Canadian to make film with robot eye

Rob Spence, a Toronto-based filmmaker who was blinded in the right eye when he was a teenager, is turning his prosthetic eye into a camera he'll use while filmingan upcoming documentary.

"I want to turn my prosthetic eye into a wireless video camera," he told CBC News Wednesday.

Spence, 36, had his eye removed three years ago and replaced with an artificial one. A fan of The Six Million Dollar Man, the 1970s television series about a man with bionic body parts, he said got the idea when he realized that something as small as his cellphone camera could fit into his empty eye socket.

He intends to use his high-tech eye to interview people for a documentary he's making about his concerns about the global spread of surveillance cameras. His subjects won't know they are on camera.

"When you bring in a camera, people change," said Spence, who has been writing about the project on his blog, Eyeborg.

The wizard behind the project is University of Toronto engineering professor Steven Mann, who has also expressed concerns about surveillance. He is in the final stages of designing a camera about the size of a pea, a battery and a wireless transmitter, which will be inserted in the prosthetic eye.

"What happens is whatever you experience is transmitted, so it's like you're inside the person's head," Mann told CBC News.

The camera will be embedded in a prosthetic eye shell being made by Toronto ocularist Philip Bowen. It will look like a regular eye and should notbe noticed by Spence's subjects.

Spence starred in the 2007 documentary Let's All Hate Toronto, which was commissioned by CBC Newsworld. His documentaries have appeared on Discovery, Vision and SpaceTV.