Following up my Kurzweil Was Right post from the other day, The NYTimes today reports on an experiment testing whether electrodes implanted in the eye can restore sight.
No miracle cure, and it doesn’t work for glaucoma, the artificial retina produces the sensation of sight. It draws on cochlear implants for the deaf and is partly financed by a cochlear implant maker:
The project, involving patients in the United States, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one of science’s most-sought-after holy grails: making the blind see.
That goal long seemed out of reach because the visual system of the eye and the brain is so complex. But advances in technology, genetics, brain science and biology are making several approaches, both new and long-studied, more viable. Some, including the artificial retina, are already producing results. […]
With the artificial retina, a sheet of electrodes is implanted in the eye. The person wears glasses with a tiny camera, which captures images that the belt-pack video processor translates into patterns of light and dark, like the “pixelized image we see on a stadium scoreboard,” said Jessy D. Dorn, a research scientist at Second Sight Medical Products, which produces the device, collaborating with the Department of Energy. (Other research teams are developing similar devices.)
The video processor directs each electrode to transmit signals representing an object’s contours, brightness and contrast, which pulse along optic neurons into the brain.