Forget the “eye of the tiger”: the best is the eye of the fly. It is true that we could be satisfied with our eye which functions like a camera, but that would be being small players. By drawing inspiration from the eyes of our friends the flies, we could develop devices that combine a multitude of images and faithfully reproduce reality. With this, as an article published on the New Atlas site explains, we should be able to make the most of what remains of our retina, even when it is no longer in its prime.
Soliddd, a start-up based in New York, has unveiled a model of glasses of this kind, allowing people with macular degeneration, whose vision is amputated in its central part, to reconstruct a complete image of what they are looking at . The device has been tested with patients and was presented at the recent Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
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Macular degeneration is a disease that damages the central part of the retina, the macula, from the age of 50 and more frequently around the age of 65. This disease, the leading cause of low vision in developed countries, manifests itself as a disorder or even a blind spot in the field of vision – a scotoma. Although treatments can delay the effects of this degeneration, there are currently no medications to treat this disease, which affects approximately 8% of the French population and 25 to 30% of those over 75.
The company explains that it tested its device under the aegis of Lighthouse Guild, an independent association serving victims of visual impairment. The eyewear makers of the future worked with a sample of thirty people suffering from macular degeneration. All participants claim to have seen an increase in their reading speed of at least 50%.
-A great puzzle for the brain
These glasses are designed to reconstruct a coherent image from several shots: «When the brain receives redundant coverage of the same basic visual information, it automatically combines themexplains the team in a white paper accessible from the company’s website. If an area of the overall field of vision lacks information, the brain adds the missing information from another view.»
The glasses are therefore equipped, on each side, with cameras which send the captured images to screens, one for each eye. These screens have the particularity of being made up of a multitude of lenses which project images towards the healthy part of the retina, at a particular angle, which will allow the user to reconstruct a complete picture, a 3D mental representation of what he observes.
This device is inspired by the eyes of the fly, made up of several thousand light-sensitive receptors, the ommatidia. These allow him to have 360° vision, very far from the 5° of clear vision of humans who nevertheless manage to distinguish shapes at 180°. If you have trouble catching them, that’s normal, they are better equipped than you (a bit like mosquitoes).
The first feedback seems to be enthusiastic. We say to ourselves that perhaps we should take inspiration from animals more often to improve our eyes: the owl to see at night, the butterfly to distinguish colors and the eagle to spot line mistakes in tennis. But be careful, we’ve seen enough flies rushing headlong into windows or circling around a lamp to tell us that we can keep our human eyes, as long as they function more or less.
