Artificial Vision for the Blind - Future Trends - Day 1

Daniel’s  talk was about “Leveraging Markets to Solve Our Greatest Challenges” and he spoke about his passion for entrepreneurship. Daniel is under 30, but his Unreasonable Institute is a startup accelerator trying to to help companies that want to solve BFPs - "Big F*ing Problems." One of the group's newest ventures is taking the Institute's process to sea on a giant experimental expedition - a 100 day cruise around the world with 10 of the most promising entrepreneurs and 20 mentors to launch these companies in global markets.

One example of the kind of people joining Daniel and his group at sea: A startup that has developed artificial vision for the blind. Without invasive surgery, their device will literally give people who have never known sight the ability to see, in three dimensions. And its been successfully tested. Just listen to this example, as Daniel told it... an elderly woman in her 70s born without eyes uses the device for 5 weeks letting her brain "adapt" to it. After this time she is able to walk up to her house and see it for the first time. She opens her door, sees the long hallway ahead, walks to the table at the end of the hallway, picks up the book sitting on the table, and flips through the pages SEEING the letters on the pages. This woman has just been giving artificial vision. She has no eyes. Mind blown.

This is the type of radical innovation that we expect to see in the future, not today. Thanks Daniel for opening our eyes to the kind of work you and the Unreasonable Institute are doing to bring the future to us a little bit faster.

originally published at The Trends and Foresight blog.

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