We can rebuild him. We have the technology.



Technically, that should be "her" not him, but we really do have the technology. Barbara Campbell really does have a bionic eye.  Barbara has the genetic disease of retinitis pigmentosa.  It is degenerative and she was blind by the time she was 30.  All of her the photoreceptor cells in her retina were gone.  She was sentenced to a lifetime in darkness.  Until, that is, this past year when at 56 Barbara got a reprieve.  Second Sight Medical Products, in a feat worthy of Steve Austin himself, rescued her with its prototype Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System.  Inside Technology Spectrum describes the process and equipment as follows:

The process that allows the blind to see starts with a pair of sunglasses, which sport a tiny video camera mounted in the bridge just above the nose. The camera captures an image and sends it down a wire to a visual processing unit hanging on the patient's belt. That VPU—which is a little larger than a smartphone—­converts the world's complexities into a 60-pixel image in black and white, which it sends back to transponders on the glasses. From there the image goes wirelessly to antennas wrapped around the sides of the eyeballs, and from there to the 60-electrode arrays that are tacked to the delicate retinas.

Barbara says she can make out streets and buildings.  And they are just getting started.  Hmmm.  Maybe she is more like Data on Star Trek . . .