Eye

Fans of the original film in the Terminator franchise will recall how various bits of data were shown to be overlaid on the cyborg's vision - in particular, they might remember the list of possible responses that could be used when someone was angrily knocking on its door (for those who don't remember, its chosen response wasn't very polite). Such augmented vision systems are now a little closer to reality, thanks to work being done by a team of scientists at the University of Washington and Aalto University, in Finland. They have created a contact lens that displays information, which is visible to the wearer. Read More

By now, many readers are probably familiar with the da Vinci robotic surgery system. It allows a seated surgeon, using a 3D display and hand controls, to operate on a patient using robotic arms equipped with surgical instruments. Not only does the system allow for more laparoscopic surgery (in which surgical instruments access the inside of the patient’s body through small incisions, instead of one large opening), but it even makes it possible for the surgeon and the patient to be in separate geographical locations. Now, a researcher at the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology has developed a similar system, designed specifically for operations on the eye. Read More

When he was nine years old, Toronto film-maker Rob Spence received a severe injury to his right eye in a shotgun accident. After a period of hiding the aftermath under an eyepatch, six years ago he had the eye replaced with a prosthesis. Being a visual artist, however, he had an idea - instead of just an unseeing artificial eye, he wanted one that could capture images of what he was looking at, and wirelessly transmit them to an external recording device. He himself wouldn't be able to see through the eye, but the footage obtained from it could take film-making to new levels. It's been a few years since Spence began his Eyeborg Project, but he has just announced that the eye is now functioning. Read More

No, it's not just you. According to studies recently conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, the viewing of stereoscopic 3D displays does indeed cause visual discomfort, fatigue and headaches. The problem appears to come from the fact that the viewers' eyes are simultaneously trying to focus on the screen, and on objects that appear to be located either in front of or behind that screen. Read More

What do trees, rivers, clouds and neurons have in common? They're all examples of fractals, or irregularly-shaped objects in which any one component is the same shape as the whole – a tributary of a river, for instance, looks like a miniature river itself. Electronic chips are not fractals, yet some researchers are trying to restore sight to the blind by attaching such chips to the eye's neurons. Given that neurons are fractals, wouldn't it work better to hook them up to other fractal structures? University of Oregon researcher Richard Taylor thinks so, which is why he's developing metal "nanoflowers." Read More

If you suffer from hyperopia, more commonly known as farsightedness or longsightedness, you may be interested to know that the world's first contact lens to correct the condition has been developed. The correction, however, is temporary – a custom-made lens is worn overnight to reshape the cornea, and when the patient wakes up and removes the lens they have perfect vision for the day. Read More

The Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo has recently developed and demonstrated a peculiar pair of headphones that can precisely detect a user's eye movements without a camera, and use those movements to control electronic devices such as mobile phones and portable music players. DoCoMo started working on this idea back in 2008 by adapting an electrooculogram (EOG), a medical device used for measuring eye response, to their purposes. An EOG works on the principle that the human cornea has a positive electrical charge. As the user looks to the left or right, the charge shifts in the space between the user's ears – a change that can be easily detected by appropriate sensors. Read More

A study made public this Wednesday has shown that biosynthetic corneas can and do restore eyesight in humans. Researchers from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa in Canada, along with Linköping University in Sweden, conducted a clinical trial using ten Swedish patients with advanced keratoconus or central corneal scarring. Each patient had the damaged corneal tissue in one eye surgically replaced with a biosynthetic cornea made from synthetically cross-linked recombinant human collagen. After two years, six of the patients’ vision had improved. After being fitted with contact lenses, their vision was comparable to that of someone who had received a real human cornea transplant. Read More

We all know that we shouldn’t make fun of people with glasses, but now it appears that bugs with bifocals deserve our respect too. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati (UC) have discovered that the larvae of the sunburst diving beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus) have bifocal eyes. As far as they are aware, this is the first known example of truly bifocal lenses in the animal kingdom. Previously, only prehistoric trilobites were suspected of having had bifocal vision. Besides being a big hairy deal in the bug world, this news could also have implications for human technology. Read More