This is Tanya Vlach’s new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam. You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.

I suggested that she put her request out into the web to see if anyone there has any ideas. She is serious about the project, which is half art, half medical innovation. She doesn’t have any money to fund the contraption because she says, she is still trying “to figure out how to get out of my astronomical debt that I owe for the medical care that saved my life.”

Her solicitation for engineering help, and a place to reply is here.

I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic / artificial eye. The intraocular installation of an eye-cam will substitute for the field of vision of my left eye that I lost in 2005 from a car accident. While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality.

Specifications for the eyeball:



* DVR



* MPEG-4? Recording



* Built in SD mini Card Slot



* 4 GB SD mini Card



* Mini A/V out



* Firewire / USB drive



* Optical 3X



* Remote trigger



* Bluetooth wireless method



* Inductors: (Firewire/USB, power source)