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athomasflynn t1_j1t1fgy wrote

We would need the ability to graft and/or regrow nerve tissue. Something has to carry the visual signals generated by the eye to the brain or its just a useless eye sitting in your head.

For an artificial eye (basically just a camera) we would need the ability to connect and interface electronic components with nerve tissue and the receiver would need to be able to produce a signal that the brain can understand.

We will probably have eye transplants well before bionic eyes. When we do, what you're describing is basically something like a Bluetooth receiver connected directly to the optic nerve where the "eye" is a standalone, battery powered camera that just happens to sit in the eye socket most of the time. Useful, but it would probably be really disorienting when you take it out. I imagine most people would get motion sickness.

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mjbat7 t1_j1thvo8 wrote

Bionic eyes are currently in development by the bionic ear team and they aren't that far away, although it'll probs start with simple shapes with poor resolution. But it's a simpler problem because you can interrogate the patient's optic nerve and augment stimuli to inform the way your device communicates.

On the other hand, transplants are much more challenging - the visual pathway from cone/rod passes through complex, multi-synapse neuronal processing. Neurons tend to degrade quickly and they aren't very good at repair. Then there's the rejection question. So you don't have a good way to figure out if you're connecting the right donor/patient neurons, and even if you did, they'd rapidly degrade.

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athomasflynn t1_j1ur002 wrote

I understand what you're saying but I was talking about something close to or better than human vision. I'd argue that bionic eyes are further along because they're sending a simplified signal. As they ramp up they're going to run into the mapping issues. There's a ton of different procedures and repairs to incentivize improvements in neuron grafting, organ rejection and neurogenesis where the bionic eye challenges seems like it will pull in less R&D money. I might be wrong though, brain implants are getting popular in the startup funding cycle so that might drive crossover breakthroughs.

I'm personally rooting for bionic eyes. I'd like to be able to see like a mantis shrimp in my 70s.

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nubsauce87 t1_j1tramt wrote

Bionic eyes already exist. There was a story this year about how a handful of people who had them went blind because the company that designed them went out of business and stopped supporting them.

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neroute2 t1_j2a1u0e wrote

Were those the extremely limited ones (like a 3x3 grid of pixels)?

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