COULD SCIENCE DEVELOP MOODY’S MAD EYE?

Who gets your vote for the most badass wizard? Other than Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Snape, naturally. Is it Sirius Black, perhaps? Sirius, the animagus, looked like a cross between Ozzy Osbourne and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (also played by Gary Oldman). Or maybe it’s Gellert Grindelwald, the brilliantly talented (and brilliantly-named!) wielder of the Elder Wand, and known as the Second Most Powerful Dark Wizard of All Time. That’s some title. Or perhaps your pick of the wizardry crop is Alastor Mad-Eye Moody.

Considered by many to have been the most powerful Auror of all time, Mad-Eye was a master of magic, both offensive and defensive. In the first wizarding war and its aftermath, Mad-Eye battled and defeated dozens of deadly death eaters. And Voldemort considered Mad-Eye to be such a deadly enemy that he made him his prime target, of all the talented wizards and witches shielding Harry during the Battle of the Seven Potters.

Now Moody was most famous, of course, for his magical eye. A magical prosthetic that replaced an eye lost in battle, the eye was an electric-blue orb that sat in his empty eye socket. The eye was able to rotate through a full 360 degrees in Moody’s head, and enabled him to spy through anything, whether it was wood, cloaks of invisibility, or even through the back of his own mad bonce. Indeed, the eye seems to have been made just for Moody, as when Barty Crouch Jr. wore it, the eye got stuck in mid-whirl.

But what was the eye’s full range of function? In the movie version of The Goblet of Fire, the eye was seen to have a zoom function. And the fact that the eye was powerful enough to see through the Cloak of Invisibility, one of the Deathly Hallows, suggests that it may have been a very rare artifact indeed. The Cloak, according to legend, granted the owner true invisibility. As the origin of the eye was never known, it’s possible the eye was itself an ancient and very powerful artefact, matching the Deathly Hallows if not in fame or mythical status then certainly in power.

The Muggle Mad-Eye

So, what are the chances of a muggle Mad-Eye? We already live in an age where muggle technology can help restore vision to the blind. The science is simple enough. The tech works by a combination of an external eyeglass-mounted camera with a complex retinal implant. The micro-chipped camera interprets what it sees, and wirelessly runs the visual data to the implant, which houses 60 electrodes to feed information to the optic nerve, the nerve that discerns light, shape, and movement. The resulting vision isn’t quite the same as typical sight. The muggle sees contrast, and the edges of things, but in black and white only. The damaged cells in the eyes disable the natural ability to see light and color. But, with use, the brain can learn how to make sense of the signals, and convert them into images. Users are then able to read books, cross the street, or see images of their kids for the first time in years. Not only that, but scholars the world over are now working to enhance what they call a retinal prosthesis system, or a muggle Mad-Eye. The next generation of eyes will be able to see color, by using improved algorithms that gauge electrode data, and the device will give sharper images, enabling the kind of eyesight focus you get on computer screens, which can alter resolution and brightness. New muggle eye models have more electrodes, which means better resolution, and many eye researchers predict a fully functioning synthetic eye on the market by 2020.

The next big thing in eye tech will be to bypass the eye and go straight to the brain. This revolution in technology, where implants bypass the retinal layer and go directly into the visual region of the brain could mean a huge breakthrough for millions of visually-impaired muggles. The new eye tech may not be able to see through wood, cloaks of invisibility, or the back of a muggle head, but the device may enable a kind of superhuman ability, including telescopic sight, just like the zoom on Moody’s eye. Muggle brains can be taught how to interpret the powerful zoom functions of cameras. And that means muggle eye wearers could learn to see much closer or farther than the normal human eye. But it gets even more bionic. The muggle eye might be able to see more of the electromagnetic spectrum. That would not only include the visible region we are used to (from red, through orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, to violet), but also infrared. And that would mean an eye capable of heat-sensing ability, the capacity to detect some gases, and yes, even the ability to see through objects!

So, in the future, muggles might become a little like cyborgs, or walking science labs. Through a prosthetic eye, we might have available a whole range of apps and devices. An x-ray vision app might enable muggle military recruits to detect landmines on the terrain of battle. Doting parents might have an eye app that enables them to detect toxic gases in their kids bedrooms, in a similar way to the way carbon monoxide alarms work.

The muggle eye may even go beyond the magic of Moody’s eye. As images would be projected directly into the visual areas of the muggle brain, we may see things we never imagined. We might envision the millions of creeping microbes living on the human body. As the eye will never sleep, it could be set to guard us at all times of day and wake you at night if danger looms or light dawns outside. As the muggle eye would be Wi-Fi enabled, the wearer could record their day-to-day life and beam it straight online. Uh, oh. And your favorite movie or TV show could be streamed straight to your brain.

Currently, the muggle eye sees around 1 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s not a lot of this big old universe, when you think about it. But, in a future where muggle bodies are augmented by a device such as the eye, our experience of the cosmos will be utterly transformed.