I lost my left eye at 3. I am now 40 and it has only been the last few years that I have been made aware of my handicap. We are a USMC family and currently in Okinawa. The driving on the wrong side of the road on the wrong side of the car has created a HUGE blind spot for me. Snorkeling in the beautiful waters of Okinawa caused a minor crying breakdown on my first attempt out. Once again, HUGE blind spot. That was a little scarey in the big ocean waters. The third was a major meltdown at 40 years old when we went paint balling. I do not like to wear hats or safety glasses because the obstruct my vision. To most that would seem silly. The let piece of plastic that sets on the bridge of my nose steals and and all of the peripheral vision that I can gain from my right eye seeing to the left. Hats steal upward vision as well. So this paint ball mask killed me. I figured if I was a Marine and went to war I would be dead with in minutes. I have never felt blind until the last few years and it is like reliving a loss. I would sit and think what it would be like to see with two eyes. How it would work because I just can not grasp it. I do not have depth perception problems but I do have neck problems because my head is always tilted at a constant left angle. Driving can be challenging while changing lanes becasue I can not just look over my left shoulder, I have to turn my entire upper body around to see on-coming traffic. I have played softball and volleyball over the years but soccer and basketball were never an option, that would be like driving on the freeway for me. Hopefully one day technology will come around and maybe this will be affordable.
My daughter is at Lester Middle School in Okinawa, Japan. I was looking through her yearbook last night and saw a little section on this.
Good luck in your findings, research, funding, and seeing into the future.
Krissa Malott
Today Show viewers might have been taken aback this morning when Rob Spence yanked off his right eye patch and revealed a bright red LED prosthetic eye.
“Accessor-eyes. Get it?” the colorful Spence said in a phone interview following the segment. “My red LED eye isn’t functional. It just to be cool, immature and have fun not trying to look like everyone else,” he says.
EyeBorg camera and proesthetic eye
A Toronto filmmaker, Spence is the co-creator of “The EyeBorg Project” (not to be confused with Eyeborgs, the movie) in which he and Kosta Grammatis are creating a bionic eye with a tiny camera that can be inserted into the eye socket. One could not visibly tell that the camera is there.
“I would use this camera the same way I would use any other camera. I have to be careful with it ethically and am not interested in life casting myself going to the bathroom or having sex. I could event cast the All Night Arts Festival in London or get in a Lamborghini and event cast that. Or I could do undercover journalism. There’s multiple ways for using secret cameras,” Spence says.
At present, they have a working protoype whose two halves are held together by wax with a camera made by Omnivision and a radio transmitter.
“We want it to have an hour to an hour and a half of runtime and one quarter VGA [display] quality,” says Grammatis. “I’m waiting for Rob to order parts. [It should be finished] in a couple of week’s depending on Rob’s attention span.”
Spence, whose web site describes his team of four as “moderately to severely crazy,” admits he’s angling for a TV documentary or film gig, but there are other implications.
The parts include circuit board with camera, battery and radio transmitter (l. to r.)
“I am a film maker. That’s my passion, but I did not make it so I could I get a deal. This is very personal to improve myself as human being to take a loss and turn it into a gain.” At age 13, Spence says he lost his right eye when a shotgun he trained on a pile of cow dung at his grandfather’s in Ireland kicked back. “I did not have the stock on my shoulder. I wasn’t holding it right.”
Could output from that camera travel to the optic nerve and essentially perform the duties of a healthy eye?
“I would have a very strange field of view seeing light and some shapes. You get 60 pixels at best, but who knows 10 or 20 years from now?” says Spence.
So for now, EyeBorg’s camera will talk to other conventional electronics such as computers, but other more complex projects are riding the wave of publicity Spence is getting. “Projects such as the Boston Retinal Implant Project say we love what you guys are doing because people are starting to talk about it and put it in the spotlight,” claims Grammatis.
Prosthetic retinas or ‘bionic eyes’ as they are called employ tiny implanted cameras that feed transmitted images to the brain via sensors attached to nerves. Such devices have made strides in the past few years, but have a long way to go before approaching the sight quality of a natural eye.
No one had more fun with the loss of an eye than EyeBorg’s Spence. While he will never have a healthy right eye again, he thinks the option of a bionic or natural eye will eventually be available to others.
“I’m not sure I would have the inclination to remove a healthy eye, but that day is coming. Unlike you that has a healthy eye and that’s it, I can have version 1, 2 and so forth.”
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How "bionic eyes" presently work. credit: Doheny Eye Institute
