Via BB, Kevin Kelly writes:
This is Tanya Vlach’s new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam. You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.
8 thoughts on “Help make a webcam eye”
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thats a good idea!
This is so beyond awesome. While a difficult task, it is at first blush very feasible with existing technologies, needing only some research and tinkering into the specific application.
It is a shame that medical technology is just not up to any form of functional neurological interfacing of the camera into restoring her vision in that eye, but the video recording part alone is just way cool in and of itself and well worthy of some looking into though.
I can see fitting a small camera inside the eye, but how would you go about replacing batteries? I don’t imagine that any glass eye which could be opened would be smooth enough to be comfortable to wear. Also, how do you plan on getting the video stream to somewhere that you can process/encode it? Wirelessly, no doubt, but (and IANADoctor) I’d be a little nervous about having an RF transceiver INSIDE my skull.
Wrap a coil in the eye and inductivly charge a battery. Depending on the proximity she could wear glasses with a coil around that eye and charge in place when needed. Or drop it onto a charging station.
Charging in place will reduce the need for batteries opening up space for other hardware. like a transmitter.