my favorite feature is superplonk. it remixes the environment and filters annoying persons, objects and sounds. that’s an augmented reality version of what i practice today with special earplugs. but soon that should be possible with modified hearing devices and slim head mounted displays. one experiment in my ongoing surveillance series simulates superplonk with images of network cameras. via motion detection i am reconstructing a place’s image without people and cars. all moving objects are becoming ghosts. only people and cars who are standing still are becoming visible.
Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. “Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside. This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”
2008-01-24: I am really impressed. I only learned about this last week myself. Either I am becoming mainstream or the Economist has a very good nose of what is going on 🙂
Contact lenses are good at correcting vision. That, however, is not enough for Babak Parviz. Dr Parviz wants to get them to provide information, too. His model is the “head-up” displays of useful information on the windscreens of aircraft. Putting such displays into lenses might be valuable for both soldiers and civilians, but shrinking the technology to the point where it could be done has proved hard. Dr Parviz revealed that he was getting close.
A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser – the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists – is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair.
The tiny Bionic Lens would be inserted into the eye during an 8-minute surgery where the patient’s sight would be corrected instantly
Future Bionic lens could also include projection systems that will give the user capabilities of projecting their phone screen, or integrating NASA technologies to allow for better focusing resolution than anything seen before, or even installing a system that allows for slow drug delivery inside the eye.
Our research allows us to bypass the damaged light-sensitive cells and stimulate the pathways that lead to the brain with tiny bursts of electricity. We send electrical impulses to specific locations within the eye. A spot of light is perceived and patterns can be formed. If we are successful in our research, this pattern vision can give blind people sight again.
In genetic diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, abnormalities in the layer of photoreceptors in the retina ultimately lead to their death. With the photoreceptors lost, light signals can no longer be translated to electrical signals, resulting in blindness. While the photoreceptors are lost in retinitis pigmentosa, the RGCs — and other cells in the retina — remain intact. The brain can still decode light signals. The idea behind the Science Eye is to modify these RGCs to become photoreceptive so they can be stimulated, by light, and send those signals to the brain.
Imagine a Science Eye implanted in a person with perfect vision. It might stimulate the brain in such a way that the person sees specific images or places, via fine control of the RGCs. You could see and interact with an entire world that isn’t there. It’s kind of like plugging in to a simulation, a virtual world plugged directly in to your eye. Alter the brain, alter reality.
In addition to street scenes, indexing can be applied to other image sets. In one implementation, a store (e.g., a grocery store or hardware store) is indexed. Images of items within the store are captured, for example, using a small motorized vehicle or robot. The aisles of the store are traversed and images of products are captured in a similar manner as discussed above. Additionally, as discussed above, location information is associated with each image. Text is extracted from the product images. In particular, extracted text can be filtered using a product name database in order to focus character recognition results on product names.
A soldier would wear the lenses and a magnetic sensor attached to the side of his or her head. The sensor picks up any changes in the local magnetic field and works out how the wearer’s eyes are moving.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 