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Phoenix666 writes:

Various sight recovery therapies are being developed by companies around the world, offering new hope for people who are blind. But little is known about what the world will look like to patients who undergo those procedures.

A new University of Washington study seeks to answer that question and offers visual simulations of what someone with restored vision might see. The study concludes that while important advancements have been made in the field, the vision provided by sight recovery technologies may be very different from what scientists and patients had previously assumed.
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"Electrically stimulating the retina excites all of these cells at the same time, which is very different from how these cells respond to real visual input."

There are similar issues with optogenetics, Boynton said. "The optogenetic proteins that are currently available produce sluggish responses over time, and they are limited in the number of different cell types that they can separately target," he said.

These limitations in both technologies mean that patients may see fuzzy, comet-like shapes or blurred outlines, or they may experience temporary visual disappearances if an object moves too fast.

Original Submission