Every now and then, I come up with some outrageous idea that I really wish was possible. One that I’ve been thinking of is if our eyes could be cameras. I absolutely love to take pictures and I try to keep my camera on me at all times. Sometimes, things just happen too fast for it to be pulled out, turned on, aimed, and shot. So many brilliant pictures and shots have been lost that way. To some extent it preserves the beauty of life, making living in real time worth so much more than trying to live through still shots. However, those are often the very moments you really want to remember and be able to look back and share with others.
So my idea was that if there could be a pressure point with the shutter button at your temple, so whenever you want to capture something, all you need to do is press your temple. Shots recorded from there would be taken exactly as the eyes see, with no altered colors and all the details we would normally distinguish with the naked eye – none of that distortion junk that happens with most cameras. The downside to this would be not having a flash to illuminate things when it’s just too dark. But generally, I find that I like things just the say my eyes see them.
Of course, this begs the question of how technology could possibly make this happen. And in short, that is why this goes under my "ludicrous" ideas bag and gets stuffed away in a dusty corner for an indefinite period of time. The plausibility of converting your eye into a camera without damaging your vision, making things captured just the way you see it (which would likely require access to your brain), then finding a way to store it without all kinds of crazy equipment is just nil. Even if it could be developed, the legal issue of recording things without consent could crop up as a greater and greater issue. Plus, the time and resources would likely not be worth the investment.
Sadly, I have to resort to just pretending, in my mind’s eye, that I can capture a moment so beautiful and memorable just the way it is to me. I’ll never have anything concrete to share with others, so I guess I’ll just have to work on improving my memory. This type of thing is borderline robotic, almost as if you’d have to start to convert the human body into a machine. Now that is certainly not the direction I think we should be going in (or ever go in). I guess we have an imagination for a reason: to let us live out all those silly things that cannot be, should not be, or will not be.