I think i worded my other reply wrongly, I meant what is their final outcome objectives for this project. I wasnt really meaning why bother with it (because you could equally say the same about the robots we build). It just seems to me that the only people who could use such a thing are those that already have a prosthetic eye - which are in a very small minority.
There have been experiments where people have hooked up a camera to the optic nerve of a blind person and they were able to see using that camera.
The only successful ones have only been able to see literally a spec of color, never anything close to an image. There are many laboratories that release statements saying what they could
be capable of and stuff but no actual proof or end result. Volunteers are also in short supply, there arent many people that would let people connect electrodes into their brain in the name of research.
Unimportant projects like these may seem kind of useless, but in the future they give people a stepping stone to help them accomplish the useful stuff. If they get this eyeborg project working, someone who wants to actually have the brain receive the signal already has a working camera eye to base it off of.
quite true, excuse my short sightedness (and my pun
So the only way they can see out of that eye is with a cell phone or something?
Yes, it would be quite funky if they used it for a first person big brother type thing, where people can log on to the streaming video to see what the test subject is doing