Do you know anyone who is blind or visually impaired? There is a revolutionary technology in the making, which might significantly better the situation of people suffering from these issues. Researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology built the ElectroChemical Eye or EC-Eye for short, an artificial 3D eyeball, which resembles the biological eye in shape and size, but with the potential to vastly outperform it.
The way this device works is by converting images through tiny sensors that mirror the light-detecting photoreceptor cells in the human eye. Those sensors reside within a membrane which is shaped into a half sphere for the purpose of mimicking a human retina. Information is then passed through nanowires, which act like the brain’s visual cortex, to a computer for processing.
Achieving a bionic eye, or a visual prosthesis has been a long time challenge for scientists, due to the difficulty in cramming the technology into a spherical shape. In its current condition the eye's ability to render images isn’t the greatest.
