Filmmaker Rob Spence crafts eye-camera to go undercover

The notorious intro to Six Million Dollar Man ("Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology.") has special meaning to filmmaker Rob Spence. Spence, a rabid fan of the '70s drama, damaged his eye in a childhood shooting accident, and had it removed three years ago. Now he's decided to capitalize on his loss, building a prosthetic eye-masked camera for an undercover documentary he'll be shooting.

Spence says he had an "epiphany" after he stripped down his cell-phone camera and held it in the palm of his hand. He realized it would fit perfectly into his eye socket, and enlisted the help of MIT guru Steve Mann. Like a pair of Frankensteins, the crafty duo assembled the "all-seeing eye" from a mini-camera originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. Spence will be able to control the camera simply by moving the muscles in his eye-socket.

Spence's stroke of (mad?) genius will enable him to film a documentary about surveillance cameras, a project he couldn't do unless he were going undercover. Without his interviewees noticing him, he wants to essentially become "a human surveillance camera" and explore the prospect that people, haunted by reality TV, are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."

The filmmaker is also excited about the prospect of filming without a bulky camera. It's difficult to film subjects who know their every move will be trapped in pixels forever, and Spence hopes to eradicate this stage fright. Before he releases the documentary, however, he'll disclose his footage to his subjects to get their permission.