Twenty years and $200 million from private and public investors later, the Argus II became the first FDA-approved visual prosthesis available for commercial implant in February of last year. Nearly 80 people have had it implanted worldwide.

In early 2013, Kulik got a call back from Second Sight. She would be the third commercial patient in the U.S., and the first on the West Coast.

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Last July, Kulik flew from Arizona down to USC for a series of eye tests. In the end, Kulik was chosen not only because she fit the requirements—her blindness had to be severe enough that she could benefit from the device—but also because of her optimism and dedication to learning how to use the Argus II, said Lisa Olmos de Koo, the eye surgeon at USC who performed the procedure.

It took nearly a year for Kulik’s private insurance to agree to cover the $150,000 device. Finally, in June of this year, Kulik went under the knife.

First, Olmos de Koo peeled back the outermost layer of the eye, the conjunctiva. Next she wrapped a silicon belt around the eye’s circumference, behind the eye muscles. To reach the back of the eye, she broke up the vitreous, the jelly-like substance that fills the eye, suctioned it out and replaced it with a saline solution. Then came the hard part: she had to place the electrode chip so that it fell squarely into the center of the retina. “You don’t get another chance,” Olmos de Koo says. She tacked the chip in place and hoped for the best.

A few days later, Kulik turned on the device. At first she could only see dramatic contrast: the edges of sidewalks, the steak on her plate at dinner (she still can’t make out rice). “A lot of people think I’m going to put it on and ‘Wow, you’re going to see again.’ It’s nothing like that,” she says. “The contrast is easy, but trying to figure out shapes and letters—I need to work on that more. It’s definitely a whole new way of learning how to see.”

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Humayun dreams of more than just 60 pixels. He wants to fine-tune the resolution of the device so that it can be used for those with macular degeneration, a far more common cause of blindness that affects more than 2 million Americans, according to Prevent Blindness America. That challenge will be “more than just going from two to eight megapixels,” he says. “It’s like going from a train to a plane.”

Yet no matter how much Humayun improves it, there are some things the Argus II will never achieve. For instance, color. That would require wiring each electrode to one of the eye’s matching colored cones—an impossible feat. And the device still requires a user to have an intact optic nerve and other structures of the eye to convey its messages to the brain, a caveat that rules out many other forms of blindness.