Most people would be devastated to lose one of their eyes, but Rob Spence saw it as an opportunity.
Rob, also known as the ‘Eyeborg’, was involved in a gunshot accident as a child, which required surgery to remove his eye.
“I was messing around with a 12 gauge shotgun [and] I tried to shoot a pile of cow crap, but I wasn’t using the gun properly,” he told CNN Business in 2011.
“I had my eye right against the gun like a cowboy in the movies and there was an accident,” Rob goaded.
Rob underwent multiple surgeries to try to salvage his eye, but it wasn’t until his cornea degraded several years later that he had to have it removed.
Instead of being discouraged, Rob immediately began making arrangements to replace his lost eye with a camera.
Kosta Grammatis, an independent radio-frequency engineer and designer, assisted Rob in designing his unique camera eye, which is a wireless camera that lies behind a prosthetic eye.
The contraption contained a micro transmitter, a small battery, a miniature camera, and a magnetic switch that Rob used to turn it on and off.
Martin Ling, an electrical engineer, then assisted them in developing a miniature circuit board that collects all of the camera’s data and transmits it to the rest of the world via a receiver, according to LiveScience.
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It is worth noting that the camera eye is not connected to Rob’s optic nerve.
Speaking with CNN, Rob acknowledged that he was concerned that people would believe he was’screwing with them’ when he first requested for help designing his camera eye, but he discovered that this was not the case.
“The great thing about engineers is that the love science fiction and pop culture, and this is a very science fiction-y/pop culture thing to do,” according to him.
Rob’s eye can record up to 30 minutes of footage without needing to be recharged. Rob, as a filmmaker, has exploited his incredibly unique point-of-view content in his work, which is one of the primary reasons he had the device developed.
Rob’s website lists various versions of his revolutionary camera eye.
Some variants have ‘a clear shell that displays the tech within, a realistic-looking one, and a red flashing Terminator version’.
Rob’s unique invention has set records, with his idea being recognized as the first bionic-camera-equipped artificial eye in the Guinness World Book of Records.
He won the prestigious award in 2009.
Rob was inspired by a Six Million Dollar Man action figure he possessed as a child, the filmmaker previously told BBC.
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