Looking at the Breast Christmas thing and I wonder IF POSSIBLE: Would you augment your body via Cybernic implants [ok and read some Sci fi today] Would you replace say . . your arms with strong ones that looks and feel like they real or . . . almost . . New Cyber Eye . .looks further and clearer etc but. . . u look like Geordi Laforge [in the movie . . . . just strange looking eye] If so . . .What would u augment Rocket River
Being legally blind in my right eye, I eagerly await the day when such a thing is possible! Hopefully it is within my lifetime and is relatively unnoticable in appearance...
The key for all of this stuff is being able to get nerve tissue to grow and integrate with the hardware. People have been trying forever and haven't done so well. The day that you read that they've found a way to reliably and effectively repair spinal nerve damage, such as affected Christopher Reeves, is the day that people will really start working on this stuff with practical aplications in mind. The eye would be a pain in the @ss to engineer since each eye splits it's visual field into two left and right visual fields which are then directed to the right and left side of the brain respectively. These nerve cells terminate in the lateral genticulate nucleus where they are distributed to magnocellular and parvocellular layers which analyze shape and motion (I forget which does which). With inactivity, these LGN structures atrophy so complex layered midbrain structures would need to be rebuilt somehow. Furthermore you also have some random, bizarre nerve bundles going off to strange places, such as those that deal with the really freaky phenomenon of blindsight and those that deal with things like sleep cycle regulation at the hypothalamus or the pineal gland or somewhere. In short, the nerve bundles behind the eye would be an incredible mess to connect to any type of "cybernetic eye". For me, the one thing that would be most useful would be something that directly plugs to the brain to augment natural abilities. This sort of stuff would develop out of the very specific research into augmenting the substantia nigra in Parkinson's disease patients.
