Second Sight is in the business of prosthetic vision. A pair of glasses equipped with a tiny video camera transmits light directly to a microchip implanted in the back of the eye, providing rudimentary sight to the blind.
ACCESS MAIN COMPUTER FILE
A VISUAL STUDY OF COMPUTER GUI IN CINEMA.
The Argus II is a retinal prothesis, the first of its kind to receive clinical approval in Europe. It’s science fiction defined: a camera mounted on a pair of glasses captures the world, then feeds its signals wirelessly to a chip implanted in the eye, stimulating retinal cells (by producing light in the patient’s field of view) and hence restoring partial sight to people with severe vision loss.
For those of us who’ve been dreaming of having laser-eyes since childhood.
One implanted, the computer makes regular pressure measurements inside the eye and stores the results in its memory. To download the stored data, an external device is held near the eye to receive the signal from the radio transmitter.
This is particularly “opening lines of a science fiction story.” The computer, which even has a tiny solar panel, is designed for glaucoma patients, but imagine a device recording data directly from your eyes; at any time, it can be externally downloaded. End of subjectivity.
"Science is the only news. Human nature doesn’t change much…Science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."
Stewart Brand
IBM Watson: The Face of Watson
Preparing Watson for the Jeopardy! stage posed a unique challenge to the team: how to represent a system of 90 servers and hundreds of custom algorithms for the viewing public. IBM, in collaboration with a team of partners, created a representation of this computing system for the viewing audience — from its stage presence to its voice.
This is really interesting. Part of what is so impenetrable about advanced computing systems like Watson, or Carnegie-Mellon’s NELL, is that as much as we want to think of them as an entity — a “guy” — they’re just servers. Just software, running on anonymous, faceless computers in a regular room.
Artist forced to remove head camera implant
“…technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.”
— Bruce Sterling
Will computers ever see what we see?
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