A film-maker is putting a mini video camera in his prosthetic eye to record a documentary highlighting the issues of privacy and the surveillance society.

Rob Spence, 36, says he will secretly record people for his "Eyeborg" project using a tiny camera, battery and wireless transmitter hidden inside his false eye.

Mr Spence, from Toronto, Canada, had his right eye damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago.

Now he is going through the final stages of fitting the camera with which he will be able to record the same things that he sees with his good eye, his muscles around the empty socket moving the camera eye ball just like his real one.

Onlookers will not be able to tell the difference between the two eyes from a casual glance as his prosthetic eye has the same hazel green iris and the camera shoots through a special transparent pupil.

"It will be a way of experiencing life through my eyes," he said.

Mr Spence, who is hoping to strike a broadcast deal for his documentary, has already run into controversy over his plans.

He said that people were happy to have surveillance cameras recording what they did, and were willing to divulge personal details online, even their location, but the idea that a cyborg could be recording them made them very uncomfortable.

"The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me," he said. "People aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time."

He said he had no intention of becoming a "lifecaster", recording every detail of his life for broadcast and he said that he would seek the permission afterwards of anyone he filmed in a private setting for the documentary.

"It is very interesting that my plan has been met with fear and fascination. People find the idea that any part of the body being replaced by a machine is difficult. But when it is the eye, the personal window to the soul, then that is even more difficult," he told The Times.

"This will be about direct eye contact, being captured at your candid best or worst and that provokes a mixture of fear and fascination," he said. People would be at their most natural, and this was very attractive for him as a documentary maker, he added.

Mr Spence was partly inspired by the 1970s televsion series "The Six Million Dollar Man". He said he had an epiphany when looking at his cell phone camera and realised something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.

His equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter all on a tiny circuit board. Mr Spence has had help from leading engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The camera was provided by OmniVision, a California company that specialises in the miniature cameras found in cell phones, laptops and endoscopes.

Zafer Zamboglu, staff technical product manager at OmniVision, said he thought that success with the eye camera would accelerate research into using the technology to restore vision to blind people. "We believe there's a good future in the prosthetic eye," he said.

Mr Spence, who said he had been warned that having a video eye would mean he would never get another girlfriend, hopes that his project will help people to discuss how much they want to be recorded by "Big Brother" CCTV cameras.

"There are surveillance cameras in many parts of our lives now. I am going to be another camera, a 'Little Brother'," he added.

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