We still cannot build bionic bodies in the purest cyberpunk style, since we still do not have such technology, but a new artificial eye brings us much closer to this reality. It is the prototype of an artificial eye that has been developed by a team of Hong Kong researchers.
This device, which mimics the structure of the human eye and how it works like a human retina, is so sensitive to light and has a faster reaction time than a real eyeball. It may not come with telescopic or night vision capabilities, but this electronic eye has the potential for sharper vision than the human eye, scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology detail in the journal Nature.
“In the future, we will be able to use this device to improve vision prosthetics and humanoid robotics,” says Zhiyong Fan, co-author of the work.
The artificial eye, called ElectroChemical EYE (EC-EYE) , of a size comparable to a human eye, just over two centimeters in diameter, has several mini sensors that reflect photoreceptor cells like real eyes. Everything is arranged in an aluminum oxide (Al2O3) and tungsten membrane shaped like a half sphere and sealed in rubber tubes.
The experts lined up a curved aluminum oxide membrane with tiny sensors made of perovskite, a light-sensitive material used in solar cells. The extremely light-sensitive nanowires mimic the brain’s visual cortex by transmitting the visual information gathered by these sensors to a computer for processing. To give us an idea, these cables are so sensitive that they could exceed the optical wavelength range of the human eye, allowing it to respond to wavelengths of 800 nanometers, the threshold between visual light and infrared radiation. This means that it could see things in the dark when the human eye is unable.
Furthermore, scientists also claim that it can react changes in light faster than the real human eye. It adjusts to changing conditions in a fraction of the time of approximately 30 to 40 milliseconds, instead of 40 to 150 milliseconds.
According to the document, each square of the artificial retina can contain around 460 million nano-sized sensors. That’s a lot compared to the 10 million retinal cells in the human eye. That is, the bionic eye could in fact exceed the visual fidelity of a real eye, achieving a wide field of view of 100 °, close to the approximately 130 ° of our eyes.
But that would require separate readings from each sensor. In the current configuration, each wire connected to the synthetic retina is about one millimeter thick, so large that it touches many sensors at once.
To demonstrate that thinner wires could be attached to the artificial eyeball for higher resolution, Fan’s team used a magnetic field to attach a small series of metal needles, each 20 to 100 microns thick, to the nanosensors. on the synthetic retina, one by one. “It is like a surgical operation”, clarifies the expert.
The current method for creating individual ultra-small pixels is not practical, says Hongrui Jiang, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin – Madison whose comment on the study appears in the same issue of Nature. “For a few hundred nanowires, that’s fine, but how about millions?” Engineers will need a much more efficient way to fabricate large sets of small wires at the back of the artificial eyeball to give it superhuman vision, he says.
The prototype is in the proof-of-concept phase and, at the moment, its resolution is low (130 dots per inch), but they hope to achieve a resolution greater than 10,000 dots per inch.
Applications
Of course, in the near future, the device will be able to be used much earlier in humanoid robots, whose abilities, according to experts, will soon surpass those of humanity. “For robotic applications, it’s simpler,” says Fan.
Referencia: L. Gu et al. A biomimetic eye with a hemispherical perovskite nanowire array retina. Nature. Vol. 581, May 21, 2020, p. 278. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2285-x.
H. Jiang. Artificial eye boosted by hemispherical retina. Nature. Vol. 581, May 21, 2020, p. 264. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-01420-7.
