Musings about prosthetic eyes.

I discussed this with Smári yesterday on msn, and despite him being my only reader I shall still put it up here in all its glory.

My thoughts originated in Shadowrun and other cyber-punk fiction. I didn't expand on them much until the other day when I attended a lecture by one of the main managers of Ossur, a prosthetics company.

My thoughts were, that as far as I know, (Of course, I haven't heard much from these branches of research, but still...) the main focus of research into optical restoration etc. has been on the eye itself. I propose to bypass this stage, and move on to studying the signals that the eye sends, that is, study the nerves.
The aim of this research would be to identify which signals mean what. Making a map, so to speak, of all transmissions that the eye sends to our visual cortex.
Of course there are many problems with this, like: How do we get sensors sensitive and focused enough to study each individual nerve without just picking up all the noise from all the other nerves as well?
Or: How can we map out each signal when there are essentially endless combinations?
Well you people are the brilliant minds here, you tell me. ^^