How long before the bionic eye becomes available to the public?
I am hoping that there will be something available in the next five years. It might not be us. Now that might sound like a long time but given that we have been working on this for only five years, we feel like we are half way through this cycle. Just to make it very plain – and we have been very careful with any publicity because we don’t want people to think that we are about to have a product- what we have achieved is an important step forward. We took a slightly different approach to the one of some of our colleagues in the US. Normally, most of the groups that are working on the retina have put electrodes on it. The retina is like a film in a camera. It has a layer of cells that detect light and turn light into electrical signals. Those signals go to nerves that join up and form the optic nerve. Because the retina is very delicate and also because you have to open the eye, that approach involves some risk. Just imagine what might happen to someone with pieces of metal attached to
