[Caution: video is slightly graphic. Also, Postal Service warning]
It seems like everybody’s trying to replace their eyes these days. However, it’s important to distinguish an in-eye camera from a vision substitution system. This Canadian filmmaker, along with this lady, are trying to make what amounts to an eye-mounted camera, while others (in the medical field) are trying to create an interface with the retina or the brain’s visual system. Guess which is harder? Well, to be honest, they’re both pretty difficult, especially when you’ve got no budget.
The project has had mixed success so far (as you can see in the video) but every bit of work done in this area contributes to the whole. The stumbling blocks of one project are stepping stones for the next, so maybe it won’t be too long before you get your eye replaced just for kicks.
That’s a really well made mini-documentary, even if the ingenuity it covers is a work in progress. Nice editing and so on. It’s cool to experience the inventive process. I must admit, though, that I missed hearing a deep voice pronounce the “Oh Yeah” of the “Back to the drawing board” title, a missed opportunity perhaps. Moving on, this story, although it involves a camera verses a vision system, follows nicely on the news story I just watched minutes earlier about a retina-attached vision system that has restored a degree of sight to the user. That story speculated that, someday, it might also be possible for an artificial retina to be developed with greater performance than the human retina. Anyway, cameras and retina-attached systems obviously overlap, and, throw in a recording method, and that might be the best of all worlds (until we discover that the brain is already recording much of what we see and we develop technology to “read” it back someday). In the meantime, good luck with “hacking” the human eye (no offense) and keep up the community spirit. Perhaps you should put Ben Heckendorn on stand-by for any needed case-mods; he also does videos/movies.
It’s good to see roadblocks in a documentary. Keep up the coverage and good efforts and they’ll eventually pay off.