visual jack in

“A half century of artificial-sight research has succeeded. And now this blind man can see,” reports Wired with an impressive, well written story about an american laboratory, which is working with cameras that bring vision directly by cables into the brain of a blind man:

From a few steps closer, I see that the wires plug into Patient Alpha’s head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel.
    “It’s called a percutaneous pedestal,” Dobelle tells me.
    All I can do is stare. The man has computer jacks sunk into both sides of his skull.

As a sidenote, just for the spice, here’s some Neuromancer (from where ‘to jack in’ comes) nostalgia:

The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card-board. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. (Gibson 1984: chpt 4)

GIBSON, WILLIAM FORD. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Penguin.
via entry at ethno::log
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