Rob Spence and his bionic camera

Mar 9, 2009 by Dan Taylor    4 Comments    Posted under: Technology, Video

Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence lost an eye.  So what does he do?  Creates a film about it of course.  Known for his documentary work, Spence is planning to outfit his prosthetic eye with a tiny wireless camera.  Together with his partner Kosta Grammatis, Spence’s “EyeBorg Project”, seeks to raise awareness of surveillance society in general, but more specifically about the team’s hometown, Toronto, Ontario, which is currently home to 12,000 surveillance cameras.

EYEBORG– The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Putting a camera inside a prosthetic eye is no easy task.  The smallest, lightest, most powerful image technologies are being utilized to make this seemingly ‘Sci-Fi’ chapter a reality.  Inside Spence’s eye is the world’s smallest CMOS camera, measuring a paltry 1.5mm square.  To put that into perspective, a sneeze aimed in the wrong direction could easily send this camera flying across the room, never to be found again.  While the lithium polymer powered camera rests in the iris of the prosthetic eye, the actual footage is transmitted via an RF transmitter and recorded elsewhere.  This tiny RF transmitter is roughly the size of a pencil eraser.  Kosta envisions that the data will be sent to a backpack to be recorded.

To me, this is truly a working, living, breathing version of the old adage; When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  Spence lost the use of his eye at a very young age.  Instead of letting his impairment dictate his career path, he chose a vacation that not even some with two eyes can get right: making great films.  Fast forward 20 years, and Spence is bravely forging ahead; and not just working, but working on something that could have massive implications for future generations.  If Spence and his team can successfully make the EyeBorg project work, how far off are we from utilizing this technology in fully sighted humans?  Granted, now I’m taking a page from the ‘Sci-Fi’ chapter, but it all has to start somewhere.

Find out more about Rob Spence and his EyeBorg project at EyeBorgBlog.com.

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