Computer vision has ushered in a revolution across many aspects of daily life, enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate roads, enhancing border security systems, and powering automated retail stores, and it is now on the brink of fusing AI perception directly with human biology. To better understand its implications and where it may lead next, three experts in the field shared their perspectives: Ohad Hever, Co-Founder of UVeye, Daniel Gabay, CEO and Co-Founder of Trigo, and Professor Ofer Hadar of Ben-Gurion University. This is the story of this ecosystem, its close relationship with the startup nation, and an in-depth look at what comes next.

Close your eyes for a moment and try to cross the street. Is it difficult, almost impossible? Not really. You can hear the traffic, feel the ground beneath your feet, and sense the wind from a passing car. But without sight, the geometry of the world, the shape of objects, the distance, the speed, the gap between you and everything moving around collapses into the mere hope of not being hit until you reach the other side of the street. This is not a thought experiment. It is the oldest truth in human movement. When we drive a car, ride a bicycle, or simply walk through a crowded street, vision is not one sense among many. It is the system that everything depends on.

Amnon Shashua understood this in a way that most engineers in 1999 did not. A computer science Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he kept arriving at a simple observation: when a person drives a car, he does not use radar. He uses his eyes, his brain, and a lifetime of learned pattern recognition. If you want to teach a machine to drive safely, the most natural approach is not to replicate the instruments of a submarine, but to replicate the human eye.

Amnon Shashua founded Mobileye on that single idea: one camera, the right algorithms, the discipline to make it work in the real world. The automotive industry told him radar was the answer. He disagreed and kept building. By 2014, when Mobileye went public in what was then the largest Israeli IPO in history, the radical idea had become the global standard. Vision had won. I worked at Mobileye,........

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