Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
As cool as this is, though, I'm more interested in having them figure out more ways of restoring vision rather than augmenting it. For purely selfish reasons, I'm especially interested in retina replacement, which is being worked on (they've been able to create new retinas using embryonic stem cells), but I haven't heard of any studies having started yet to actually swap out damaged retinas with the new ones.
You can get by with only one eye, but you don't have any real depth perception and you don't get any benefits from 3D movies (although you still get all the downsides). Plus, although I would love to try laser surgery to improve my vision in my remaining "good" eye (if you can call needing -9.5 power lenses good), the risks are still too high given the consequences if something went wrong.
I often wonder if there isn't more I could be doing -- hanging out near research hospitals that have good retina teams, following research, anything -- to keep abreast of new developments or maybe even get in on some trials for new procedures.
I was a year and half when I had surgery to shorten one of the muscles for my bad eye - they thought it was just a lazy eye.
When I was 5 I used to have to wear a patch over my good eye for an hour a day because the doctors still thought my other eye was just lazy and that I could be "trained" to use it properly.
At 6 we traveled 4 hours to Seattle to see an eye specialist at a hospital. It was a full day affair and I had to spend most of the day in a dimly lit playroom because my eyes were kept dilated so they could take multiple pictures. This is when they actually figured out that there was more going on, and decided what parasite actually caused the damage (I still can't remember the name of it).
15 years ago I went to an eye doctor who took another picture of my eye. He wanted to show the image to others because he had never seen anything like it.
Even 5 years ago pictures of the eye usually meant dilating it and putting in a dye so they could get a clear image.
Today I can go get an eye exam and they don't even need to put dye in my eye to take a picture. --Other tests still need the dye, but at least I haven't had to have my eyes dilated for around 3 years. And, of course, the images are stored online so they can quickly load them up and compare them to make sure nothing has changed.
If this sort of progress continues, I figure there's a chance that they'll come up with something that can give me vision in both eyes before I'm too old for it to matter. :)
Ha, there are some benefits?
For me, it is the latest snake powder intended to boost sells in movie and high-end electronic devices industry. I tried just once but, as far as I can tell, it has no benefit, except being able to say I have seen a part of a 3D movie.
I hear someone saying "improved immersion".
Well, immersion is not a function of some "more realistic" rendering. I never played Minecraft but apparently many people get deeply immersed in this low-fi world. I personally get easily immersed in any B&W Hitchcock movie. Our ancestors got so immersed at theater that the actor playing the bad guy had to be protected after the play. In Chinese opera, the full "ride a horse" movement is a very slight move of the right leg, and if done well all the spectators will stand up and shout 好！好！
So no, immersion is not improved with 3D, it is improved with good actors and story.
Interestingly enough, Avatar did work in 3D for me (though the effect did seem to depend on how close I was to the screen - closer worked better). Its the only 3D movie that has worked, but admittedly I have not went to many since I figured its a waste of time if I can't see the effects anyway. I tried a 3D TV last year and it didn't work for me at all. Avatar did though and while I don't know if the effects made the movie more immersive or anything, they were certainly interesting. It was really the simplest effects that had the most impact: sparks, rain drops, clouds - stuff like that.
Making 2D movies into 3D seems completely pointless to me.
In particular, if the brain were infinitely plastic then you could just wire the output from a HD video camera to some random spot on the brain and wait for the brain to figure it out.
20 years later, as an adult, I had weekly vision therapy for close to 1 year (once a week). All the other patients where kids less than 10 y/o. Although it is considered very hard (or impossible) to correct amblyopia in adults (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopia#Treatments), my doctor was very open minded and we tried a lot of different exercises with more or less success.
I made some progress so the brain can learn some tricks. For example, I learned to switch my point of view from one eye to the other. I can also force my brain to see from both eyes at the same time though I then see double and the images are not aligned and the lazy eye's image is darker.
At the end, I stopped active therapy for two reasons. First, because I was scared that I would end up in a state where I would see double all the time and not be able to control it anymore. I know it is not very pragmatic but as talanvor said, I will not risk loosing my one good eye. Second, because it was becoming very expensive and the insurance was not ready to cover this kind of treatment for adults.
I guess it would mean no criminal outlaws or parole violators walking around, but for a common man to not be able to walk anywhere without everyone around him knowing everything there is to know about him....that's scary
Perhaps we'll start seeing new fashions arise as a result: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/03/cv-dazzle/
Perhaps a persistence-of-vision patterns that say "ANON" covering your face? http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/amazing-persi...
I can also see the casinos' utopia coming to fruition: those without the smarts to count cards, without the expertise to play properly, without all their electronics gadgets, coming to play^W empty their wallets into buckets owned by the casinos.
"The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. "
I'm a pretty rational person and I have no problem holding a cell phone up to my head, but this scares me.
Now you will have to look at that ad, even if you close your eyes.
I was thinking one way for people to afford them would be to accept ads. I would hate that, and I think I'd just wear glasses or normal contacts.
In fact I'd be much more attracted to this sort of thing in glasses, because they'd likely be cheaper, and glasses can probably support more functions. And you wouldn't have a radio receiver concentrating radio energy directly on your eyes.
Also this is a thing that goes in your body, and the FDA might have something to say about open source in that context. Is there any open source software running on pacemakers at the moment?
I think there are many more issues involved than simply "it's my hardware and I'll do what I want with it." If we get better eyeware through open source then great, but I'm skeptical at the moment that it can, much less will happen.
Actually, that's kind of my point more than yours. It isn't as simple as a knee-jerk "it must be closed source". You argued black and I argued not-black; not-black isn't "white", it's white and the greys, too.
New devices are much more locked down than they would have been a decade ago. That's not an accident or a fad.