Are there cameras which capture what you are seeing through your eyes?

Factual Questions
1

First, just want to say hi, being that this is my first post.

Now that we’re acquainted, on to my question:

I’m thinking that it would be great to have a camera which shoots, as accurately as possible, an image that matches what I’m currently seeing. I’m envisioning something “wearable” – something along the lines of a lightweight device which you affix (say, to your eyeglasses) such that the lens is pointing directly along your line of sight.

Now, this in and of itself would be fairly easy; however, at this point, you’d have a camera that is taking a photo of whatever your head is facing. To truly get a shot of what you were “looking at”, the camera would have to take the current “status” of your eyes into account.

Assuming this is an eyeglass-mounted device, then, the camera would have to be able to determine what your eyes are doing at the moment you take the shot. Presumably, this would involve a tiny secondary camera which takes an image of your eyes, and then passes the data to a microprocessor which adjusts the angle and focal length of the main camera.

Thus, based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of how the external appearance of ones eyes is related to what one is looking at, the device would be looking at the position of the pupils (to determine what direction one is looking), for starters. Secondly, the device would have to determine what the eyes are focusing on – perhaps determinable via the dilation of the pupil? It seems that the direction in which you were looking would be fairly easy to determine; its the focal length that I’m not clear on.

Whew. Before I get too long-winded here, let me sum up my question:

(a) Does such a camera already exist?

and

(b) If not, how difficult would it be to produce something along the lines of what I’m describing?
-Mike

2

As for the focal lenght, that wouldn’t be an issue, off the top of my head I wan’t to say what we see is roughly equal to a 30 or 40mm prime lens. What would be difficult it to tell what the eye was focusing on. The reason is that this gadget would HAVE to be in your line of sight for it to work properly (I don’t know what you would call the issue that you would have…something along the lines of parallax I suppose). So it would have to have a small monitor for your eye to look at so you know what your looking at (does that make sense). That would mean you would be focusing on that one spot and not something else.

I suppose I could see this as being possible, but not really worthwhile. Seems like somthing a grad student would do as a project.

3

There are Helmet Cameras that you can use with a solid state video recorder. Is that what you have in mind?

4

I think it could be done reasonably properly with two cameras; a wide angle one mounted as close to your eyes as possible, facing forwards; a second one looking at your eyeball - a computer could analyse the direction your eye is pointing and selectively crop the image from the wide angle forward facing camera. I expect this could even be done in real time today.
Parallax issues due to the camera not being directly in your line of sight would be minimal for objects beyond, say, arms length - perhaps nonexistent if it could be mounted on the bridge of a pair of glasses.

I’m remembering a TV documentary about psychology in which people had to wear equipment not unlike the above, but instead of cropping the image in real time, the footage was analysed afterwards and a crosshair was superimposed on the scene, showing what the subject had been looking at.
They put different people in different situations such as shopping and just walking along the street, but the interesting one was men meeting women - the men’s eyes were cycling rapidly between eyes-breasts-crotch-breasts-eyes

5

Professor Steve Mann is on top of this sort of thing. IIRC he wears such a device 24/7. There is a video of him with one of the latest models here: here

6

I think not quite yet, although I could be wrong. Slapping a couple of cameras on the head is easy, but real time eye tracking is still hard:
A Video-Based System for Tracking Eye and Head Movement
Eye-Movement Tracking Using Compressed Video Images

Still, these devices look like they might be closing in on the camera you want.

7

Is there were a way to “decode” the signal that the nerve endings in your eyes send to your brain. It seems to me that the easiest way to solve this problem would be to use the eye as the camera. Is this remotely feasable?

8

Not a chance. There are about 1.2 million nerve fibers in each optic nerve, and you’d have to figure out a way to tap the signal from each of them. Barring some very elegant nanotech, the sheer number of connections involved would make it impossible to fit such a device inside the head.

9

[hijack]
Just the other day I was wondering if eye transplants were possible, as I had never heard of it happening. Can I assume from your post that transplants are not possible and this is the reason why?
[/hijack]

10

Well, it’s easy to find papers with titles like Optic Nerve Regeneration With Return of Vision in Anurans (frogs) or Functional recovery of vision in regenerated optic nerve fibers. (cats), but no one seems to have managed a complete transplant. That’s probably more due to a lack of understanding of all the growth factors involved than an actual wiring problem.
Reportedly, the brain itself will handle the remapping of new inputs into a coherent visual field: Artificial Vision for the Blind by Connecting a Television Camera to the Visual Cortex. That would allow transplants without worry about the details of every single connection, but the only way to tap the whole visual signal for external manipulation is to tap each individual neuron.

11

Our brain compensates as we move for the movements of our eyes through space.

No camera mounted to the body or head or face can do that. None except a Steadicam. Shown in extremely long mode, this device completely eliminates body motion from the movement of the camera, allowing it to glide through the air as though you were… looking through someone’s eyes !

Imagine the point of view of another person, walking shoulder to shoulder. Their eyes are about 18 inches off center from yours. That is what the Steadicam allows.

I’ve operated Steadicam for 20 years.

Cartooniverse

12

I believe that as of right now we don’t have the foggiest idea as to how vision works. That is, how the brain turns the electrical signals into vision. Crick, of Watson and Crick the DNA guys, was working on this but I don’t know how far the work got.