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Neuroprosthetic Projects Words Directly Onto Retina
Researchers have successfully implanted a neuroprosthetic device onto a human being's retina, allowing him to read four-letter words accurately. The Argus II device has been implanted in more than 50 people, many of who can now see color, movement and objects.
(Grid of electrons implanted on the retina)
It uses a small camera mounted on a pair of glasses, a portable processor to translate the signal from the camera into electrical stimulation, and a microchip with electrodes implanted directly on the retina. The study was authored by researchers at Second Sight, the company who developed the device..."In this clinical test with a single blind patient, we bypassed the camera that is the usual input for the implant and directly stimulated the retina. Instead of feeling the braille on the tips of his fingers, the patient could see the patterns we projected and then read individual letters in less than a second with up to 89% accuracy," explains researcher Thomas Lauritzen, lead author of the paper.
Similar in concept to successful cochlear implants, the visual implant uses a grid of 60 electrodes—attached to the retina—to stimulate patterns directly onto the nerve cells. For this study, the researchers at Second Sight used a computer to stimulate six of these points on the grid to project the braille letters. A series of tests were conducted with single letters as well as words ranging in length from two letters up to four. The patient was shown each letter for half a second and had up to 80% accuracy for short words.
"There was no input except the electrode stimulation and the patient recognized the braille letters easily. This proves that the patient has good spatial resolution because he could easily distinguish between signals on different, individual electrodes." says Lauritzen.
The first time I read about this idea was in an sf novel many years ago. Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth wrote about this idea more than half a century ago in their satiric 1952 novel The Space Merchants.
...soon we'll be testing a system that projects directly on the retina of the eye...
(Read more about retinal projector)
There is also a mention of this item in Peter Watts' Starfish:
She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks...The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across [one's] retinas.
Via Eurekalert.
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