VR For The Blind?

There are articles that describe VR in being instrumental in helping restore sight but the question I have to ask is do you think someday in the future it might be possible to tap into I guess it would be the optic nerve via some type of interface so that people who can not see can experience Virtual Worlds? I realize the technology may be decades away and who knows by then they may have found a way to restore vision even in people who have been blind since birth, but it would be wonderful if they two could experience what VR is like don't you think?

Wetwire implants would be the holy grail, a la Geordie LaForge (Happy 50th Star Trek!). I would think that the far future would be something like that. In my lifetime, I don't think Moore's Law will even help get us there.

I worked for a company related with Carl Zeiss Meditec, it's division from Carl Zeiss where all the human eye healthcare, treatments, studies and equipments are developed for Carl Zeiss, one of the things everybody was speaking is that there are a lot of opportunities to improve how the sight problems are treated, but there just a little investment on that because the people just want to see a little better and is willing to wear glasses and the amount of blind people is too little to make the market profitable.

I don't think the big fishes are working on it, but maybe some university or some little companies may be working on it already, there is kind of easy to electrically produce color in the optic nerve, so if the problem is with something related to the retine there is a chance, but if the problem is inside the brain I don't think we will see that in our lives.

Iirc, magnetic stimulation of the brain can cause hallucination of colors, even in blind people (I think). Not sure if there's a safe way of doing it, or even if it can be controlled precisely enough, but that could possibly be a route that doesn't require tapping into a physical nerve. And thus might come about a bit sooner.

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Being sort of a Trekkie myself I didn't think about Geordie and I would hope something could be developed in my lifetime given it's already half way through, I"m not holding my breath :)

That's very interesting about Zeiss, I think you are right if it's in the brain given how slow technology has been in that area probably not in our life time sadly.

Is this stimulation done with like a MRI type magnet or something similar?

https://www.athenabrand.com/wp-conte...ster_Spock.gif

Another aspect I found about it, I think it's well explained here:

http://forums.vrheads.com/vr-news-di...-reality-8602/

And as I always said, we are only looking the tip of the Iceberg of what is next to come.

VR can still be pretty cool for the blind even with just the 3d audio aspect of it.. It can create some neat experiences even if it doesn't necessarily fix eye sight.

Maybe a limitation for the real 3D audio in a blind person are the other parts of the body which reacts to the sounds as the skin ( http://www.Scientificamerican.com/ar...nd-perception/ ) and bones vibration giving the perception of low frequencies and other stuff.