[With heavy, uncomfortable headsets and even glasses a major source of interference with presence. there’s long been talk of a contact lens or other eye-based alternative technology. This short story from Futurism’s The Byte and the excerpts from a Futurism interview that follow it don’t provide too many details but they reinforce the hope not only for improving the prospects of restoring vision with prosthetic eyes but eventually creating “the ultimate AR/VR display technology.” –Matthew]
[Image: Credit: Getty / Futurism]
Neuralink Cofounder Says New Company’s Eye Implant Could Be “Ultimate” VR Tech
“We Think We See a Way To Create What Ends Up As The Ultimate AR/VR Display Technology Without Meaningful Surgery.”
By Noor Al-Sibai
January 3, 2022
Science Corporeal
After leaving Elon Musk’s Neuralink in 2021, Max Hodak is back with a new brain-computer interface startup, and it’s working on a next-generation prosthetic eye that he hopes will both provide a new treatment for blindness and eventually pave the way for the future of virtual and augmented reality.
In a recent interview with Futurism, Hodak told us about his company Science Corp’s “Science Eye,” which combines gene therapy with a microLED display over the retina to restore vision.
As the neuroscience entrepreneur notes, the Science Eyes have already been implanted in some bunnies, which he says are “doing well.” Human trials are still a ways off — “eighteen months, hopefully!” — but he thinks a variation on the tech using “different underlying technology, not the microLED film” could lead to immersive virtual experience that leave today’s clunky headsets in the dust.
“We think we see a way to create what ends up as the ultimate AR/VR display technology without meaningful surgery,” Hodak told Futurism.
Different Strokes
Science Corp, Hodak emphasized, is “extremely different” from Neuralink — though as Bloomberg reported a few months back, the startup is now the second-highest-funded brain-computer interface company out there with $160 million in capital, trailing only Neuralink itself.
And in spite of the flashy VR concept, overall Hodak has expressed a very cautious vision for the company’s trajectory.
“The technical approach we’re developing is extremely different from what Neuralink was doing,” he told us. “Ultimately, though, our vision goes well beyond just clinical visual prostheses. But we want to let ambition grow with success rather than making big statements about things we may or may not do in the future at this point.”
For now, Science Corp is “focused on getting our first product into patients” — and once it does, we’re excited to see where the startup goes next.
—
[From Futurism]
Meet the Neuralink Cofounder Who Left and Started a Competitor That’s Now Rapidly Catching Up
“Engineering the brain is really this very transcendent goal if you take it seriously.”
By Simon Spichak
December 30, 2022
[snip]
Futurism: So, tell us about the Science Eye. How does it work and what does it do?
Max Hodak: The Science Eye has two parts: a simple gene therapy to add a protein to the cells of the optic nerve which makes them light sensitive, and a thin-film microLED display that is laid over the retina to drive the altered cells. The protein we deliver isn’t sensitive to ordinary daylight, only the flexible microLEDs we implant. These parts together should allow the restoration of vision in patients who have lost the photoreceptor cells, like rods and cones, resulting in blindness.
[snip]
Why did other companies that tried to do this in the past fail? How’s Science Eye avoiding those mistakes?
There are many players working on visual prostheses. Second Sight and Pixium Vision were early leaders and use traditional electrodes; we think in the long run traditional electrodes will preclude truly high-resolution vision, though given there’s nothing available at all right now for these patients, they are plausibly better than nothing. There are also companies using optogenetics, namely Bionic Sight and GenSight, but they use projectors mounted on glasses to drive their opsin proteins, which doesn’t move with the eye and has many drawbacks relative to our flexible microLED technology which keeps a constant cell-to-pixel mapping as the patient looks around and moves.
[snip]
If the tech proves to be successful in patients, do you think there could be demand for a commercial version? If so, what sort of services do you think it might be able to provide?
We do think that our visual prosthesis work eventually evolves into something mass-market, but it will be a different underlying technology, not the microLED film. We probably won’t have much more to say on this until the first version of the Science Eye is in patients, but yeah, we think we see a way to create what ends up as the ultimate AR/VR display technology without meaningful surgery.
[snip]
I love playing around with new tech and devices but I haven’t really gotten the appeal of VR or AR just yet. It gets me wondering what’s different with the Science Eye, and what is the mass-market appeal exactly? Is there something I’m missing about the potential of using VR/AR in day-to-day life?
The Science Eye as publicly described today is not an AR/VR device, at least certainly not for sighted people. It’s possible that a successor device, if we can get the technology to work, might enable that. AR and VR are very different things. The potential of VR is real and almost so obvious that it’s easy to miss, but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it. It’s easy to immerse someone’s vision and hearing, but very difficult to put the rest of their body there, too, so they can run and jump and feel the breeze fluently. I think this will take many years and may be tough to translate to a true consumer device.
For AR, it’s obvious to me now that AR is the logical conclusion of the smartphone
. Apple is working on glasses, and I suspect these will ultimately supersede the iPhone. AR isn’t just a screen hovering in your vision: for it to really be immersive, it has to be semantically aware of the world and what you’re looking at. I think Apple understands this and it’s a big reason they’ve been investing so heavily in low power on-chip machine learning, since the real hard part of AR is running scene recognition in real time on a wearable, though the display technologies have a way to go also. In the long run, I think there will be fundamental limits to how crazy of a product experience can be enabled by worn glasses, and an approach which moves with the eye and is completely full-field, and also works when the eyes are closed, will be superior and one of those truly psychedelic product moments when it’s possible.
[snip]
As a cat person, I would be remiss in not asking about how your cats are doing. Curious if thinking about how cats (and other animals) perceive and process their environment played some influence in the Science Eye?
Our cats are doing great! And there’s even a conference room in our office outfitted with cat furniture; employees can bring in their cats from time to time. (Early Google invited employees to bring in their dogs, and we’ve too tried to be as pet friendly as practical.) Thinking about animal perception didn’t necessarily influence the design of the Science Eye, but it is super fascinating to think about how perception varies as you go down the evolutionary tree and eventually end up as the basic fundamental atoms of perception.
[snip to end]
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