The World’s First Bionic Eye?: Checking in with the slightly Orwellian, but very cool “Eyeborg”

Filed under: Themes, Blind Visionaries, Campaign Watch, Irked Videos

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Quoting The Belleville Intelligencer:

Rob Spence is part man, part machine and loving it. Spence, 37, is a Belleville native and Toronto-based filmmaker and founder of the Eyeborg Project. The goal: create a prosthetic eye containing a video camera and transmitter to be worn by Spence. He compares himself to Steve Austin, the bionic action hero of television’s Six Million Dollar Man. There’s just one difference. ”I’m the zero dollar man,” Spence said. “We have no budget.” [...] Spence lost the use of his eye while shooting his uncle’s 12- gauge shotgun in Ireland. When the nine-year-old Spence tried to shoot a pile of manure, it backfired. The eye was removed about five years ago. Replacing it with a camera isn’t an original idea—”Almost everybody who loses an eye these days thinks of that,” said Spence—but it’s one in which he’s investing much of his time. ”As soon as I knew I was going to lose the eye…I started making phone calls.” Television executives weren’t interested unless he already had the camera eye, Spence said. He found engineer Kosta Grammatis in San Francisco and flew him to Toronto. ”He moved into my spare bedroom for three weeks and we built the first prototype.” [...] Smaller than a penny, it fits into a clear two-piece eye that feels just like his regular prosthetic. There are limitations—its battery must be changed every 45 minutes—but progress is being made. ”We’re MacGyvering things as we go along,” he said…[read the rest of this article at intelligencer.ca]

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Check out Eyeborg’s fun promo reel (warning: brief graphic imagery at beginning may be unsettling to some viewers):

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Here’s a recent quote from Kosta Grammatis’ blog iamkosta.org:

Nerds are amazing. I don’t know how many of you were the jerks who picked on us in high school—but let me tell you, the older I get, the more “vogue” it becomes to be a nerd.

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And check out this March 6th screengrab taken from Eyeborg’s blog:

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Learn more at eyeborgproject.com

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