Meet the Eyeborg [VIDEO]

Meet the Eyeborg [VIDEO]

Meet the Eyeborg [VIDEO]

Future Tense
The Citizen's Guide to the Future
Aug. 26 2011 3:04 PM

Meet the Eyeborg [VIDEO]

In a video from Sky News, Rob Spence, a Canadian filmmaker who lost an eye a few years ago, demonstrates his unique prosthetic: a fake eye with an embedded camera. This ocular camera can’t help him see out of his right eye, but it makes up for that by transmitting footage from his POV to a receiver. This has made him a “bionic documentary maker.” Indeed, in conjunction with the release of the cyborg-centric video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Spence directed a short film about how human augmentation for the disabled—and for going beyond what nature has allowed.

Torie Bosch Torie Bosch

Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a project of Slate, New America, and Arizona State that looks at the implications of new technologies. 

Spence tells Sky News that many people dismiss the idea that humans may one day prefer prosthetics to their biological body parts, but he thinks that’s short-sighted: “If the technology gets there, which it looks like it well, people will think about it. They might be what you’d call an early adopter, a really early adopter, but people are going to have the option of having superior limbs, superior eyes, at some point.”

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In another video from early this month, Spence reveals that his camera eye was made by young, energetic engineers who “just wanted to do it for the challenge.” Why did he do it? “If you’re a filmmaker with a hole in his head, it’s really not a big mental leap. It’s just something that, in fact, anybody that loses an eye immediately thinks of doing that because the technology’s there. … When you lose a part of your body, you automatically think about what you can do with that space.”

 

 

Future Tense is a partnership of SlateNew America, and Arizona State University.