Is the implant upgradable? Imagine in 2 years the resolution is doubled but because your an early adopter, you're stuck with the original.
There's more to sight than light - eg when Jesus healed the blind dude in the Bible it took two steps, the first to restore vision, a second to restore perception.
This isn't entirely related, but it's an interesting story, so I think I'll share, anyway.
From my personal experience, even restoration of previous eyesight can be pretty unnerving for a bit.
I spent much of last year losing my vision as a cataract in my only eye got progressively worse. I put off surgery as long as possible due to a high risk of complications that could lead to total blindness. By the time I was ready to have the surgery, I couldn't see to do a lot of everyday things, like cook, watch TV, etc. and had a lot of colorblindness and diplopia (sometimes seeing as many as 8 'ghost' images when looking at an object).
The sudden improvement in my vision after cataract surgery took probably two weeks to fully adjust to, mentally. I actually had a bit of paranoia for a while, because I would see things in my vision that I wasn't used to seeing and it would trigger some sort of panic response. I hadn't been totally blind prior to the operation, but suddenly there was all of this detail that hadn't been there before (or that I hadn't seen in months, anyway).
I'd look at something and it was blue or had texture or cast a shadow. It made it very hard to concentrate. Everything was a distraction.
I remember that I had a mild panic attack one day shortly after surgery when we stopped for lunch. We were seated next to a window in the restaurant and it was very windy and cloudy outside. The wind blowing the clouds around was causing shifts in lighting coming in through the window and it was just too much sensory input for me to handle.
I wonder how many blind people are going to hold off on this in the hopes that it gets better in five years.
> a second to restore perception
I imagine that this is aimed at people who've gone blind, and therefore have all the neural infrastructure to see and perceive; but it does raise an interesting point of what would happen if you implanted this in someone who was blind from birth. (It brings to mind deaf-from-birth people who have rejected their aural implants, though I think that was largely due to the crapiness of the state of technology at the time, everything sounded like it was being shouted through a pipe full of tin foil and gravel.)
This quote is especially interesting from a 13 year old whose sight was restored in 1728: "When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment of distances, that he thought all object whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin"
Is the implant upgradable? Imagine in 2 years the resolution is doubled but because your an early adopter, you're stuck with the original.
There's more to sight than light - eg when Jesus healed the blind dude in the Bible it took two steps, the first to restore vision, a second to restore perception.