At age sixty-two, “Jerry” had been blind for nearly three decades when his doctor, William Dobelle, first connected him to the computer. The device itself was essentially a pair of sunglasses with a pinhole camera linked to an image processor. This translated the camera’s pictures into patterns the brain can understand. From there the information pulsed through a small wire array to a contact on the visual region of Jerry’s brain.

Wearing the unit, he was able to walk across a room, locate a black cap hanging against a white wall, then bring it back and set it on a mannequin’s head. According to Dobelle, who heads a medical device company in New York, Jerry could also make out a two-inch-high letter from a distance of five feet. That event is considered the first meaningful demonstration of artificial vision. Dobelle has since made numerous advances with his device—making it more portable and improving resolution to the point that one patient could drive a car, if only in a parking lot. On four continents there are now a dozen teams moving ahead with sight-related devices. Among them, Mark Humayun at the University of Southern California is developing an artificial retina, and Richard Norman at the University of Utah makes implants that actually hook into the visual cortex (Dobelle’s contacts rest on its surface).

Work on the other senses has advanced to a similar degree. Growing out of basic research by George Dodd at the University of Warwick in England, electronic noses have been on the market since the early 1990s. They’re used now to monitor things like batches of beer, but will soon provide everything from medical diagnoses to airport security. Artificial retinas are also being developed at the University of Pennsylvania. A Caltech group has done insightful work on the hearing of owls. Haptics—from the Greek haptesthai, meaning “to touch”—is the theme of research at places like the MIT Touch Lab. There, work on the problem of remote tactile interaction is well under way, with what eventual implications for the Internet one can only speculate.

Tags: artificial retina, artificial senses, artificial vision, blindness, Caltech, Dobelle, George Dodd, haptics, Humayun, Richard Norman, senses, visual cortex

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Posted on May 10th, 2006 @ 3:00 pm