bionic eye

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id...

Flexible web of micro-sensors enables eye-shaped camera, heralds new class of electronics technology that can conform to almost any shape.

Instead of using a flat microchip as the light sensor for their new camera, a team of engineers has developed a sensor that is a flexible mesh of wire-connected pixels.

The mesh is made from many of the same materials as a standard digital-camera sensor, but has the unique ability to conform to convoluted, irregular surfaces.

http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?visitsource=uwkmail&articleID=3...

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW's electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center's ophthalmology department.