What you're hearing is a man named Larry Hester seeing for the first time in 33 years.

He's in a medical office surrounded by doctors and his family and he's wearing a special pair

of glasses and staring at a bright light.

This video was shot in 2014, roughly a month after Hester had a device surgically implanted

in his eye by a surgeon at Duke, a device that allowed him to see light and differentiate

it from darkness.

It was incredible.

It was bright and it was significant and I just had to take a deep breath.

It really was a revolutionary technology and when it came out, there were a lot of stories

written about these remarkable emotional moments.

That's journalist Eliza Strickland.

She's a senior editor at the Tech Magazine eye-tripley spectrum.

It was really seen as something of a miracle, even though the vision was very crude, just

the fact that humanity had built a gadget that could restore any kind of sight was I

think a really powerful idea.

Powerful enough that hundreds of patients like Larry Hester went on to get retinal implants

made by a company called Second Sight.

Most of them spoke very movingly about what it was like to get even a little bit of light

perception back after having nothing for a long time.

Second Sight patients were paired with support staff to help them adjust to their implants

and they were supposed to get software updates as well.

But then the company ran into trouble.

...