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How does a "bionic eye" allow blind people to see?

A company called Second Sight has developed a new retinal prosthesis that can provide sight to people who have gone blind from degenerative eye diseases like macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. Second Sight's retinal technology consists of five main parts:

• A digital camera built into a pair of glasses captures images in real-time and sends them to a microchip
• A video-processing microchip is built into a handheld unit and processes images into electrical pulses representing patterns of light and dark and sends them to radio transmitter in glasses
• A radio transmitter wirelessly transmits pulses to a receiver implanted above the ear or under the eye
• A radio receiver sends pulses to the retinal implant by a hair-thin, implanted wire
• A retinal implant array of 60 electrodes on a chip measuring 1 mm by 1 mm

And get this: The whole thing runs on a battery pack. Read more at HowStuffWorks...

How Artificial Vision Will Work

By some estimates, there are more than 10 million people worldwide affected by retinal diseases that lead to loss of sight. Several groups of scientists have already developed silicon microchips that can create artificial vision. The devices, called artificial silicon retinas (ASR), have scientists looking at three important aspects:

• It should be small enough to be implanted in the eye
• It is supplied with a continuous source of power
• It needs to be biocompatible with the surrounding eye tissue

Another technology in development, called the artificial retina component chip (ARCC), will give blind patients the ability to see 10x10 pixel images, which is about the size of a single letter on this page. However, researchers have said that they could eventually develop a version of the chip that would allow a 250x250 pixel array, which would enable those who were once blind to read a newspaper. Read more at HowStuffWorks...

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