Here you have a retina.

A 400 foot tall calving face breaking off.

Falling rocks present a danger to climbers.

This is a view of what's called the calving face.

The retina chip extracts four different kinds of information.

In other words, we're not literally replacing the components of the retina.

So you have an image, a retina, and a brain.

Helicopter in front of the calving face for scale, quickly dwarfed.

And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output.

We've just abstracted what the retina's doing with a set of equations.

The image projected in the retina is inverted.

The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here.

Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier, and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film.

But when it's moving back and forth, the retina picks up these changes.

If you look in the middle background, you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo yo.

We have some cameras on the south edge of the Ilulissat, watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat.

Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns?

A mile of retreat in 75 minutes across the calving face, in that particular event, three miles wide.

This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases.

The calving face is four and a half miles across, and in this shot, as we pull back, you're only seeing about a mile and a half.

To give you a little bit of a sense of scale, that calving face in this picture is about 325 feet tall. That's 32 stories.

The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off, but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet.

What you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse, right?

So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked, what was the retina seeing at that moment?

When this first came out, it was just a really exciting thing, the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all.

A week before we got to the workshop, a massive landslide, caused by Hurricane Stan, last October, came in and buried 600 people alive in their village.

The block was three fifths of a mile deep, and if you compare the expanse of the calving face to the Tower Bridge in London, about 20 bridges wide.

But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following.

Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?

So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer.

Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.

And so the encoder does just what I was saying it mimics the actions of the front end circuitry so it takes images in and converts them into the retina's code.

Light enters, hits the back of the retina, and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain, at the primary visual cortex.

And I'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina, which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball.

So a completely blind retina, even one with no front end circuitry at all, no photoreceptors, can now send out normal signals, signals that the brain can understand.

And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce.

And the chip I'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at Kareem Zaghloul, who's the student who designed this chip.

So when you look at something, like this image of this baby's face, it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina, on the front end cells here, the photoreceptors.

So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math.

Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code.

51 Days 52 Days Developing retina, nose and fingers The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.

Instead of doing this in software, or doing those kinds of algorithms, we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that's called the retina.

and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them.

The SBS hypothesis attributed the triad of symptoms to the physical rupture of blood vessels on the brain s surface and in the retina, and the tearing of nerve fibers within the brain.

So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders.