yesterday at siggraph 2006 in boston i tried on the forehead retina system, a headband with a grid of 512 electrodes that stiimulate the skin on the forehead through a conductive gel pad with the ‘image’ captured through a video camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses. the idea is to provide sight to those without it, by ‘feeling’ the field of view with the touch sense. the feeling is quite brusque, like being scratched with long nails, and you can distinctly make out a white line on a black background (like the primitive visual cortex can) but nothing more. real-world scenes are too noisy and give a feeling that disctinctly resembles a sinus headache. this work offers slightly more discreteness and portability than the similar tongue-based system, it may never lead to an effective vision aid because acuity and pattern recognition for the skin are generally weak.
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