Bionic Eye Prototype Reminds me of c3p0

You can have c3p0's eyes.  The Boston Herald's horribly cliched titled piece "Eyes on the Prize: Visionary device gives hope" explains:

A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser - the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists - is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years.

The Boston Retinal Implant Project, partially based at the V.A. Medical Center in Jamaica Plain, is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair.

In its simplest terms, the device, which is implanted behind the retina at the back of the eyeball, works as a light transmitter. Only patients who were once able to see and have partially intact optic nerve cells are eligible for the procedure. People who are blind from birth or suffer from glaucoma are not.

“One of the neat things about our implant is the whole device sits on the outside of the eye, except for a tiny strip” of plastic, he said. “So it doesn’t invade the eyeball.”

Rizzo said the implant will not restore perfect vision, but will provide patients with a sense of their surroundings - to detect shapes and obstacles in their pathways. Ideally, Rizzo and his team say, patients will someday be able to recognize objects, faces and general detail.

“The thing is to significantly improve the quality of life for blind patients,” said Rizzo. “What level of achievement that would actually be is hard to know. The idea of not having to use the white cane - to walk around, find the sidewalk, not run into a telephone pole, not walk into a car. Being able to navigate safely in an unfamiliar environment, that’s the big topic.”

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Roughly 2 million Americans suffer from age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in the industrialized world. Some 1.6 million people worldwide have retinitis pigmentosa, the leading cause of inherited blindness in the world.