Australian Scientists Create Bionic Eye Prototype

Bionic Vision Australia has developed the first prototype of a bionic eye that could restore rudimentary vision to blind people by 2013. But unlike the Six Million Dollar Man, recipients won't get to zoom in on evil plots from afar. Instead, the imagery the device currently produces is blocky and low-res at best. Still, anything is better than nothing, and probably beats seeing with your tongue as we reported earlier.
The bionic eye is comprised of several parts: a pair of glasses with a mounted camera, a processor, and the ocular implant. The glasses record footage and pass along the imagery to the processor seated in the user's pocket. The processor then sends the wireless data to the implant mounted against the user's retina. The implant thus stimulates the surviving retinal neurons electronically-- these neurons send the visual information to the brain.
"We anticipate that this retinal implant will provide users with increased mobility and independence, and that future versions of the implant will eventually allow recipients to recognize faces and read large print," said Professor Anthony Burkitt, Research Director of Bionic Vision Australia and Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne.
Gizmag expands on the story and details how the entire process works. The site reports that the overall problem is not in getting the signal to the brain, but to improve the resolution and detail of that signal. While the advanced first prototype can produce rough imagery for unaided navigation, the group wants to fine-tune the technology so that face and emotion recognition is a possibility in the next prototype-- 20/80 vision at the very least-- in 2013.