I expect to get some artificial eyes when my originals wear out in 200 years.
Last I checked, they were actually making fairly good progress towards that.
The last I'd heard on the matter, was an article which had been mentioning they'd managed to make implants which were basically light sensitive receptors which fed the data back to the brain through the optic nerve.
They'd gotten a matrix of 24 points I believe to work fairly reliably, but it took a long time for the recipient to get used to the awkward new form of vision, and they could only make out basic shapes. For someone who had NO sight at all though, it was an incredible breakthrough.
They were supposed to be working on a matrix closer to 200ish points, to vastly increase the resolution.
Within a few years, should be possible to manage several thousand or million points, which would allow vision to be nearly that of normal once more, though I believe it'd be lacking true depth perception, and lacking colour. Even so, it's a nice step in the right direction. I'll see if I can find any more about that now while I think of it =3
EDIT: There we go! Founds it =3
nsf.gov - Special Report - Science Nation | Eyesight to the Blind
Camera attached to glasses gets worn, and feeds information directly to a microchip attached to the retina. Currently only has a 60 pixel resolution, but the hardware's designed to be able to accept software upgrades, so they could just replace the camera and software on the chip, and allow much better vision capacity.
Sight shows up as just flashes of light, and only shows in high contrast areas (an example being the moon vs dark night sky), but it's enough that they can 'see' basic shapes enough to avoid walking into a tree or such.
Very nice stuff, and would be nice to see that technology enhanced further.
Narrow the camera down from 'glasses' sized, to just 'contact lens' size, increase resolution, add colour detection and so on, and all of these things are possible over time.
Why WOULDN'T we want to be able to do this? XD