In May, Rob Spence was at a Toronto restaurant with his brother-in-law and his wife. A server turned to the 44-year-old filmmaker to ask for his order. What stared back at her was a man with a glowing red right eye, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.

According to Spence, the server visibly struggled not to look at him or say anything about his glowing cyborg eye, and simply asked, "What would you like to order, sir?"

The camera-equipped eye recorded his brief interaction with the server as Spence demonstrated his cyborg eye to his dinner companions, he told me in an interview in Toronto several days before his appearance at FutureWorld, a conference on robotics and high-tech prostheses held at OCAD University in June.