about 120 million rod cells and 6 million cone cells, so limiting a human retinal implant to 100 connections or less seems ridiculously low. Figuring out how to reproduce in an implant the very large number of individual sensing cell connections in the normal retina will be an important step in technology evolution.

When this point is reached, it will be possible to both replace sight and also to stream the output from the implant to the Internet, thus combining both the documentary and sight-replacing focuses of research in this area. It will not only change the way human beings function, it will also change the way they tell stories!