Filmmaker Makes Movies with Micro-Camera Prosthetic Eye

Filmmaker Rob Spence needed a prosthetic eye -- so he figured, why not get a camera?

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on September 06 2010

Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence had been blind in one eye for years. But when doctors told him it was time to have the eye removed, he didn’t want to replace it with a creepy glass eye. Instead, he made the natural choice for his career: he had a videocamera put into the eye socket.

‘As soon as I knew the eye was coming out, I thought about the camera and I started making the calls,’’ Spence told the Sydney Morning Herald.

No one had ever used a videocamera to replace an eye before—but that didn’t mean people weren’t willing to try. The camera would be very expensive under normal circumstances, but a group of engineers were willing to volunteer their services because of the sheer novelty of Spence’s request.

The engineers built a 1.5 square millimeter camera, complete with circuit board, transmitter, and rechargeable battery. The camera is encased in clear acrylic, the same substance used for more conventional prosthetic eyes.

The footage from Spence’s eye-camera is similar to that of a cell phone camera. ‘The aesthetic, oddly, is very similar to the point of view of the Terminator from the first Terminator film, including a slight wavering of video, which is actually now part of film language to talk about surveillance and cyborgy stuff,’’ he said.

Now, Spence is using the camera to film a new movie—a documentary, quite literally, from his own point of view.

Filed under: Science, Weird,

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