Neil Harbisson is officially the first Cyborg in Britain. The Dartington College student is completely colour-blind and has been fitted with a camera attached to a laptop, which converts colour to sound. Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds.
But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college. Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the "sound" of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player. |
