Vision Enhancement
Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Tue, 3 Jun 1997 14:49:19 -0700 (PDT)
The recent thread about wearable devices brought to mind something I'd
thought about before: it has already been shown that when blind people
are fitted with a head-mounted camera that reproduces its image onto a
grid of tactors on the subject's belly or back, the subject adapts to
his new "vision" easily, and the brain relocates the subjective image
to the camera, regardless of where the tactor array is placed (for
example, when an object is thrown at the subject, he reflexively ducks
in the right direction, even if the tactors are on his back).
It seems obvious to me that the next thing to try is a normally sighted
subject. Mount a small camera--say infrared--on a pair of glasses,
feeding to a tactor grid. Wouldn't the subject then be likely to adapt
his subjective vision experience to include the new infrared data? We
could call them "LaForge Glasses" :-)
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC