A revolutionary step towards the bionic eye has been made. Yesterday scientists announced they had made a camera that can reproduce human vision.

John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues published some details on their discovery in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Nature.

The human eye is capable of focusing an image on a curved surface at the back of the eye. Usual cameras were never able to do so because of electronic materials that wouldn’t tolerate being curved.

Rogers and his team say they have developed a way to have a flat sensor adhere to a curved shape, similar to the surface of the back of a human eye. Traditional camera makers on the other hand use multiple lens arrangements to avoid distortion.

Scientists explained that this is the first time anyone has built a curved light-sensitive surface for a digital device of this sort and the breakthrough opens up the possibility of attaching similar sensors to parts of the human body.

"The work opens new possibilities for advanced camera design. It also foreshadows artificial retinas for bionic eyes similar in concept to those in the movie The Terminator and other popular science fiction," said a spokesman for the University of Illinois.

The camera is also the same size as a human eye. But to achieve the performances of an eye, it uses a mesh of wires.

For now, the device only has 256 light-sensitive pixels but a camera of this sort with far more pixels is sure to be designed in the future.