Rainbows End Contacts Coming Soon!

A future predicted in the novel Rainbows End is a bit closer to becoming the present. A very cool technology described by Vernor Vinge in his amazing novel centers around contact lenses that do a whole lot more than improve vision and change your eye color.

Vinge's contacts are actually connected wirelessly to an omnipresent Internet on steroids. They overlay what you see with everything from private text messages to an alternate reality. With these contacts you can share an augmented reality with others so that you all see the same things. For example, you could be sitting together at a table at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, enjoying good conversation and a view of the Parisian landscape, when each of you is in a different city.

Another use of these contacts would be informational overlays that could tell you what the restaurant you happen to be walking by is serving for lunch. A city utility worker could see which cables run under the sidewalk he stands on. The possibilities are virtually endless.

So here comes this article:

Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.

For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.

Remember this little article when you see what follows.

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Out-of-Body Virtual Reality: Are You Ready?

Researchers are finding out what it feels like to have an out-of-body experience. An interesting use of VR, don't you think? Placing VR goggles on test subjects that show them the view from a set of cameras actually situated behind them, then giving them a poke in the chest while simultaneously poking at the air in front of the cameras, gives subjects the feeling that they are being poked in the chest while outside their bodies. Very weird, but cool, they say.

Researchers equipped subjects with virtual-reality goggles that showed images from a video camera setup — two cameras spaced like a pair of eyes. When placed behind the person wearing the goggles, the cameras acted as a "virtual self" that looked at the subject's back.

As subjects watched themselves from behind, an experimenter prodded their chests with one hand while prodding the air just below the cameras at the same time. Because subjects could see the experimenter's hand but not the spot it was poking, researchers said subjects felt as if they were being poked in the chest — outside their bodies.

“This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants," Ehrsson said. "It felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many of them giggled and said ‘Wow, this is so weird.’”

I can't wait till this is available for the rest of us!

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Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Ultra-Fast WiFi

Looks like I'm on an AR roll here, but it can't be helped. For AR to work, it seems to me that ubiquitous, ultra fast wireless connectivity will be required. At this point, even wired broadband is far too slow for a believable augmented reality overlay system. Much higher bandwidth wireless will have to be made virtually omnipresent.

A few city centers have made free wireless access available, but it will have to be present in every nook and cranny, every field and forest. Which will come first, the chicken or the killer app? I think the infrastructure and the application will have to encourage each other to be created, perhaps by the same company. (Could this be why Google is quietly buying unused pipes?)

As far as the hardware is concerned, here is a little fellow who doesn't yet exist, but may be developed in time to play a part in the task of making wifi reach every cubic centimeter of livable space on earth. Right now it's called the LANdroid, and it looks like this...



Apparently these guys are on DARPA's wish list. So after they are built and battle-tested, perhaps they can be deployed for peacetime use. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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Augmented Reality Powered by Vibrations?

Just yesterday an article was posted on NewScientistTech that may well describe how augmented reality may be powered.

A sugar-cube-sized electric generator that feeds on environmental vibrations has been developed. It could power swarms of wireless sensors or even medical implants, researchers claim.

What AR needs are "swarms of wireless sensors" and other devices, scattered throughout the physical environment and creating a seamless mesh of virtual overlays. This can be useful even before we have the contacts that project images directly onto our retinas. Cell phone/PDAs would be able to "see" the overlays, which at first would be primarily informational in content.

Some examples may be helpful. You approach a door in an office building. Standing in front of the door, you hold up your PDA and see the door with an overlay containing information about the business situated behind the door. You can drill down the overlay interface to get the name of the person you are meeting, along with other pertinent facts about them. Yes, this is the right place!

Later on you pass by a new Chinese restaurant. You hold up your PDA, and there is a sample menu, along with the establishment's contact info and hours of operation. Yes! They deliver to your apartment!

I'm certain that you can think of much better examples, but an added benefit of this technology that jumps out at you right away is that signage could be almost completely done away with, providing an immense savings for businesses as well as a more aesthetically pleasing environment for everyone.

Can you picture this? Stay tuned.

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Choose Your Pleasure: VR or AR?

Taking a glimpse into the near-term future, we can see the advents of both virtual reality (VR), and a subset of VR called augmented reality (AR). We have all heard of VR and seen a rudimentary version of it in the movie Disclosure. But virtual reality is headed in the direction of total immersion VR, which will take place at the level of your neurons themselves. Nanobots will stimulate your neurons directly so that you will not be able to tell the difference between real reality and the VR environment, except for some type of indicator inserted for safety reasons. Every one of your senses will be engaged, and your entire environment will be virtual.

So what is AR? AR is a mixture of the virtual and the real, sort of a virtual overlay that is superimposed upon real reality. This could also be activated at the neuronal level, or even projected onto your retinas by means of special contact lenses. Think of how much fun this would be, and how it could increase your productivity.

Imagine the fun part first. Think about people appearing as characters in a game, or dressing up the local environment to appear to be coming straight out of another world or another time. How cool would that be? As far as productivity, there could be educational or informational overlays on people and objects that would give you vital information about them. As you look at the person you're meeting for a business lunch, you see above their heads their name, company, position, etc. As you get started, you could bring up an agenda you had prepared earlier and either share it with your associate or view it privately, like a heads-up-display hanging in the air. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Talk about your killer apps. Let's see Apple and Microsoft battle it out in that arena! Stay tuned.

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