cww.blog!

The feline eye has a very similar structure to that of the human eye, which has allowed researchers to experiment with bionic implants on cats with failing sight. The blindness is probably a condition induced in the laboratory, but my opinions on that are more appropriate for a night at the pub, not a blog entry. Regardless, the bionic eyes use an array of 5,000 microphotodiodes (which should give about an image with pixel dimensions of about 70x70) to provide the cat with an image it would not otherwise be able to see. This seems like a really cool application of microtechnology, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to the future of this device.

Stock photo courtesy absenseNow, let's take this idea and extend it a little further. A tiny, fancy camera in your eye could do a lot of things, after all.

First, let's improve the number of photodiodes we can put on the surface of the chip to, say, 1,000,000. That gives us a 1 mega-pixel image. What can you do with an image in the mega-pixel regime? Well, you can zoom into it, for one thing, and that would give the user the ability to see things really far away. You can also filter out natural light and view only the infrared part of the spectrum picked up by the photodiodes, which would give the user the ability to sense heat. What about using terahertz photodiodes in addition to visible light photodiodes? Then, the user could see through walls! Well, they would have to be thin walls, but they would be walls just the same. All this, without even changing the basic idea behind the device.

The military currently uses nifty but bulky binoculars to provide these functions to its troops, so wouldn't it be a vast improvement if they could just implant the binoculars into the troops' eyes? Well, that's where I see this going, and I think that's pretty neat.