Saturday, February 17, 2007

The blind shall see

Here's something else exciting: researchers have developed a bionic eye for the blind. So far it's a bit crude, but very promising:

“They can differentiate between a cup, a plate and a knife. They can see motion. They can avoid stumbling around into large objects. That is just with 16 electrodes, and we’re now going up to 60. The models suggest 1,000 will be enough for face recognition, and we hope to get there in five to seven years.”

I have to say that I find things like this to be amazing. Robert Wilson used to write these lists of trends that scared him and trends that gave him hope- recently there have been many medical advances that give me hope.

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