As you look at this page, your eyes are doing a remarkable thing. A stream of light from the words and pictures is bouncing into the eyeball and falling onto photoreceptor cells on the retina. This visual information is passed on to output cells and then transmitted to the brain as a kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence you are reading right now.
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process, says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets further than the eyeball; the chain is broken. That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the blind see again. In the video above, she explains how her technology works and the eureka moment that started it all.
The video explains that they expect human trials within 18 months. The procedure is really sci-fi stuff : they can fit a camera to a retina in which all the photoreceptors have died and get it to fire off signals which the brain can correctly interpret. This has been demonstrated in a laboratory and promises to restore something very close to normal vision, vastly superior to any other comparable prosthetic devices currently available. However, this has not been demonstrated to actually work as advertised quite yet.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141111-the-woman-who-makes-the-blind-see
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