A device to restore vision to the blind is being prepared for clinical trials
monash.edu
monash.edu
Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier.
It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.
For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia.
My paediatrician failed to diagnose congenital hyperopia which resulted in amblyopia by the age of five. After a couple of years of eyepatches I was told my vision in the affected eye would never improve. My ophthalmologist explained that past the age of five the brain doesn't have the neuroplasticity to "learn to see" with the amblyopic eye.
To describe the condition, it feels as though the affected eye sees in very low resolution. I was somehow able to know what word I'm looking at after staring at it for a couple of seconds, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't tell individual letters apart.
At university, when my nonamblyopic eye got overstrained, I would patch it and use the amblyopic eye with the aid of software screen magnification. A couple of years later I realized that my formerly amblyopic eye suddenly sees almost as well as the nonamblyopic one. I suspect the fact that my amblyopic eye was unwittingly overprescribed by 1 diopter might have played a role by giving it an advantage for reading even when not using an eyepatch.
My left vision was as you described, very low-resolution and dark, with the addition of a large dark spot near the middle. I read with my right eye, though it felt like a little bit of the left was integrated. This led to eye strain, especially after I got into software and spent 8-10 hours a day staring at tiny text on a screen.
I had the lens with the cataract removed at 26, and while it was initially fascinating to have brighter vision and be able to make out large print words, I eventually felt kind of disappointed that I didn't have a better result. My vision was still very blurry (significantly worse than the right eye), and since the artificial lens I received can't flex to focus like a real lens, glasses only correct for a single fixed distance, and text had a weird shimmer to it that made it very difficult to read when my brain integrated the two images. So I mostly stopped wearing glasses and went back to reading with my right eye.
But I recently had a series of headaches due to eyestrain, got a new reading prescription that was better than the old one, and have been wearing glasses any time I read or look at a monitor. And until you mentioned it, I hadn't really realized that the "shimmer" is almost gone, and my left vision is much better than at any other point in my life. Cool!
Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.
It was a catastrophe. His brain was like an untrained neural net - the input was there, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He described it as seeing an undifferentiated field of color, where he couldn’t distinguish objects. Blind, he was able to confidently live his life and get around his city (I believe NY but no promises). Sighted, he was terrified to cross the street.
On the other hand, I figure that if there’s a concern that laymen immediately raise, medical researchers are well aware of it as well. If they’re going forward, there’s a reason.
Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light
Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.
If anyone is interested, the title is "To see and not see", and comes from this collection: https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/anthropolo...
Paywalled here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not...
Short excerpt: http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf
Love seeing new research in this space but the science is nowhere near ready. Neuralink type stuff and other bleeding edge tech gets us like 5% of the to making this kind of thing practical for everyday life. By all means make it rain on researchers doing this stuff but don't expect miracles. The human vision system is incredible and we barely know how it works let alone how to imitate its functions. Fund basic research!!
Every few years since then -- and seriously, it's happened at least 10 times now -- I've seen something similar announced as though it's a major breakthrough. I don't understand what's going on. Are each of these announcements -- and that 1991 film itself -- merely aspirational bullshit, which never really come off as planned? Or do they each represent distinct branches of research whose apparent similarity is merely a function of my layman's understanding?
> Dobelle's first prototype was implanted into "Jerry", a man blinded in adulthood, in 1978. A single-array BCI containing 68 electrodes was implanted onto Jerry's visual cortex and succeeded in producing phosphenes, the sensation of seeing light. The system included cameras mounted on glasses to send signals to the implant. Initially, the implant allowed Jerry to see shades of grey in a limited field of vision at a low frame-rate. This also required him to be hooked up to a mainframe computer, but shrinking electronics and faster computers made his artificial eye more portable and now enable him to perform simple tasks unassisted.[46]
> In 2002, Jens Naumann, also blinded in adulthood, became the first in a series of 16 paying patients to receive Dobelle's second generation implant, marking one of the earliest commercial uses of BCIs. The second generation device used a more sophisticated implant enabling better mapping of phosphenes into coherent vision. Phosphenes are spread out across the visual field in what researchers call "the starry-night effect". Immediately after his implant, Jens was able to use his imperfectly restored vision to drive an automobile slowly around the parking area of the research institute.[citation needed] Unfortunately, Dobelle died in 2004[47] before his processes and developments were documented. Subsequently, when Mr. Naumann and the other patients in the program began having problems with their vision, there was no relief and they eventually lost their "sight" again. Naumann wrote about his experience with Dobelle's work in Search for Paradise: A Patient's Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment[48] and has returned to his farm in Southeast Ontario, Canada, to resume his normal activities.[49]
Does that mean a total of 172 "pixels" of resolution? Like 12x14(ish)? I suppose that's better than complete darkness, but...
In the bottom plot here, https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi , one can readily determine that it is very cloudy here in Seattle today, and that yesterday was cloudy in the morning and partly-cloudy/clear through the rest of the day.
To test this out, assuming that you are sighted, try navigating an exterior-windowed room with your eyelids closed on a bright day, then try doing the same with a true blindfold. I suspect the former will be far preferable.
And more efficient solar cells
And enamel reconstruction
...
The article is really light on details - I'd love to see an image of how the world looks to the owner of such a device.
* though it might be the first to work for those with optic nerve damage, or with this pathway
According to the paper Neuralink published last year[1], Neuralink's system has 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. The threads are flexible and 4 to 6 micrometer wide, and are inserted individually by a robot that avoids hitting blood vessels.
Edit: no, the real reason why the Neuralink could not be used here, and the answer to the previous comment asking for the difference between the devices, is simply that the Neuralink is, for now at least, purely a sensor, whereas the aim with this vision-restoring device is to stimulate the cortex (so that would require different currents, electrodes, battery life, etc), which the Neuralink cannot do (in its current version).