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Bionic organ of vision

07.04.2013

UCLA professor of bioengineering, Wentai Liu, who has been doing research in this area for two decades, has created a device that the inventor himself calls "the first bionic eye for the blind."

The official name of the product, which is a retinal prosthesis, is Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System. The group of specialists involved in the project, led by the professor, hopes that their work will help elderly people who have lost their sight due to age-related changes or diseases that cause the destruction of light-sensitive receptors in the retina.

The central component of the prosthesis is a miniature but powerful enough chip implanted in the retina and replacing the signals of damaged photoreceptors with its own. Argus II receives video signals from a miniature camera built into the goggles. To be more precise, first, the camera data is sent to a microcomputer attached to the patient's wrist, and after the necessary processing, they are transmitted wirelessly to a chip implanted in the eye. The task of the chip is to stimulate the nerve endings with electrical impulses that travel through the optic nerve to the visual area of the cerebral cortex.

As stated, patients with the Argus II prosthesis gain the ability to read texts in large print, distinguish objects and their movement, even see the contours and some details of faces. So far, the picture is far from perfect, since the artificial retina has a resolution of only 60 points, negligible compared to the resolution of a healthy eye, but for people who are blind, this is an incredible breakthrough. The first patient to take part in clinical trials was a seventy-year-old man who, at the age of twenty, completely lost his sight due to an illness.

The UCLA research team is currently testing two more prototypes, which have a resolution of 256 and 1026 pixels, hoping to fit them into the same dimensions as the first version of the prosthesis. Over time, scientists expect to add the ability to color vision and move the camera directly into the eye.

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3D glasses for TV without remote control 17.02.2014

Scientists have developed a prototype 3D glasses that can "adjust" to the image on different screens, and which can be useful for watching three-dimensional TV shows without using a remote control.

Russian physicists have developed a prototype of 3D glasses that can "adjust" to the image on different screens, and which can be useful for watching three-dimensional TV programs without using a TV remote control, the scientific information agency FIAN-Inform reports.

To obtain a three-dimensional image, stereoscopic glasses based on the so-called nematic liquid crystals (NLC) are currently widely used. But such glasses, due to the properties of the NLC, are inconvenient for the perception of a continuous television picture, moreover, an undesirable overlay of the "remainder" of the image, "intended" for one eye, on the image in the other eye is possible.

This problem can be eliminated by using liquid crystals of another type, smectics (SLC), as the basis for 3D glasses. This idea was proposed by a team of scientists from the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN), the Prokhorov Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Research Institute for System Research (NIISI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The research results showed that due to the use of smectics in the liquid crystal cells that make up the LCD display, a clear color image can be obtained.

"This allows you to dream of creating a TV for the whole family. Frames of various TV programs can be mixed up on its screen, from which the father's glasses, for example, will "choose" the broadcast of a football match, the mother's glasses - a series, and the child - a cartoon. That is, each member of the family with their glasses and wireless headphones will see completely different programs on the same screen," the researchers explain.

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