Wouldn't it be great if you could take your eyeballs out of their sockets? You could look around corners! You could look two ways at once! You could see what needed to be fixed on your car engine without having to dismantle it! You could check what's clogging the garbage disposal and keep an eye on the switch at the same time!-- fence, Jul 31 2000 Baked http://www.april-fo...=1&page=0&Itemid=28This guy has too much time on his hands... [LoriZ, May 18 2010] Better yet eyeballs http://2leep.com/news/27939/9/James Kuhn es un artista americano que tiene una curiosa forma de demostrar su arte: su propia cara. [LoriZ, May 21 2010] How about a fake "eyeball" with a camera, connected to VR goggles?-- egnor, Jul 31 2000 It seems that this would just put our eyeballs in MUCH more danger than they are now. Put your eyeball in the engine? In the garbage disposal? Why not just throw it into the Sun to see what it looks like inside? The corner idea is good, though. Also, you could turn your eyeball around and look into your brain if you provided the proper light source.-- f_kedge, Aug 31 2000 we just have to figure out a way to lengthen our optical nerves....-- celizafinn, Oct 16 2000 The Brother from Another Planet, John Sayles' brilliant early work, showing he promise he would fulfill later with some of the greatest films ever made (Men With Guns, Lone Star, Limbo)-- globaltourniquet, May 10 2001 The army have simply optical fibre based camera/lens/display jobies to let them see into places they can't otherwise. (Hostage situation etc.)
It's the same technology used for keyhole surgery.
Why not use that with a pair of those tv glasses?-- CasaLoco, May 10 2001 You could always use a little dentists mirror to see round corners etc...-- DaveSt, Aug 25 2001 Another way we could take our eyeballs out of our sockets is if they had a antennae installed in them, and they transmitted signals back to the brain. But how would we see two things at once, and how would be fit the antennaes...? Imagine people walking around with big tall hats hiding antennae under them. Or people clawing at their skills because they accidenatlly made the antenna come out of the eyeball while it was still in their head...::shudder:: Agh, pardon me :)-- Turin, Nov 23 2001 It would be better if you could extend your neck eight or ten feet, then you can yell at what you are looking at.-- jimk, Sep 03 2002 If you take the eyes out of their sockets, you lose the nice neat parallax relationship between them. Our brains are built (either genetically or by learning) for processing signals from two eyes that are a fixed distance apart. Move the eyes around independently, and you have problems resolving the 2D images into a partial 3D model (partial because you can't see everything, such as the other side of objects. You could call it 2.5D)
This isn't unbakable, however. You simply need to create a brain that is capable of processing disparate signals and rendering a partial model from them. While you're at it, why keep with the assumption of two eyes? Keep the two eyes in your head, but allow for extra eyes to augment that signal with images from other directions.
The tricky part is that you need to know *where* the other eyes are. If you're holding it in your hand, your brain roughly knows where your hand is. If it's floating in the air or sitting on a surface, you need something more exact.
You could use some localized version of GPS, by broadcasting timed signals from various parts of your body, including all the detatched appendages. Each eyeball would listen to these timing signals and work out where it is relative to your main body and all other parts, and send this signal back to your brain along with its compressed video stream.
The eyeball would therefore need to include quite a bit of processing power along with the antenna. Since eyeballs are also fragile, i suggest they also have a tough skin or crispy shell (although anyone suggesting recipes will have their eyeballs removed).
So i envision something that would look a little like a scotch egg. It contains an eyeball in the middle, surrounded by a small amount of brain matter and an efficient extruded antenna - probably approximating to a fractal antenna, since evolution is good at finding such solutions.
The main brain would need a larger antenna, and processing power for all these extra eyeballs, taking up extra space. I imagine though, that if parts of the body are able to communicate remotely, you would probably save a significant amount of space on the large, bulky nerve pathways.
The biggest remaining problem is cancer - all this radiation going though your brain can't be a good thing. I can think of one solution to that, which is to make neurons into non-DNA carrying cells, like red blood cells. They are extruded in place by stem cells, which are shipped in from a common stem cell gland. This way they could be replaced or repaired by shipping in new stem cells whenever the brain got damaged.
It's assumed the brain software is upgraded to be resiliant enough that information patterns survive the loss of a few cells, provided new neurons are created to take up the pattern. The stem cell glands would also help to repair other injuries, including ones that are currently fatal or irreparable such as the loss of an arm or leg. I expect they would also help prevent infertility due to injury.
Now, the implications for this remote neurology system on telepathy would be interesting, particularly when you consider the political aspect of evolving in a social context...
Can you spell WIBNI? How many mouths can you say it with at once?-- sadie, Sep 04 2002 I dunno, I have seen a woman on the Letterman show and a guy on the Leno show who could pop their eyes out of their sockets. Incredibly odd looking and, frankly, really disturbing.-- bristolz, Sep 04 2002 Should i post that lot as a new idea? Radio Neurology?-- sadie, Sep 04 2002 you could implant a screen(s) in the back of your pet chamaeleon-- chud, Sep 04 2002 I know there is a guy who is fitting a camera into his fake eye, that relays information to an external computer but the hygiene issues alone make this idea just unwanted. (-)-- MisterQED, May 21 2010 random, halfbakery