Ok, so it's not quite as cool as shooting lasers out of your eyes. But for the 39 million blind people alive around the world today, and the many more who will live in the future, a pair of goggles that allows you to see by shooting lasers into your eyes would no doubt sound like the best thing ever. Scientists from Stanford University in the States have put together a proof-of-concept demonstrating core system that could make such a device a future possibility.
The team have been working on a new kind of retinal prosthesis that involves implanting a special photovoltaic silicon chip a third the size of a single hair beneath a human retina.
The user then wears a pair of goggles, that comes complete with miniature camera and pocket computer, that images the outside world in real time, turns it into laser pules, and then pumps them into that new solar-like cell in the back of the eye.
These pulses are then converted into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain into vision.
"It works like the solar panels on your roof, converting light into electric current," said senior author and associate ophthalmology professor at Stanford, Dr Daniel Palanker, in a press release.
"But instead of the current flowing to your refrigerator, it flows into your retina."
The particular advantage of this design from Stanford's perspective is that it does away with cable, wires and the like. You're still left with goggles on your face, but given that everyone is prepared to look like a dork with the Google Goggles (which is a way less awesome concept compared to making blind people se)e, we don't think anyone is going to care.
"The current implants are very bulky, and the surgery to place the intraocular wiring for receiving, processing and power is difficult," Palanker said. "The surgeon needs only to create a small pocket beneath the retina and then slip the photovoltaic cells inside it."
Given the nature of the device, it would be particularly useful in varieties of blindness where the retina has failed, but the neuron pathways and the rest of the vision system is left intact, which is the case in most kinds of age-related macular degeneration.
The laser pulses themselves make use of the infrared spectrum. Given the amount of light that has to be projected by the goggles to make the system work, visible light wasn't an option without essentially blinding the patient (again) with the sheer brightness of the light.
In this study, published in Nature Photonics, Palanker and his team created a photovoltaic chip the size of the point on a pencil, and then used the retinas of both blind and fully-sighted rats to test it out on.
While only the normal rates responded to light from the visible spectrum during tests, both rats showed neural activity when exposed to infrared light, showing that the diodes in the photovoltaic cell were behaving as expected.
While the vision one would gain through the current system is far from normal vision, and doesn't come in colour, it is certainly a good stepping stone into better things down the line.
