For about $30,000 the blind can get a bionic eye implant capable of sending a 60 pixel image of the world around them directly to their brain. The implant is currently being tested on people, with better than expected results. Researchers attribute this success to the ability of the brain to fill in the gaps of the visual information they are receiving. The technology was developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of California. Unfortunately information on how the device works is not easily available from their website, so here's the Guardian article about the implant. The basic idea, however, seems as basic as one might think, although implementation is still amazing -- images are captured using a camera, those images are sent to an implanted chip, the chip sends those images to nerves in the eye responsible for vision, and the brain does the rest. The amazing part of the implementation, in my opinion is hooking the outputs from the chip to the nerves responsible for vision. Such a feat is not limited to this ocular implant, it has also been done for projects such as the bionic-arm.

In the future, they are hoping to increase the resolution of the image and one day produce implants that improve normal human vision.

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