© 2005 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
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This article is marked as 'retired'. The information here may be out of date, incomplete, and/or incorrect.
In 2002 researchers in Austraila announced the creation of a bionic eye. That model required the user to wear a pair of spectacles with a camera that would transmit signals to a retinal implant that was made up of an array of 16 eletrodes. The results were as expected with those trials. The image resolution was 10×10, and allowed the user to know if their surroundings were dark or light, and detect some movement.
2003 saw 3 people in the US fitted with a bionic eye.
Now the newer model is fit to be tested. It is the same basic device, but instead of the handful of electrodes that allow 10×10, the upgrade has 50 to 100 electrode sensors. It still won’t provide normal vision, but as said by Professor Dagnelie:
“To us, the images look very basic but for someone who was previously blind they are a massive step forward.”
Old article describing model with 10×10 resolution.
2005 Article
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Is it just me or does 10 x 10 feel like way too little after worrying about monitor resolutions?
With a little improvement on the resolution, the world will look like “Gunfighter” on the Atari 2600.
This is wonderful…Soon every blind person will be wearing hair clips over their eyes!!!
Am I missing something? How is 50-100 electrodes better than 10×10? 10×10 =100.
My guess is that one pixel != one electrode, especially since it says the original 10×10 resolution was using only “a handful of electrodes”
The Article said: “…required the the user to wear …”
Sorry, couldn’t help it.
rp2 said: “Sorry, couldn’t help it.”
wow, I must be really sick i always get the dirty jokes right away lmao XD
Arby said: “Am I missing something? How is 50-100 electrodes better than 10×10? 10×10 =100.”
I was about to comment on the same thing – but instead I re-read the article and saw that the original is 16 electrodes providing the 10 x 10 display. So if you increase the number of electrodes by a multiple of 3-5, you should see quite an improvement in the resolution. That’s probably a jump similar to going from Atari 2600 to VGA.
rp2 said: “Sorry, couldn’t help it.”
Umm… I don’t get it.
‘the the’ was originally written in the article
Enter your reply text here. ok
How about the Odessy.
How be that a dirty joke? Forget it.
I’m afraid I don’t have refernece for this but maybe someone else does.
Anyway I heard that they can now cure blindness in one eye (so long as the other (eye) is ok)
something to do with re growing the stem cells of the retina from the good eye in the blind one.
Amazing eh, will humans one day end up living for 100’s of years? I truly hope this will happen within my lifetime….would love to see what the future brings.