Seeing the unseen

Elizabeth Goldring, an artist and poet at MIT, has struggled with varying degrees of blindness for decades. She had been functionally blind for many months when her doctor used a scanning laser opthalmoscope (SLO) to focus a laser beam onto her retina. He projected the word "sun" directly onto Goldring's retina, and for the first time in many years, she could see a word clearly. "After not having seen anything for many months, I was amazed," she told The Scientist.

Immediately, she saw the possibilities for the blind. She contacted Robert Webb, the inventor of the SLO and a physicist at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard, and the two began working to build a "seeing machine." Over the past 20 years, they have created many prototypes. The first seeing machine was bulky, cost $200,000, and could only display black and white images. The latest version, the seeing machine camera, is a mere 5 square inches, can be made for about $500, and displays full color images. A bit like a video projector, it focuses images from a digital-point-and-shoot camera into the retina using a technique called Maxwellian viewing.



Goldring said that her work isn't simply about aiding the blind in useful, everyday tasks. You couldn't read a book with the machine, for instance. "But why would you want to read a book, really, when there are other devices available to read books to you?" she said. Rather, it's about giving blind people access to a panoply of visual experiences; revealing the face of an old friend, or capturing a flower in bloom. Peering at distant galaxies, for instance, is normally off-limits to the blind, because "our impression of outer space, unless we're astrophysicists, is visual," she said.

Goldring has also tried to convey her machine-aided experience of vision to the wider world. To that end, she created "retina prints" that overlay images from the seeing machine with pictures of her retina; a way of capturing her in the act of seeing. Seth Riskin, manager of the MIT Museum who collaborated with Goldring on a project called Eye Dance, once viewed the poet in a performance where a picture of her dear friend's face was beamed onto her retina. For the first time, she clearly saw the details of her friend's face. "It was a very emotional moment," Riskin told The Scientist. "That kind of encapsulates something about who she is and what she does. She had made her vision experience visible to other people in the room, because she is going through the experience of seeing in a public way that gives insight into the value of seeing the way she does."