Computer Chips Bringing Eyesight To The Blind
“The surgery wasn’t easy. The chip sits at the end of a long steel tube, which had to be threaded through a hole behind the ear. After that, the surgeons had to remove a lot of the vitreous jelly in the front of the eye to work on the deeper layers, and they had to detach a small part of the retina to guide the chip into place.”
— That’s funny. I would have thought that inserting a millimeters-wide computer chip affixed with 1,500 diodes that convert light to an electric current into someone’s eye would be easy. And then you just hook-up the diodes directly to the person’s bipolar cells. Doesn’t sound that difficult, does it? But seriously, once you get past the, “Eww, vitreous jelly” factor, this is truly miraculous. Crazily, the three formerly blind, now bionically-sighted humans who have had the chips implanted can see infra-red light. Which, y’know, other people can’t see. So they’re like the Six Million Dollar Man. Or, maybe, Rowdy Rodder Piper with his special sunglasses.