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Behind the bionic eye

This week's story was just another eye-opening experience for our contributor, who is also an engineer.

July 10, 2014 2:13PM ET

by Kosta Grammatis @kgram

Doing a story on bionic eyes was a dream come true for me. Why? Several years ago I worked on a little bionic eye project myself, so hanging out with the geniuses who are using advanced technologies to restore vision was in a word: awesome.

For my "eyeborg project," myself and a team of others created a video camera enabled prosthetic eye for a documentary film maker named Rob Spence. He wanted to film from the perspective of his missing eye, and we made it happen.

Kosta walks with Lisa Kulik, who had electrodes implanted on her retina during an innovative surgery.

For "TechKnow," I sat down with Dr. Mark Hamayun, the co-inventor of the technology behind Second Sight's retinal prosthesis, called Argus II, and we chatted about how the technology works.

I also met with Lisa Kulik, a woman who lost her eyesight due to retinal pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease, and was slated to receive the Argus II. The technology is relatively new and very few people have had the opportunity to have their vision restored—but our cameras got to see it all!