Eyeborg

By Anthony Pilloud
Contributing Writer

“If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?”

It’s an earnest question from Rob Spence, who lost one of his eyes in a shooting accident when he was only a child and has recently implanted a prosthetic eye that is a tiny camera, constantly taking and sending footage of his day-to-day life and sending it directly to his handheld LCD-screen device wirelessly and instantaneously. It was only a matter of augmenting a wireless lapel microphone to transmit video rather than audio signal and adding a transmitter and receiver.

“It’s not unlike any cell phone,” Spence said for a Today Show interview. “It is just a small, wireless video camera”.

Spence was once known as a mild internet celebrity when he possessed a prosthetic eye that glowed red, in the same fashion as the infamous symbol of robotic evil, the Terminator. “The eyes are like no other part of the body. It’s what you look into when you fall in love with somebody and [influences] whether you trust someone or not. Now with a video camera in there, it will change how people see and perceive me.”

The eye-cam is a single piece, much like a normal prosthetic one, with the camera and battery built right inside; Spence need only to turn it on and pop it in to begin recording every moment of his waking life. He has already set up his own blogspot that feeds information about the process, and hopefully soon posting the camera in action. He has even taken upon the moniker “Eyeborg,” after the name of the “Eyeborg Project” thats goal was to create the device.

While it is true that the cam-eye does nothing to assist Spence’s immediate vision (that is, it does not restore his vision while it is active in his socket), it is clearly a massive leap forward for the ever progressing cyborg culture. Spence has been compared to the video game “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” due to its themes of bionic extension of the human form by multiple news sources; Spence was even hired by the production company for the game to make a documentary using the eye and to discuss the implication of cyborg technology.

“With an eye camera, it’s not on your shirt, it’s not on your glasses, it’s right in your pupil; when you look at someone like that, it’s like a window to their soul,” Spence states about the eye. The cam-eye will be used to record interviews for the documentary.

Spence’s progress brings to mind Dr. Wafaa Bilal, who attempted to implant a small camera into the back of his head as a means of artistic expression in early 2011. However, the event was less successful, seeing as how the professor’s body began to reject the implant, instigating a series of medical issues. The project, codenamed “3rd I,” was meant to capture photographs at a rate of one per minute and send the directly to his laptop (unlike Spence’s implant which, so far, simply goes to a local hand held screen) right from the back of his head.

Bilal explains in an artistic statement that his desire to perform the operation “arises from a need to objectively capture my past as it slips behind me from a non-confrontational point of view.”  The Iraq native states that he recalls little of his journey from his birthplace to the United States and wishes he could have better recorded the experiences.

Currently, Spence’s prototype could run for about $20,000, however he hopes that that will decrease with the years to come. “People say no one would ever cut off their own arm and replace it, but if the technology gets there – and it looks like it will – people will think about it.”  Spence claims that his inspiration is the Six Million Dollar Man.

The event marks an astounding triumph for cyborg culture. It also instills some rather dramatic, thought-provoking questions about human progress and evolution. There was a time when the Six Million Dollar Man was purely science fiction (to quote the show directly, “you know what this is, doctor? It’s impossible. A man loses an eye, who can make him a new eye to see out of?”), but when has science fiction ever really been about fiction?  That word is purely a formality, because science fiction can always become reality.

Similarly, Ray Kurzweil brought near universal reading capabilities to the blind with his optical character recognition technology. The invention was originally a large scanning device that could recognize written language and read it aloud; the prior technology could only translate certain fonts. Now the same technology is incorporated in cell phones, thanks to Kurzweil’s contributions.

Here is but the cusp of the potential that robotic technology can offer us. Physical injuries no longer need to be limitations; now we can safely use technological advances to supplement what was lost. It is only a matter of time before they are a complete replacement – and then some.

Will bionic augmentation get to a place where it surpasses what the body has already provided?  More than likely. This appears to be a natural progression. Already we are seeing ingenious inventions by the likes of Spence and Kurzweil (as well as many, many others) that take the fiction out of science fiction. Truly the imagination is the limit.

However cyborging yourself does not mean you have to cut off your leg and replace it with a metal one. We have it every day that we use our computers to access the internet – all the knowledge of the World Wide Web literally at our fingertips at any given time. We need only access the file and folder and retrieve the necessary information, not unlike how a computer works itself. With social networking applications like Skype, we can connect with anyone in the world with minimal effort, and even be in two places at once.

A cyborg is a biological being with artificial parts, and a cell phone (a device that enables one to contact others over great distances despite the physical limitations to do so) more than meets this criteria. It is practically a separate appendage for most Americans. Who leaves their house without one? Medicine and robots are becoming increasingly more and intimate as well, as studies continue to uncover whether or not mechanical precision would compensate (and then some) for the stress of regular surgery. Nanotechnology increases in popularity, as the possibility of using it and nanobots to enter the human body and combat deadly diseases such as cancer.

The age of the cyborg is near at hand, and with every day the possibilities and implications of this prove increasingly more promising. With a slight twist of the wrench (and more than a little stretching of the imagination), we are making ourselves better and better every day.

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