As research goals go, it is bold with perhaps a touch of the miraculous. For more than twenty years, Professor Gregg Suaning has been working to bring sight to the blind. Though in the early days, the idea was almost all he had.

“We were dismantling radios and car electricals to make the equipment we needed,” Suaning says, obviously enjoying the memory. “One time we were making bespoke electrodes and we ended up using a capacitor out of a big, old‑style television.”

Those early hurdles have long been cleared and today, Suaning’s work is at a point where the broad technology of delivering a sense of sight exists. In principle, it’s not unlike the cochlear implant and related technologies which now help millions of hearing‑impaired people.

A camera on a pair of glasses collects the visual information which is then sent to a mobile phone and processed. The result is sent wirelessly to a microchip implanted in the retina which decodes the wireless signal and sends electrical impulses to the part of the brain that produces vision: the visual cortex.

While the technology might be cochlear-like, the degree of difficulty is many times greater because vision is so much more information dense than sound.

Where hearing technologies can deliver a more than acceptable result using 14 channels of information, Suaning’s work currently uses 100 channels with more limits in the process of being pushed.

Still, the challenge plays to Suaning’s natural impulses since he grew up wanting to be a motor mechanic before discovering mechanical engineering then biomedical engineering. In fact, he was an engineer at Cochlear in its very early days, and it was there that he set himself the goal of helping blind people see.

“It hasn’t been easy,” says Suaning in his Australian-inflected San Franciscan accent, having met his Australian wife in a Jerusalem Youth Hostel.

“Keeping in mind that full vision is like a million channels of information, it really helps that the brain can also make a lot out of very little.”

This was demonstrated in 2014 when the sight technology was still cumbersome, and lab bound. As part of national project where researchers were developing an Australian bionic eye, three blind volunteers came to a Melbourne University lab, and were implanted with a rudimentary electrode array and connected to laboratory-based electronics.

“Two didn’t get much of a reaction, but one of them did really well,” remembers Suaning. “Going through an obstacle course she avoided and even identified obstacles, including a chair. Though it wouldn’t have been a fully realised chair, just a few dots. But her brain filled in enough of the gaps.”

This represents a key challenge for the research: making the visual information captured and communicated actually meaningful for the blind person, meaningful being a key term here.

“We’re working towards something so blind people can navigate the world,” Suaning says. “To help them recognise objects, avoid obstacles and move about more confidently. Will it ever be the full visual experience sighted people have? Thinking about the huge advances there’ve been in video game technology, it might be possible, but we’re not there yet.”