Eyeborg Project Update: 1st Step Towards in-Eye Camera a Success

A little over a month ago I reported on the Eyeborg Project, an attempt by one-eyed Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence and his team to develop and embed a wireless video camera and a transmitter into a prosthetic eye. The plan is then to put that eye in Spence's empty right eye socket, and record the world from a perspective that's never been seen before, via video streamed wirelessly to a computer.

The project is run on a shoestring so progress has been limited, but it was recently reported by Newscientist.com that it did succeed in what might be seen as a first step towards its goal by placing a working red LED in Spence's eye prosthetic. Of course this is very far from a working prototype of a camera in that same space, and succeeds more in making him look like a T800 on a mission to change the past than anything else. What it also does though is show that the Eyeborg Project team is capable of placing a working electronic device, complete with power source, into the eye socket. This looked somewhat in question in a video on the Eyeborg site that showed a circuit board that would presumably be in Spence's eye, smoking when current was run through it.

According to Spence a similar LED may be fitted alongside the camera in the final Eyeborg prosthetic if the battery can spare enough power, to provide "aesthetic value as well as additional light for filming." Those kinds of aesthetics would certainly do a number on any quest the filmmaker has for capturing candid responses from this new perspective, but this is only the beginning of the project. In the long-run the project could lay serious groundwork for future worn technologies, as well as provide the building blocks of a guaranteed winner at pretty much any Halloween party.

~Tom Milnes

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