Telepathy for $15

6 09 2007

Yes, another title to tease you into reading, promising more than it can deliver. I’m at that head-shaking point where I can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen.

In an interview about his latest novel, novelist William Gibson points out that writing science fiction is getting harder, because:

we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”

Here’s the perfect example:

Neurosky, a company that will let us interact with games (and tools, and machinery, and robots, and cellphones…) just by controlling our mental state, blinking, and so on through a device that will be on the market next year – and should only add $15 to the price… Incredible… who thought it would come so soon? And look at how portable the device is! Combine this with the kind of augmented reality I was talking about the other day, and we will soon be seeing some wild stuff happening out there on the streets! Are we ready for this, I wonder…? I also wonder: when will they go to IPO….?

Here’s that augmented reality clip again: watch this back-to-back with the above, and imagine the possibilities when they’re combined….

Update:

My word, and those 3-d avatars of yourself that I mentioned in that earlier post… hehehe, I should have known: they’re going to be on the market later this year!


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4 responses

6 09 2007
Emlyn

More on Mova, the firm who produce Contour – the “reality capture” software and tools here:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/07/steve_perlmans_.html

18 11 2007
The machines will speak what’s on your mind « 卦Trigram

[...] by thought alone also required a chip to be implanted in the brain – now, though, it’s a $15 accessory. In the same way, I suspect that this thought-to-speech technology will also rapidly become a cheap [...]

20 01 2008
China will change us | The World Egg

[...] I want to throw into the mix something I wrote about before: augmented reality and extended consciousness. The technology exists, and is about to hit market at a fairly low price, to turn the internet into [...]

20 01 2008
The machines will speak your thoughts | The World Egg

[...] computer by thought alone also required a chip to be implanted in the brain – now, though, it’s a $15 accessory. In the same way, I suspect that this thought-to-speech technology will also rapidly become a cheap [...]

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