Bionic Eye Restores Sight to the Blind, How will the Armed Forces use this Technology?

In an ARTICLE recently scientist say that within 2 years an implanted retina will cure the two most common types of blidness. It uses 60 light-sensitive electrodes with the goal of eventually having 1000. Test subject of an earlier modle reported seeing light shapes and objects. ( the original modle only has 16 light-sensitive electrode compared with todays 60.

Now that this technology is out there, it is my belief, that there is/ or will be a modified verson with application in the armed forces. Special ops with super visoin, night vision, and thermal vision all "installed" in the soldiers eye. This technology could be the next best thing for our special ops and airmen (the last generation, as they will soon be replaced with computers and unmanned vehicles). What do you think?

[edit on 18-2-2007 by chrondoc]

Um, it's got a long way to go, doesn't it?

You're talking a whopper 8x8 resolution, in lovely phosphine green? Nope, don't see it for about, say, 200 more generations.

The other issue is that the human eye as an optical system really ain't all that great. It's just amazing you can grow a pretty good camera out of meat, but if you had the neural interface trick down to where you could actually get it to work WELL over a long period of time, I'd give that about 150 years, then you might want to think about replacing the entire eye to get some decent optics. Something like a Tleilaxu eye.

Of course, the bad part is that how the eye encodes the output to the visual centers isn't all that well understood, and probably isn't exactly the same from one person to the next. Obviously, with the nerves not being able to send transmissions faster than the low audio frequencies, there's a lot of compression and encoding going on, along with a really really wide output. If you wanted to drive the optic nerve directly, you'd have to have a little supercomputer with over a million outputs per eye.