Bionic eye a reality

Close your eyes and walk around a room where children have been playing, or put on a blindfold and try to imagine why you find your partner so beautiful, or put a cardboard box over your head and cross the road. Now imagine that's how you lived your life everyday, but someone just told you a pair of glasses had been  invented that would help you see for the first time. Well that just happened, with the unveiling of the prototype of the world's first bionic eye.

If successful, the bionic eye has the potential to help over 85 per cent of those people classified as legally blind. It is hoped the device, which involves a microchip implanted in the skull and a digital camera attached to a pair of glasses, will allow recipients to see the outlines of their surroundings.

It is a team of Australian industrial designers and scientists who have brought the bionic eye to the world, and with trials beginning next year, Professor Mark Armstrong from Monash University in Victoria says the bionic eye should give recipients a degree of extra mobility.

"There's a camera at the front and the camera is actually very similar to an iPhone camera, so it takes live action for colour and then that imagery is distilled via a very sophisticated processor down to, let's say, a distilled signal."

"That signal is then transmitted wirelessly from what's called a coil, which is mounted at the back of the head and inside the brain there is an implant which consists of a series of little ceramic tiles and in each tile are microscopic electrodes which actually are embedded in the visual cortex of the brain."

Professor Armstrong says is it is hoped the technology will help those who completely blind, enabling them to navigate their way around.

"There's a number of different settings ... so you could set it to floor mapping for example and it creates a silhouette around objects on the floor so that you can see where you're going."

Johnny Diesel said "You never miss your water 'til your dry," and for people who have never been able to see, they've been dry for a long time, so Professor Armstrong believes the bionic eye might help people experience things in a completely new way.

"What we believe the recipient will see is a sort of a low resolution dot image, but enough... [to] see, for example, the edge of a table or the silhouette of a loved one or a step into the gutter or something like that," he said.

"So the wonderful thing, if our interpretation of this is correct - because we don't know until the first human trial - [is] it'll of course enable people that are blind to be reconnected with their world in a way."

How does the bionic eye work?

- A digital camera embedded in the glasses will capture images.

- An eye movement sensor inside the glasses will direct the camera as you turn your head.

- Digital processors will modify the images captured by the camera.

- A wireless transmitter will then present the image that you are "looking at" to a chip that has been implanted at the back of the brain.

- The chip will then directly stimulate the visual cortex of the brain with electrical signals using an array of micro-sized electrodes.

- The brain will learn to interpret these signals as sight.