OT: Hardware-to-Organism Interfaces (h2oi)

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by Puke:
in unrelated news, there is also some fierce competition between companies developing ocular implants to restore sight to the blind. some of them tap directly into the occular nerve, and the one that has gotten the most press coverage is able to deliver a 100 pixel (10x10 field of dots) display, enough to enable the subject to destinguish shapes, or read very large block lettering.

Drat, foiled again!

I thought about making artificial eyes for the blind. Those would need to be wired to intact ocular nerves, and in theory at least should be possible. I had considered making a higher density of photoreceptors to give the recipient eagle-vision (since the smallest CCD cells can now be made the size of a human cone cell,) but realized that human brains probably weren't even "wired" for any more cones and rods than were already in place. So an additional circuit to handle the additional information from the photoreceptors might be needed before interfacing with the brain. I say might because the hypothesized "vision area" of the human brain is huge. It might be capable of more than I think. What such a pre-brain vision circuit could do for example would be to filter and focus a part of the picture and in effect allow the recipient to zoom in and out on a part of the image that his or her brain is able to handle at once (I would think this could be wired to the nerves that now control the lenses in functioning human eyes, with actual focusing done automatically in the prosthetic eye.) The circuit could also quite easily be made to record the full video information in such a way that it could be read out into a computer or video system. Spy of the future?