Bionic eye could be restoring sight as early as 2013 [Bionic Eye]

After over a decade of work, a group of researchers at Bionic Vision Australia have created a prototype of a surgically inserted eye implant that could see real-world applications in as little as three years.

To call it a 'bionic eye' really only addresses part of it, as the entire setup involves the implant, a pair of glasses with a camera, and a tiny processor you keep in your pocket. The camera feeds footage to the processor, which interprets the sensory information and then wirelessly sends images to the eye implant, which in turn stimulates the neurons of the retina to translate that visual data and encourage your brain to create images from it.

The Australian government has invested nearly million in the technology, and the country's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, hails it as 'one of the most important medical advances we see in our lifetime,' commenting that it 'has the potential to restore sight to thousands of people in Australia and across the world.'

It won't offer perfect vision, though it will allow those who have lost their vision to see images recreated from light. Bionic Vision Australia released a video to show what this might look like when showing off an earlier prototype of its technology (pictured above). Check it all out below.



[DVICE via Bionic Vision Australia via PhysOrg]

AMD simplifies its brand again with “Vision”

AMD is sort of becoming the Mac of PC hardware. That is to say, they perform well, but in the end want it to be about a final user experience, not a piecemeal selection of parts and capabilities. In this spirit of simplicity, they’re shifting the bulk of their merchandising over from Turion and X4 and all that to three labels under the brand name “Vision.”
It reminds me of when they simplified their gaming line under “Game!” On that note, it’s not clear what the fate of Game! was, but it doesn’t seem to be present in the current lineup. It’s more of a desktop thing, really, so I’m not surprised either way.

Just as “Game!” had plain Game and Game Ultra, Vision will be divided into three parts, from basic to enthusiast to advanced: Plain, “Premium,” and “Ultimate.” Those particular epithets don’t have the greatest track record (they call Vista to mind primarily), but they do bespeak the small-medium-large idea going on here. There’s also a Vision Black, but we don’t talk about that.

The features differentiating the three levels are mostly video-related. Plain Vision promises dynamic contrast and improved video quality — essentially leveraging the GPU for video enhancement. Vision Premium adds better transcoding, and Ultimate supports improved HD video editing. These rely on packaged utilities like Cyberlink’s Power Director and ArcSoft’s upscaling technology — a necessary evil until GPU acceleration can be better implemented with any app you choose.
The new stuff is looking solid, and I wish them the best of luck with it. They’re also pushing that all their platforms support everything Windows 7 will throw at them (virtualization, hardware effects), so that’s one less thing for Best Buy employees to worry about.

Electronic Contact Lenses Promise Future of Advanced Augmented Vision

Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor at the University of Washington whose research was seen on our pages before, wrote an article for IEEE Spectrum discussing the work of his team to develop electronic contact lenses to provide continuous monitoring of glucose, augmented vision, and potential other implications of the technology. Parviz also gives a rundown of the challenges involved in creating functional in-lens displays that users can focus on at such a short distance.

From the article:

The glucose detectors we’re evaluating now are a mere glimmer of what will be possible in the next 5 to 10 years. Contact lenses are worn daily by more than a hundred million people, and they are one of the only disposable, mass-market products that remain in contact, through fluids, with the interior of the body for an extended period of time. When you get a blood test, your doctor is probably measuring many of the same biomarkers that are found in the live cells on the surface of your eye—and in concentrations that correlate closely with the levels in your bloodstream. An appropriately configured contact lens could monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels, to name a few potential targets. Coupled with a wireless data transmitter, the lens could relay information to medics or nurses instantly, without needles or laboratory chemistry, and with a much lower chance of mix-ups.
Three fundamental challenges stand in the way of building a multipurpose contact lens. First, the processes for making many of the lens’s parts and subsystems are incompatible with one another and with the fragile polymer of the lens. To get around this problem, my colleagues and I make all our devices from scratch. To fabricate the components for silicon circuits and LEDs, we use high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, which means we can’t manufacture them directly onto a lens. That leads to the second challenge, which is that all the key components of the lens need to be miniaturized and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of a flexible, transparent polymer. We haven’t fully solved that problem yet, but we have so far developed our own specialized assembly process, which enables us to integrate several different kinds of components onto a lens. Last but not least, the whole contraption needs to be completely safe for the eye. Take an LED, for example. Most red LEDs are made of aluminum gallium arsenide, which is toxic. So before an LED can go into the eye, it must be enveloped in a biocompatible substance.

Link @ IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens...