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Vision improvements
Hi everyone!
After some weeks I was just reading the discussions, I decided to register here and become an active member. I'm pretty new to mods and transhumanism in general, so I try to make my knowlegde more and more. I also want to apologise for my simple language due to I'm not native english speaker.
The improvements' realm I'm most interested is vision. I've been wondering about two ways of vision enhancement and I want to ask some questions and discuss whether they are even good ideas.
The first idea is contact lens with some kind of display devices built into them. The displays have to be transparent (as whole contact lens), have ability of displaing in way, that user would see many pictures in many different distances, receive wireless signal of image from portable controller and, what I think most difficult, displays should be powered by energy of body - I don't have any conceptions how to achieve that. Are the requirements even possible to be met, maybe in five years if not now? If so, get controller programmed (it could be also a smartfon with dedicated application) wouldn't be a problem, as there's many applications making Virtual Reality yet (now such systems use cameras and glasses of course). The contact lens I described would give us all advantages of Virtual Reality without 'heavy hardware'. During driving a car the information about traffic problems or weather could be overlayed on the 'real' image and shown in a distance from eyes, for example 20cm, so the text would be easy to read and wouldn't distract a driver.
The second thing I've been considering is the format which eyes uses to send picture by nerves. Finally, nerve signals can be treated as impulses or just lack of them - despite whole complexity of vision, nerves simple work with binary system, so I think integration of camera and nerves can be done. Only obstacles could be making format of processing pictures by eyes known and then, establishing connection of digital cameras with nerves without damage then. Maybe such functionality could be handled with some kind of 'bioprocessors', but that's the topic for other discussion.
Wouldn't it be very impressing to have ability to extend one's own way of watching the reality? :)
Comments
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welcome on the board. about idea one. display-contact lenses are currently under development by a number of commercial techlabs. afaik their current status of development is a working one-pixel prototype that is inductively powered. the practical implementation is far more difficult than it sounds in theory. that is nothing that will hit the market anytime soon, even less something you can do yourself. about idea two. you are right about the nerves, but again, in practice it is a lot more complicated. my last info on the research in that area was that they managed to hook up a 16x16 array to nerves. i dont see a big break-through in this field soon. wiring up the millions of nerves is still a thing of the future. i also want to mention that the human eye is pretty much the best biological sollution given the physical limitations of a human head. i doubt you will ever be able to "improve" vision. in best case you can augment additional info into it, or restore broken functionality, but both are still far in the future.
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So unfortunately it seems there will be no better way than set of glasses to experience Virtual Reality in about 20 years...I didn't know there're display - contact lenses under development yet; need to ask google about them.
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We can't really improve vision, but we can probably add do it. There's the tetra+chromacy mod which I think is still being developed, which is very cool. You could probably wire in another artificial eye, like you said, although I wouldn't mess with the optic nerves. Maybe try somewhere less important, or use haptics.@ThomasEgi do you think the 16^2 grid is something we could do? Relatively that's a lot of information, if we could do it it'd make a great interface for some device.
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@SixEcho: the tetra+chromacy mod is still being discussed on e.g. Mumble, but we're starting off rather slowly; we don't expect to have a working theory on how that particular mod could be done for quite a while. One of the biggest hurdles is that the best way to do it requires an eye injection :O
~Ian
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@SixEcho well it pretty much is a matter of getting the right electrodes. interfacing one or 2 in non-eye-region is already tricky enough. in order to wire up hundrets of nerves you definetly need a biocompatible lithographically created structure. flexible on top of it. i dont have a spontanious idea on how to do that on a bugdet without a good lab.
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