This article was taken from the February 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Tanya Marie Vlach looks at Wired across the table. "My dream," she says, "is to become a cyborg, an enhanced human being."
In the summer of 2005, the artist, ballerina and producer, now 38, was driving her Jeep towards Burning Man in the Nevada Desert when the brakes failed, she lost control of the vehicle and crashed.
Six days later she woke up in hospital. She could move her legs, but had lost the vision in both eyes. The doctors told her that the right eye would recover but her left eye was gone forever. "I hate feeling like a victim, impotent, weak," she says. She started a blog, One-Eyed (now renamed Eye, Tanya), which explored technical ways she might regain her sight. By 2008 she was investigating the possibility of installing a camera inside her prosthesis. A bionic eye. "I want to become a super-hero," she said at the time. "I want to zoom in on people without them knowing. I want to take pictures of the best moments of my life. I don't want to be disabled. I don't want to be monocular. I don't want to feel like a loser."
She contacted US Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly with details of her proposal to develop an ocular webcam or "eyecam". Kelly posted details about the project on his Lifestream blog, and she was soon receiving messages from enthusiasts, engineers and scientists around the world. She wasn't the first to attempt this.
Rob Spence, a Canadian film director, lost the sight in his right eye at 13 and inserted a webcam into his eye socket "to film everything I want". But Vlach's intentions were different. "I know Rob, he's like a twin," she says. "But I have different aims. I have no interest in recording everything that I see. That's very 90s -- ubiquitous computing, lifelogging and the like. What I am interested in is demonstrating that today, thanks to accessible technology, anyone can become enhanced. We can transform ourselves and repair damage almost immediately."
From a technological perspective, Vlach had (and still has) two options: fit a wireless webcam into her eye, or wait for a new generation of cameras that could be connected directly to the brain. She chose the former and, last June, launched an appeal on the Kickstarter crowdfunding site to raise $15,000 (£9,300) to develop an eyecam that could be installed inside her prosthesis. By the beginning of August, thanks to donations from more than 300 people, she had raised almost $20,000 for her project.
Now all she needs to do is crowdsource the technology (below).
She is documenting her experience through a multimedia project entitled Manual of a Man from the Future. "On the one hand [the project] describes the development of my bionic eye," she says, "and on the other celebrates the idea of body-tech, the enhancement of the human race through technology. I want to tell this story though web media, from Facebook to Twitter, and on my blog. I want to write a series of articles about the future of cybernetics, of genetic engineering, and cyberidentity, of sousveillance, of transhumanism and of singularity through interviews with experts from all fields. But I also want to shoot shorts and brief documentaries, draw cartoons and develop videogames."
Her blog leads with her original, November 2008, "Call for engineers", which sets out the technical challenge for enhancing her prosthetic (though there is also a very recent [25.10.11] entry on "What does a bionic hair style look like?"). As Wired went to press, the post had gathered a healthy 231 comments, many from engineers offering practical and technical suggestions. As to when Vlach will start to put any of these into practice, it's a case, for now, of watch this space...
Looking forward: The tech Vlach wants to see in her eyecam Vlach already has a prosthetic eye, made of coloured Perspex, roughly 22mm in diameter and 8mm thick. Into this she is hoping to install a 720p HD camera, which would transmit images to a mobile device using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. (She also lists Firewire/USB/Mini HDMI on her wishlist, though it's hard to see how these might be useful.)
The camera would have a 3x optical/digital zoom and be powered by a rechargeable battery, also inside the prosthesis. The camera's signals would be processed by a custom app that would run on a standard smartphone. The phone's screen would display what the eye was "seeing" and controls could trigger video-capture, zoom etc.
Perhaps more challengingly, Vlach would also like the camera to behave in an "eye-like" way - responding to blinks, for example, and dilating its pupil in low light. She is also investigating how she could see in infrared and ultraviolet, and incorporate face-recognition capabilities. Finally, the whole device has to be waterproof.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
