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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

How much longer until I can implant a camcorder in my eye and think about taking a video, having it take a video, then watching it again whenever I want?

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As a doctor who has seen implants, long-standing implants, get infected, let me urge you to never, ever want this.

"Ever" is too broad. What about a genetically engineered, personally tailored biological implant? It may be in the distant future, but I'll guess it'll one day be possible.

I want a GPS, compass, infrared vision, gyroscopic (rotational sensors), accelerometers, optical zoom, be able to sense the frequency my cellphone is broadcasting on. I want to feel electrical and magnetic fields, be able to distinguish between every smell, have 360 degree radar/lidar, and optional echo location, temperature sensors, I want to be able to think http requests and sense the responses.

I want to be able to close my eyes, disconnect all of my 5-10 senses and plug them into a computer generated world where the rules are as I define them. So I could be lying in bed yet genuinely feel that I am running a marathon.

The ability to feel electrical/magnetic fields has been achieved by a couple of people.

http://wiki.bmezine.com/index.php/Magnetic_Implant

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

Of course it didn't go well in the long term, but it's a very interesting experiment. Here is the article about how it went wrong (contains some graphic imagery):

http://news.bmezine.com/2006/04/01/another-two-months-of-mag...

I was with you until the last sentence. I'd use it the other way: Have my body exercise while my mind goes on less painful pursuits.

It's all wishful thinking though. There are serious disadvantages to putting hardware in bodies. Upgrading or fixing broken implants would require surgery, which is risky and expensive.

There would almost certainly be huge implementation problems with such a device. Would the camera face straight out of your eye? If so, then the incredibly rapid eye movements would make for sickening video playback. I suspect even the jitters from walking (which your brain no doubt compensates for in real time) would all but ruin the video.

I would be more interested in a way to capture and interpret the raw visual information from the eye(s) before it gets processed by the brain. Perhaps the optic nerve would be an ideal spot to capture such information. I presume that there would also be great difficulties in this endeavor, not the least of which being the fact that everyone's individual "format" of visual information (the exact distribution of rods and cones, pathways of nerves, etc.) would likely be too different to make the production of digital circuitry feasible.

As long as we are on the topic of augmenting vision: how cool would it be to have an artificial tapetum lucidum?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapetum_lucidum

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