rich contextual overlays
This video from MIT Media Lab, that eternal source of optimism and experimentation, shows a cool new wearables demo dubbed the sixth sense. Anyone who’s read Vernor Vinge recognizes this notion of overlaying contextual information onto the actual visual targets one encounters in daily life. Watch the video – really, it starts out slow but gets better.
In Vinge’s book “Rainbow’s End” people this capability is commonly embedded in contact lenses. I see something identifiable, and a processing system will fetch relevant data from the Internet to offer me more detail. If I’m lookijng at a landmark, for example, the system should fetch historical, architectural, and current visitor info about said landmark, and layer it onto my display in a semi-opaque manner.
Here they’ve taken a pragmatic approach to advancing toward this goal. They are projecting the detail onto nearby surfaces, which is much easier and cheaper. In sci-fi there are always going to be situations where mission-critical information will be retrieved, just in time, and displayed only to the hero or villian. But in more mundane day-to-day situations like shopping, this system wouls seem to be a great stride forward. Bravo MIT Media Lab!
…was also done in “Sppok Country” written by William Gibson.
P.S. Hi FuzzyLogic
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!
Rottweilers, generally the most dependable of dogs in most situations, are named once again in the same breath as tragedy after the mauling by two rotties of ten-year-old Rhianna Kidd. What is it that made these specific dogs, themselves mature domestic pets in a family with several children, attack seemingly the most harmless of subjects? Smell perhaps? Shouldn’t we be looking into that? The rottweilers involved have subsequently been put down – what for? Wouldn’t it be arguably more useful if they were kept alive for examination?