An artificial eye, which has a structure and functions exactly like a human eye, has been unveiled by Leilei Gu and colleagues, at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It is designed as a hemisphere consisting of light sensitive nanowires. These imitate the photoreceptor cells in human eyes very well. This device has the potential to produce images at higher resolutions than the human eye and could lead to significant new advances in robotics.
80% of the information we perceive from our environment, we do so using our eyes. They give us a field of view as wide as 160°, quickly adapt to different lighting and visibility conditions, and resolve details as small as 30 cm from 1 km away. This happens because of our retinas, which are concave cells that contain 10 million photoreceptor cells per square centimetre.
Advances in robotics have made it possible to imitate several human body parts, however a successful attempt in creating an artificial eye has so far been only a dream. The main reason for this is the flat configuration of our image sensors, which makes it impossible to imitate our hemispherical retinas.
This problem was overcome by using perovskite nanowires, which served as light-sensitive electrodes, mimicking human retinas. The wires were deposited onto the inside surface of a porous, hemispherical shell of aluminium oxide. The nerves behind our eyes were mimicked by liquid metal wires, which attached to the hemispherical arrangement.
The current prototype of this design has a nanowire arrangement that creates 100 pixels – enough to reconstruct images of different letters projected onto the device’s lens. This is far inferior to human eyes; however the researchers speculate that, with a dense enough arrangement of nanowires, this artificial eye could produce images 10 times clearer than those produced by our eyes!
An eye like this could help in a multitude of areas. It could come in handy to create human-like robots capable of carrying autonomous tasks and interacting with human beings! This design could also aid in creating prosthetic eyes for those with vision impairments, potentially, curing blindness!