No, almost certainly not. We can't even interface with nerve cells directly, effectively to operate limbs. That's many orders of magnitude less information than

No, almost certainly not. We can't even interface with nerve cells directly, effectively to operate limbs. That's many orders of magnitude less information than the optical nerve. Peripheral nerve interfaces that can actually get good performance are quite a way off. Plus, from what I remember there is a significant amount of preprocessing done before the optic nerve. But we don't really know what exactly it is. Edit: There actually are several projects that look at artificial retinas, making use of most of the eyes nervous system and only replacing the outermost layer: http://www.artificialretina.energy.gov/ http://www.artificialretina.energy.gov/ http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v16/n6/full/nmat4874.html http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v16/n6/full/nmat4874.html