10 Ways Star Trek Changed People's Lives
3. Geordi Inspires JORDY To Improve People's Sight
Aside from having a morally dubious holographic girlfriend, the Enterprise's Chief Engineer is also best known for the visor that aids his sight. It was an addition that actor LeVar Burton had strong feelings about. He had questioned the show's producers on how humanity can travel at warp speed, but were unable to restore people's sight. Burton says that the visor was simply a shorthand for the 24th century's technological advancement.
Despite Burton's misgivings about his obstructive costuming, he can also see the positive impact that Geordi's visor has had on society at large. He points to the fact that a generation of kids used to put a headband over their eyes to play the character as evidence of the character's iconic look.
However, it also inspired a positive change for a NASA engineer Paul Mogan. Having struggled with his sight for years, Mogan benefited from a new advancement named after the TNG character. The Joint Optical Reflective Display or JORDY for short, was an improved version of a video headset that magnified objects by up to 30x.
It was a positive step forward that could lead to further developments in improving people's sight. Real-world science has quite rightly favoured tackling that over mastering warp speed!