Our society changes daily and with those changes our bodies are beginning to change as well. The preponderance of wounded veterans from armed conflicts around the world has caused the prosthetic industry to enlarge and innovate, getting closer every day to arms and legs that can function as the originals had. However this story is about a man who has lost his right eye and replaced it with a robotic one. Rob Spence has a robot eye that doubles as a camera, allowing him to record life from a point-of-view perspective. Labeled “The Eyeborg Project” (and he does refer to himself as an eyeborg) it involves two engineers, an ocularist (they make fake eyes) and Rf-links.com. The project has been a success so far and they have planned the next step already: a realistic looking eye. As of right now, which you can see below, the eye doesn’t blend in with normal people. The goal would be making it look as close to a real eye as possible.
Not only would this be helpful to people using glass eyes (which don’t always look natural) it could also revolutionize future recording devices. Making them smaller would also make them easier to use and if you could stream it directly to a device all you would need to do is wear a small camera and press a button. It could go to your phone or computer and with future developments stream to websites or social media. As alluded to in the video, it could also have applications in secret journalism, filmmaker and any other reason you would want to record in secret. James Bond anyone? So in case you ever thought you weren’t being recorded before, look at someone twice before you do anything.
Rob Spence is a documentary filmmaker and has made a documentary called Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary focusing on new prostheses and how they relate to Adam Jensen, the main character/cyborg of the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
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