In future you may not even need eyes to see. Next year, a blind person in Australia will be the first to receive 鈥渂ionic eyes鈥� that bypass most of the visual system entirely. Instead, a camera mounted on a pair of glasses will feed information about the world directly to the brain.
The breakthrough should help restore vision in people without a working retina. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 need an eyeball at all,鈥� says at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, who is developing the bionic eye.
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The plan is to implant up to 11 small tiles, each loaded with 43 electrodes, into areas of the brain that deal with vision. When these areas are stimulated, people report seeing flashes of light. Lowery believes that each electrode could create a dot of light that is similar to seeing one pixel. In total, the tiles will provide around 500 pixels 鈥� enough to create a simple image. Although this resolution is far cruder than the 1 to 2 million pixel image a normal eye can produce, it should restore the basic elements of sight.
鈥淚f all goes to plan, the blind volunteers will wake up with a crude sense of vision鈥�
Images picked up by the camera will be sent to a pocket-sized processor worn by the user. This device will pull out the relevant parts of an image and send it to the tiles. 鈥淭he processor is like a cartoonist,鈥� says Lowery. 鈥淚t has to represent a complex situation with minimal information.鈥� A face could be recreated with just 10 dots, Lowery says. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 sound like much but there鈥檚 more information in that than you鈥檇 think.鈥� He recalls a blind receptionist who couldn鈥檛 tell if someone was coming or going, so never knew whether to say hello or goodbye. 鈥淚f there鈥檚 a dot moving away from you, you stop talking,鈥� he says.
The first volunteers will have recently lost their sight due to injury, as the device may not work for those blind since birth. If all goes to plan, the volunteers will wake up with a crude sense of vision, 鈥渓ike a John Logie Baird television from the 1920s鈥�, says Lowery.
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(Image: Tim Flach/Getty)
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淚 spy with my bionic eye鈥�
