Disgusting, wonderful gedenken

[gfish]

This just came up at the grad student Tuesday Tea, and I'm loving the question. Suppose you lost an eye. What kinds of customized fake eyes would you get made to take its place? Myself, I think I'd have an entire briefcase of them. Row upon row, all nestled securely into foam padding cutouts. USB drives, laser pointers, flashlights, creepy glowing ones, digital cameras... the range of possibilities would almost make up for the loss of stereo vision. The only problem is the lack of easy muscle control over it. Otherwise: MP3 player!

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Silly:
* Hypnotoad.
* Implant a projector-eyeball and rent out ad space as a portable billboard. Alternately, use the projector as a display device for your wearable computer.

Serious:
* I wonder if you could have a camera-eyeball transmit to a high-resolution semitransparent contact lens overlaying the surviving eye. (Hypothesize that you could show a stable image as the lens rotates.) Could the brain be trained to interpret the resulting double image stereographically?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Ignoring the registration issues, no, I really doubt you could ever learn to parse that. However, you could compute the stereo disparity map yourself and highlight things that are closer. You'd need a second camera for that, though, which takes it outside the realm of the single eyeball replacement.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

LIDAR! :)