Rob Spence has a camera in place of his right eye. Credit:Justin McManus With the help of a crack team of young engineers, Spence was the first person in the world to turn this fantasy into a reality. They built him a camera that slots into his eye socket and, with the help of a wireless transmitter/receiver, can record everything in his field of view. The camera is a tiny 3.2mm squared and has a resolution of 320x240. Spence was in Melbourne last year for the Other Film Festival where he for the first time showed off footage taken with his eye camera. However, it is only recently that he has been able to use the camera for his day job - making documentaries. Spence, who also does work for advertising agencies, was hired by the team behind the blockbuster video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution to create a documentary, using the eye camera, featuring himself and other real-life "cyborgs" with prosthetic limbs. The 12-minute documentary was released on YouTube about five days ago and has already garnered over 280,000 views.

Spence shows his prosthetic eye during an interview in 2009. The goal was to compare real-world cyborgs to those featured in the game, which is set in 2027 and depicts a world where people cut off their human limbs to replace them with far more advanced bionic body parts. One character has an electronic eye that can not only record video like Spence but is also connected to the brain and optic nerve and can overlay the game character's view with augmented reality-style situational data. In the real world people with prosthetics are lucky to get 20 per cent of the functionality of their human limbs, however, Spence believes technology is advancing so quickly that eventually the game's augmented humanity fantasies will become real. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a near-perfect game, until the boss fights come along. Already, one of the people featured in Spence's documentary has had his vision partly restored by a retinal chip.

"The way engineering is advancing there's more than enough potential for at least a small population to make a choice to replace parts of their body ... people have already made the decisions to cut off parts of their bodies for aesthetic reasons, such as their breasts," said Spence. The camera eye sits in a bionic hand. "Certainly the major challenge is something called the brain to machine interface ... what people are working on right now is connecting machines directly to our nervous system and to our brain and that has just begun, but it's advancing rapidly." Spence said people typically had two reactions upon seeing him - the first usually marvelled at the science fiction cool factor but this was then usually followed up quickly by remarks on the creepy privacy implications. Spence has long made documentaries, but now he has an added edge.

But Spence thinks the privacy fear is moot considering virtually everyone now has a small camera in their pocket. The fact that he has yet to paint the current version of his eye to look like a real eye has also had mixed responses from the ladies. "I'm single so women I'm dating are a bit dodgy about it," he said. The camera is tiny enough to blow away with a missplaced sneeze. Spence has come a long way since the accident on his grandfather's farm when he was just nine years old. "I was mucking about with a 12-gauge shotgun trying to shoot a pile of cow shit and managed to hit it - much to my pleasure - but in the meantime I caused a lot of trauma to the eye," he said.

One of Spence's prototypes has a red LED light to make him look like the cyborgs in the film Terminator. "I very nearly lost it then but they patched it up and it deterioriated over the years so about six years ago I had it removed finally. By that time I was already a documentary filmmaker." Spence had a very basic eyeborg prototype built in a matter of months but it has gone through several iterations since then. Had he funded the project himself it would have cost him more than $1 million but the engineers and suppliers who built it were so keen on the idea that they mostly didn't charge him for their labour and parts. One of the early prototypes was included on Time Magazine's list of best inventions of the year in 2009. "It's not like I'm Apple, I don't have an iPhone 4 versus an iPhone 5, we just keep mucking around ... the first one was a proof of concept and it looked terrible, but it worked," he said.

"The first prototype was blurry, no gain control, there was a lot of interference because it's RF wireless. The second one worked pretty well outside of the eye but once I put it into my eye socket there would be interference of the flesh ... we even had to come up with an antenna that would go right on my cheek." They perfected the device on their third attempt. The camera, connected to a battery and a wireless transmitter, fits into his eye socket and communicates with an external receiver that is connected to a storage device. As a joke, one of the prototypes illuminated the eye with a red LED light to allow Spence to resemble the cyborgs from the film Terminator. As for his next steps, Spence said he was keen to make a full-length documentary about cyborgs that would be more in-depth than the 12-minute version he made for the Deus Ex game. "I think it's a very nutritious tasty snack for now but I'd like to make a full meal, a cyborg documentary, and continue to upgrade my eye," he said.

This reporter is on Twitter: @ashermoses