Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Bionic Eyes Please....

...to go along with my cell phone ear piece. One step closer to being a robot.

Apparently adding tiny LEDs onto the surface of a contact may one day give us the ability to have things projected onto our eyes. How terminator of us.

Examples of an early use would be things that would benefit the, somewhat ironically, audibly impaired by projecting things like a fire alarm alert directly onto their cornea. However, the (mad) scientist behind this project also said, "We are looking right now at gaming, augmented reality, computing, telecom and medical applications." (guardian.co.uk)

A quick read of that sentence makes a lot of sense. There are potentially a large amount of promising applications for this new technology... But wait, did he say "AUGMENTED REALITY", holy christ! That's a bit, um, terrifying. "So yeah, I'm designing a contact that AUGMENTS REALITY! It'll be great!" (clearly not an actual quote)

He didn't, however, list adult entertainment as a potential application of this new device, which clearly drives most technological advancement these days. Or is that what he means when he says "augmented reality." hmm...

1 comment:

jg3 said...

Excellent point. Gaming drove computer processing and display development through the 80's to the early part of this decade. Pr0n drove the demand for faster and faster Internet speeds until cablemodem and FiOS speeds became realistic (at least in densely populated metro areas. Focusing on these two markets will help this product through its adolescence.

Oh, and there are probably lots of military applications.