Many people who are blind since birth (including myself) are pretty skeptical of such technologies. There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. An adult brain just can't make sense of those impulses.
Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier.
It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.
> There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five.
For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia.
My paediatrician failed to diagnose congenital hyperopia which resulted in amblyopia by the age of five. After a couple of years of eyepatches I was told my vision in the affected eye would never improve. My ophthalmologist explained that past the age of five the brain doesn't have the neuroplasticity to "learn to see" with the amblyopic eye.
To describe the condition, it feels as though the affected eye sees in very low resolution. I was somehow able to know what word I'm looking at after staring at it for a couple of seconds, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't tell individual letters apart.
At university, when my nonamblyopic eye got overstrained, I would patch it and use the amblyopic eye with the aid of software screen magnification. A couple of years later I realized that my formerly amblyopic eye suddenly sees almost as well as the nonamblyopic one. I suspect the fact that my amblyopic eye was unwittingly overprescribed by 1 diopter might have played a role by giving it an advantage for reading even when not using an eyepatch.
That's fascinating, and somewhat similar to my own experience. I was born with a large, central vision-obscuring cataract (or developed it very early on) in my left eye, and my optometrist told my parents not to worry about it, so they didn't.
My left vision was as you described, very low-resolution and dark, with the addition of a large dark spot near the middle. I read with my right eye, though it felt like a little bit of the left was integrated. This led to eye strain, especially after I got into software and spent 8-10 hours a day staring at tiny text on a screen.
I had the lens with the cataract removed at 26, and while it was initially fascinating to have brighter vision and be able to make out large print words, I eventually felt kind of disappointed that I didn't have a better result. My vision was still very blurry (significantly worse than the right eye), and since the artificial lens I received can't flex to focus like a real lens, glasses only correct for a single fixed distance, and text had a weird shimmer to it that made it very difficult to read when my brain integrated the two images. So I mostly stopped wearing glasses and went back to reading with my right eye.
But I recently had a series of headaches due to eyestrain, got a new reading prescription that was better than the old one, and have been wearing glasses any time I read or look at a monitor. And until you mentioned it, I hadn't really realized that the "shimmer" is almost gone, and my left vision is much better than at any other point in my life. Cool!
I wonder if wearing an eye patch over your good eye for a week or two would help the left eye develop new neural pathways and strengthen its ability to see.
Maybe having sight in one eye means your brain already "knows" how to process it, and just needs to learn to redirect the input from the other eye to the visual processing center somehow?
Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.
I'm not an expert, but it certainly gave the amblyopic eye an advantage for close range which is where the nonamblyopic eye was struggling after a day of study/work. The base value in my calculation is a regular prescription, so adding one diopter would put it in the area of a reading glasses prescription.
I understand your skepticism, and possibly a reluctance to be drawn in by false hope. It might well be very limited and very poor in the beginning. But I think it's very much worth seeing what can be accomplished and how much we can improve on it. It's early days for this kind of intervention.
We are continuously amazed at neuroplasticity so, possibly, sight maybe useless for a while after gaining it but with everything we know about the brain one single aspect persists through all topics: the brain adapts.
Sorry to say I can’t recall enough details to find a source, but I read an article once about a man who had been blind since birth, but as an adult was able to have his vision restored surgically.
It was a catastrophe. His brain was like an untrained neural net - the input was there, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He described it as seeing an undifferentiated field of color, where he couldn’t distinguish objects. Blind, he was able to confidently live his life and get around his city (I believe NY but no promises). Sighted, he was terrified to cross the street.
On the other hand, I figure that if there’s a concern that laymen immediately raise, medical researchers are well aware of it as well. If they’re going forward, there’s a reason.
Another guess waiting for authoritative source: it could possibly be applied when talking about the quality of a braille pattern (assuming that's something one does) :)
Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
I’m not blind and don’t personally know any blind people but I can imagine that blind people have heard of television at this point and the more curious among them have familiarized themselves with the technical implementation. Therefore a blind person understanding what resolution means shouldn’t necessarily be surprising.
Exactly, there is also the consideration of the type of blindness. Retinal blindness is very common due to injuries and conditions like diabetes, and a retinal implant connecting to an otherwise functional visual pathway is probably the easiest case to solve for.
For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.
Oliver Sacks wrote about a man who was born sighted but lost his sight due to cataracts at a very young age. 50 years later he had surgery and "regained" his sight, but found the world very difficult to navigate using vision, and he could not make any sense of things like TV images. It's an interesting story.
This is an interesting area of research but I'm skeptical of any world first claims. I remember a camera going to a visual area implant like... 15 years ago? And the guy got something like a hundred pixels. Not super practical but he could see things crossing his field of vision, locate certain shapes reliably etc. For a blind person that can be life changing for sure but it was a short term thing and a prototype.
Love seeing new research in this space but the science is nowhere near ready. Neuralink type stuff and other bleeding edge tech gets us like 5% of the to making this kind of thing practical for everyday life. By all means make it rain on researchers doing this stuff but don't expect miracles. The human vision system is incredible and we barely know how it works let alone how to imitate its functions. Fund basic research!!
It's not the first example; I can find other things reported from this year to a decade back, but in those cases, they were wiring into the retina, rather than later in the visual system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis)
I recall watching a film about an 8x8 matrix of electrodes being inserted in the gap between the two hemispheres, just above the occipital lobe, producing 64 pixels worth of vision. The recipient had what looked like a DIN socket in the side of his head. I saw this film in a psychology 101 class at a community college, so it couldn't have been top-secret bleeding-edge research or anything. The year was 1991.
Every few years since then -- and seriously, it's happened at least 10 times now -- I've seen something similar announced as though it's a major breakthrough. I don't understand what's going on. Are each of these announcements -- and that 1991 film itself -- merely aspirational bullshit, which never really come off as planned? Or do they each represent distinct branches of research whose apparent similarity is merely a function of my layman's understanding?
> Dobelle's first prototype was implanted into "Jerry", a man blinded in adulthood, in 1978. A single-array BCI containing 68 electrodes was implanted onto Jerry's visual cortex and succeeded in producing phosphenes, the sensation of seeing light. The system included cameras mounted on glasses to send signals to the implant. Initially, the implant allowed Jerry to see shades of grey in a limited field of vision at a low frame-rate. This also required him to be hooked up to a mainframe computer, but shrinking electronics and faster computers made his artificial eye more portable and now enable him to perform simple tasks unassisted.[46]
> In 2002, Jens Naumann, also blinded in adulthood, became the first in a series of 16 paying patients to receive Dobelle's second generation implant, marking one of the earliest commercial uses of BCIs. The second generation device used a more sophisticated implant enabling better mapping of phosphenes into coherent vision. Phosphenes are spread out across the visual field in what researchers call "the starry-night effect". Immediately after his implant, Jens was able to use his imperfectly restored vision to drive an automobile slowly around the parking area of the research institute.[citation needed] Unfortunately, Dobelle died in 2004[47] before his processes and developments were documented. Subsequently, when Mr. Naumann and the other patients in the program began having problems with their vision, there was no relief and they eventually lost their "sight" again. Naumann wrote about his experience with Dobelle's work in Search for Paradise: A Patient's Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment[48] and has returned to his farm in Southeast Ontario, Canada, to resume his normal activities.[49]
One can learn a lot from the time-series measured by a single sensor, let alone a 12x14 grid.
In the bottom plot here, https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi , one can readily determine that it is very cloudy here in Seattle today, and that yesterday was cloudy in the morning and partly-cloudy/clear through the rest of the day.
To test this out, assuming that you are sighted, try navigating an exterior-windowed room with your eyelids closed on a bright day, then try doing the same with a true blindfold. I suspect the former will be far preferable.
I probably could have been more clear. I'm not dismissing it at all. But, it sounds like pretty intrusive surgery, and likely very expensive. So, it has me curious how much better it might be in say, 5 years. I imagine it's a hard decision to participate as a patient in something like this.
Haven't there been other implants before? I just know that they weren't that successful yet but people were at least able to see some patterns, if I remember correctly.
Not again. Every 5 years or so, a story like this makes the news. People will walk up to me, ask me if I have already heard about this ground breaking development, and if I am already registered to receive my upgrade!
Resolution is as low as fuck, and risks attached to such an upgrade are pretty crazy.
I wish the media would stop using these kind of stories for clickbait.
I expect not, because I’m not aware of any “Blind culture” equivalent to “Deaf culture”. There’s no unique language for blind people, for example - they speak whatever their family speaks.
No, definitely not. It'd be a contemplation of the guinea pig dilemma: should I be part of the first wave and get low-quality upgrade that is infinitely better than the current status but have my nerves chewed so badly that I might not be able to get the new generation of tech in five to ten years? or should I wait those years in a extremely unpleasant state but have a really high quality of life update later?
"Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes) which provides information for the individual to navigate indoor and outdoor environments, and recognise the presence of people and objects around them"
The article is really light on details - I'd love to see an image of how the world looks to the owner of such a device.
These articles always give me a sense of melancholy. It seems the better-than-natural ocular implants are coming, just not fast enough for any of us reading this to still be alive when they get here.
From the picture of the 9mm by 9mm tile, it looks like it has about 30 electrodes, each something like 0.1 mm wide maybe? (The article says they are "hair-thin"). They are obviously large enough to be somewhat stiff and have a fixed position on the tile. Presumably they are implanted by pushing the tile onto the brain surface.
According to the paper Neuralink published last year[1], Neuralink's system has 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. The threads are flexible and 4 to 6 micrometer wide, and are inserted individually by a robot that avoids hitting blood vessels.
Yes, exactly. So, why didn't they just use a Neuralink instead? Now it feels like they unveiled the Amiga a few months after having unveiled some Alienware laptop.
Edit: no, the real reason why the Neuralink could not be used here, and the answer to the previous comment asking for the difference between the devices, is simply that the Neuralink is, for now at least, purely a sensor, whereas the aim with this vision-restoring device is to stimulate the cortex (so that would require different currents, electrodes, battery life, etc), which the Neuralink cannot do (in its current version).
In the neuralink paper which I linked above, they say at the end of the "Discussion" section that the system is also designed for stimulation on every channel, but that they have indeed not yet demonstrated that capability. Basically the difference is that Neuralink is a general BMI with some interesting innovations that is still in the research phase, while the Gennaris system is a specific application that is about to enter human clinical trials.
Nice, it's sad to see blog spam of blog spam :-) Dang can you swap the link for this one? The current one is a repost of a techcrunch one which is a summary of this one.
That's strange. The site is using a `TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384` cipher suite, which is only supported in TLS 1.3. Are you sure the problem isn't on your end?
Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier.
It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.