Smart Glasses for Macular Degneration

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that I am very nearsighted. One of the risks of high myopia is macular degeneration, which can result in losing your central field of vision. Since this has the highest resolution of any part of the eye, it results in losing the ability to read, watch television, or recognize faces.

At CES this year, BoingBoing reports that a small company called Solidddd demonstrated a new technology that might help to restore some vision to people suffering from macular degeneration. They are building smart glasses that project an array of 64 images onto the retina; your brain then combines them into a single, full field image. Initial trials seem to be promising and they hope to have a product release later this year.

I've embedded the video from the BoingBoing article below. It does seem promising, though still very preliminary.

It's possible that this might help with any kind of central vision loss. Given that the eye's peripheral vision is lower resolution than the macular area, it probably won't be as sharp as what you would see through an undamaged macula and  it will be limited by the resolution of the cameras they are using. 

I also don't know how computational requirements of their software. Will it run on glasses alone or will it require an attached unit for the computing and battery like Apple's VisionPro? (Which leads me to wonder if Apple could adapt the VisionPro to work like the Soliddd technology). 

Still, if it works, it will be a game change for people with central vision loss and I will be following this story closely.