Woman To Replace Lost Eyeball with Webcam

by Terri Potratz | November 19, 2008 at 09:17 am
556 views | 17 Recommendations | 6 comments

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Bionic Woman poster

Bionic Woman poster

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An artist living in San Francisco has issued an invitation to developers to design a webcam eyeball for her.  The woman hopes to document her life with the invention, or perhaps shoot a reality TV show from her first hand perspective.

“I’d always given thought to using cameras to restore sight to the blind,” said William Danz, whose patient, Tanya Vlach, wants the groundbreaking device. “This is a little different, more like James Bond stuff.”

Vlach, who lost her eye in a 2005 car accident, wears a realistic acrylic prosthesis, but she’s issued a challenge to engineers on her blog: build an “eyecam” for her prosthesis that can dilate with changes of light and allow her to blink to control its zoom, focus, and on/off switch, reports the NY Daily News.

“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,” Vlach, 35, was quoted by the daily as saying. “With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”

The tiny camera would likely be embedded within Vlach's existing eye prosthesis.

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RayBanBro66

Sounds like the makings of a "Bionic Woman"

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Terri Potratz

I know right - super cool, but very creepy.

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Uwe Paschen

Hum, Hope for many.

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Jordan Yerman

Even better if the webcam could record with filters unavailable to the human eye, so she could replay her day in infrared, or thermal vision...

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Terri Potratz

X-ray vision!  I read that she can stream the feed through her mobile device, so she could potentially 'see' what her fake eye is seeing on her cell phone.  Maybe they can wire it up to her brain.  This is some serious Bond technology.

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Erik Larson

priceless- you just can't make stuff like this up. Being John Malkovich in real life comes to the big screen.

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Uwe Paschen
First Flagged at 9:26 AM, Nov 19, 2008 by Uwe Paschen
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