Transhuman Vision Enhancement System
Ralf G. J. Knoll
Ralf G.J. Knoll (1963) is a seasoned independent management consultant and technology expert with 20 years of experience. His background is in electronics, physics, photonics, economics, innovation management, entrepreneurship, start-up culture, coaching and psychology, corporate ethics and philosophy. Further honorary and voluntary/political work comprises: member of the Economic Advisory Council for the Bavarian Union (DE), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), member of expert juries to judge high-tech start-ups (EU), member of SPIE, member of the Institute of Directors (IoD) and founder of the Philosophy Round-Table Symposium in Munich (DE). Ralf entered the start-up scene in 1997 and has to date been primarily involved in activities related to rendering services for venture capital firms (technical due-diligence & fostering their portfolio companies). Consequently, in 2014 he founded his own seed fund (KNOLL Capital Group Ltd, UK), which currently invests seed money in his start-up companies. Academia: MSc in engineering physics (applied physics Dipl.-Phys. Ing.) in Germany jointly with electronics (EE) / telecommunications (1990); a second MSc in Optoelectronic and LASER Devices from Heriot-Watt and St. Andrews University, UK (1994); Harvard University Boston, MA, USA, Micro and Macro Economy and Corporate Ethics/Philosophy (1995).
Showcasing the world’s first transhuman vision enhancement system (wearable tech) that enables the wearer to see everything, no matter how bad the ambient light conditions are – either against the sun, or instantly in the dark (without having the long dark adaptation time for > 30 seconds).
Our biological heritage is now a problem. To become a post-modern human, we must biohack our visual system and give ourselves an upgrade. Feed your eyes only with the essentials.
Summary
- Modern travel speeds exceed biological evolution, as the human iris takes up to 30 seconds to adjust to light changes, leading to significant safety risks and road accidents. - The Transhuman Vision Enhancement System reacts in one millisecond to level out light variations, keeping illuminance constant even when moving rapidly through tunnels or shadows. - This wearable technology improves safety and peak performance by eliminating glare from headlights or the sun while ensuring the eye is always pre-adapted to dark environments. - Advanced sensors distinguish between essential visual "signals" and unwanted "noise," filtering out harmful glare while feeding the eye only the light required for specific tasks. - The device provides therapeutic benefits for light sensitivity and migraines, allowing users to customize illumination set points and performance parameters via a mobile app.
Article
Transhuman Vision Enhancement System: Biohacking For Peak Performance And Safety
A Human Eye Built For Walking Met The Velocity Of The Modern World
At the Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, held on 18 May in Stockholm, Sweden, Ralf G. J. Knoll stepped onto the stage with a provocation that felt at once technical, philosophical and faintly unsettling: the human visual system, he argued, had been shaped for walking speed, not for tunnels, motorcycles, glare-struck roads and the violent fluctuations of modern light.
Knoll, founder and chief executive of Inoptech, framed the problem in evolutionary terms. “For more than two hundred thousand years of human evolution, our visual system has only been trained and built for walking speeds,” he said, urging the audience to grasp the mismatch between ancient biology and contemporary motion.
It was the sort of claim that lay at the heart of the summit itself, where self-optimisation met frontier technology. Yet Knoll’s presentation, titled *Transhuman Vision Enhancement System*, was not simply another futurist sales pitch. It was rooted in a tangible anxiety familiar to anyone who has driven into a dark tunnel at noon or squinted into the low, blinding sun on a winter road. Human sight, he said, did not fail because it was badly designed. It failed because the world had changed faster than the body.
The Dangerous Delay Hidden In Plain Sight
The central villain of Knoll’s talk was the pupillary response. In rapidly changing light, he said, the iris could take up to 30 seconds to adjust, an eternity when travelling at speed. In that interval, visibility collapsed, judgment wavered and accidents became more likely.
He described the moment with stark clarity: a rider or driver moved from bright sunlight into shade or into a tunnel, and the eye simply did not keep pace. “You are in big trouble when you run into dark areas,” he said.
Knoll linked that lag to impaired perception, poor decisions and fatal consequences on the road. His argument was blunt: modern transit had exposed a biological bottleneck. Wheels and wings had outpaced the eye.
The power of the presentation lay in the way it transformed an ordinary bodily process into a public safety issue. What most people accepted as a fleeting inconvenience, Knoll treated as an unaddressed design flaw in the human experience.
A Wearable Electronic Iris
His answer was what he called the world’s first transhuman vision enhancement system, a wearable device designed to stabilise the light reaching the eye in one millisecond. Not contact lenses, not implants, and not the camera-and-display apparatus often associated with cybernetic fantasy. Knoll was explicit on that point. This was eyewear.
The prototypes he showed were still bulky, he acknowledged, but functional. Their ambition was radical in concept if modest in form: to place electronics “in charge of your eye”.
Using a light-tight design, black foam and multiple photosensors, the system measured outside conditions continuously and adjusted incoming light before the biological eye had time to struggle. The effect, Knoll said, was to keep illuminance at the eye constant, flattening the violent spikes and drops that accompany movement through the built environment.
“We can react in real time to level out all variations in illuminance, keeping the light at the eye always constant no matter what happens outside,” he said.
It was, in essence, an externalised electronic iris, a technological intervention not to replace sight but to precondition it.
Immunity From Glare, Readiness For Darkness
The promise of the system was seductive in its simplicity. Imagine, Knoll said, being immune to glare from oncoming headlights or the deep-setting sun. Imagine entering darkness already adapted to it.
That was the trick his device attempted to perform. In daytime, it maintained a chosen level of illumination at the eye. At dawn or night, it shifted to something more discriminating, separating what he called “signal” from “noise”. Useful light, such as the screen of a phone or the essential contours of the road, would be allowed through. Harmful or distracting glare would be suppressed.
“Our anti-glare system can filter out the glare while feeding your eye only with the essentially required information,” Knoll said.
The language was revealing. This was not merely protection from brightness. It was curation of perception. The eye, in Knoll’s vision, should no longer be forced to absorb the chaos of the world unfiltered. It should receive only what mattered.
From Performance Tool To Therapeutic Aid
If the first appeal was speed and safety, the second was health. Knoll broadened the case for the technology beyond transport and athletic performance, pointing to people with migraines, light sensitivity or post-operative eye recovery needs.
Through a mobile app, users could set preferred illumination levels and tune the device to age, activity and visual demands. The concept of enhancement merged with that of accommodation. A product pitched in the language of transhuman upgrade was also presented as a means of relief for those whose eyes had become vulnerable to light itself.
This duality gave the presentation a more human register. It was not only about surpassing biology. It was also about caring for it.
The Human Plus Proposition
Knoll’s own biography seemed to explain the breadth of the pitch. A physicist and electronics specialist with further training in optoelectronics, economics and ethics, he arrived not as a narrow engineer but as a figure from the overlapping worlds of start-ups, philosophy and applied science. That eclecticism surfaced in the talk’s deeper message.
He was not simply proposing a product. He was advancing a worldview. “Give yourself an upgrade with the human plus,” he urged, presenting adaptation through technology as less a luxury than a necessity.
There was, beneath the technical details, a distinctly transhuman argument: if the body no longer matched the pace and intensity of contemporary life, then augmentation was not aberration but common sense.
And yet Knoll stopped short of the more invasive fantasies that often animate this field. When asked how soon the technology could be implanted in the eye, he pushed back. For now, he said, it was wearable technology, not an implant. The future might bring contact lenses loaded with electronics, but the challenge remained formidable.
That restraint mattered. It suggested a form of biohacking more pragmatic than theatrical, less interested in spectacle than in solving a sensory problem the species had quietly normalised.
A Glimpse Of The Near Future
By the end of the session, the question hanging in the room was not whether the idea sounded futuristic. It plainly did. The sharper question was whether this was one of those rare technologies whose futuristic sheen concealed an immediate and practical use.
Knoll believed it was. “The world’s first transhuman vision enhancement system can ensure perfect vision for peak performance, safety for everyone, and health recovery,” he said.
Perfect vision may have been an ambitious phrase for a prototype on display upstairs in an exhibition hall. But the unease he identified was real enough. Human beings had built a civilisation of speed while carrying senses calibrated for a slower earth. At the Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Ralf G. J. Knoll’s presentation offered one answer to that imbalance: not new eyes, but a new system around them.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm