Aw yeah, Star Trek engineer Geordi LaForge's visor is coming.

On Star Trek, Geordi LaForge (played by aka Mr. Reading Rainbow's Lavar Burton) was blind and wore this coolio new fangled visor (see left, which by the way I always thought was a cut up car air filter but I digress) that not only allowed him to see but allowed him to see in different spectra.

Well, there's a new operation that can provide sight to people who've lost their eyes. A tiny camera is attached to a pair of glasses, that camera sends signals to a portable computer. Now here's where it gets super cool Sci-Fi, that computer then stimulates electrodes which have been implanted in the brain through a cord attached to the head. Talk about "hard wired"! So far about 16 people worldwide have received the procedure.

It's by no means perfect, yet. Patients can only "see" flashes of light and outlines of objects, however once you realize that those patients never had ANY type of site until the procedure then its pretty cool. The procedure, the first to reverse blindness in people without eyes, is yet to be approved in the U.S. There are other procedures, profiled in Wired Magazine a couple of years ago, that give sight by implanting the camera directly into the eye and hard wiring to the bran and a processor computer. Isaac Asimov would be so proud.