Photovoltaic Eye Implant Could Give Sight To the Blind 15
MikeChino writes with this snippet from Inhabitat: "Researchers at Stanford University recently announced that they have developed a new artificial retina implant that uses photovoltaic power and could help the blind see. The problem with previous implants was that there was no way send power to the chip in order to process light and data inside the eye, so the new device uses miniature photovoltaic cells to provide power the chip as well as to transmit data through the eye to the brain. The new device has great promise to help people afflicted by the loss of photoreceptor cells by using the power of the sun."
Re:Chip? Why? (Score:3, Informative)
The eye certainly doesn't have any processors of any sort in there.
It has a detector and some wiring in to the brain.
wrong. the retina does a lot of quite useful processing on the image before sending quite high-level data to the brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina#Spatial_Encoding [wikipedia.org]
there are lots of hard-to-explain cases where somebody can see perfectly; but can't detect movement, or where can't recognize the border between shapes, and therefore is unable to make sense of what sees, etc.