"Participants in the study had completely lost their central sight, retaining only limited peripheral vision, making it 'like having two black discs in your eye....'"

"During the two-hour operation under local anaesthetic, patients had jelly-like substance removed from their eye to make space for the implant, which was inserted under the centre of their retina. About a month later, once the eye had settled, the chip was activated. Patients were given augmented-reality glasses containing a video camera connected wirelessly to a small computer, which was attached to their waistband. The video camera projected the scene to the chip, which converted it into an electrical signal, passing through the optical nerve cells into the brain, where it was interpreted as vision...."

From "Vision restored in blind patients with revolutionary microchip/A tiny retinal implant connected to smart glasses allows patients who had completely lost their central sight to see again" (London Times).

"The first time Irvine tried to read after the operation, she was given a children’s book, and struggled to make out the words. 'Initially, I couldn’t see it at all,' she said. 'It was like a big cloud on the page; it was all just white. But I thought to myself: there’s writing on this page, I’m going to bloody well see it and I’m going to keep going until I do. And then one day I started to see edges and I thought, "Here we go, here we go."'"