ABSTRACT: For those of us without any vision impairment, the world is a visually rich environment; and we have learned to base many of our judgments and actions upon what we are able to see.  For those of us without this ability however, the task becomes that much more difficult.  There are several options I believe however in the future in which cameras can aid in the endeavor towards helping vision impairment become a thing of the past.

(1) THE CONTACT CAMERA

The notion of a camera as portable is important in our increasingly mobile society.  The ubiquitous cell phone camera has literally infiltrated the market so much so that the cost of production is minimal yet the instant feedback is intensely satisfying.  Yet despite the fact that we most always have this camera with us given our latent dependencies on cell phones, it still requires the explicit step of centering this camera over our frame of view which at times can be inconvenient and conspicuous.  Enter the world of nanotechnology and biological enhancement to create the Contact Camera.

Current research is being done at the University of Washington to create the Bionic Contact Lens which opens up possibilities of bringing the digital world into our everyday environment, projecting information and data before our very eyes.  Digital contact lenses could be embedded with microscopic electronic circuity that will allow the wearer to not analyze their environment the way a camera sees it in terms of light levels, GPS positioning, and other metadata, but also in honing the eye to a new way of perception  and memory.  Gone are the days of forgetting a certain event or object, the contact camera would be able to instantly transfer data over a wireless network to a databanks that would become warehouses of images, memories, emotions, information and more.

I believe that there could be further implementations of the camera that would be used towards the possible use of the contact camera as enabling the blind to see.  Research done at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies has shown that projecting images past the damaged parts of the eye directly onto the retina are registered and recognized by the brain, enabling people to see.   Their current prohibitive areas are currently cost and the size of the machine used for this technology which the contact camera could possibly resolve.

(2) CAMERA IN THE THIRD-DIMENSION!

Computer vision is already trained to reconstruct 3D environments from one or several images which can be simply a set of points in space or reconstructing a more complex surface model.  Though currently heavy in its implementation, future models of a camera could possibly quickly produce 3D physical models to be read by the blind along with a voice recording device that would provide additional information.  Although only a conceptual prototype for now, the Touch Sight camera uses these ideas by using a Braille display sheet which than displays a 3D image by embossing the surface, allowing the user to touch their photo.