Eye technology

Unlike the popular stereotype, fly eyes do not form thousands of little images – instead, they perceive one very fuzzy image of the world around it.

Yet, with a brain the size of a grain of rice and only this fuzzy image to go on, how do flies see well enough to avoid getting swatted by us, or to perform a precise landing on a flower waving in the breeze?

The answer, according to Dr. David O’Carroll from the University of Adelaide’s School of Molecular and Biomedical Science, is that flies have an exquisite sense of visual motion.

It is this sense of motion that has a team of university scientists and engineers led by Dr. O’Carroll, and known as the Visual Physiology Group, studying the brains and eyes of flies to develop artificial vision systems that one day may provide the basis for a bionic eye.

“As all animals move, the world moves past and so even stationary objects generate patterns of motion on our retina,” he said. “Our eyes move continually to track this motion and the motion itself provides a powerful cue as to what we are doing in the world, as well as where features are and how large they are.”