p2pnet.net News:- What’s coming up for computer users of the future?

Nope. Not sharing your brain on a p2p network. (Who’d want it anyhow? : )

However, you might be wearing your computer.

That’s the view of Glen Hiemstra as interviewed by Dana Greenlee for WebTalk Radio.

Hiemstra, the founder of Futurist.com and author of FuturistNews and Beyond 2020: The Shape of Things to Come, is also a visiting scholar at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington and Greenlee asked Hiemstra to share his thoughts on the trends in wearable computing.

Hiemstra pointed out that MIT had the Wearable Computer Initiative in the mid-1990s “in which people carried big laptops strapped to their back and these weird looking goggles. My question was if there would come a day when we would carry significant computing power around with us in things that we wear. The Boeing company and the military were interested in that.”

The day is already here, guys.

Steve Mann is a faculty member in University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and he’s pretty famous around Tarana because of his, well, different way of looking at things.

It’s not unusual to see him strapped up with gear that makes look him like a passing Borg and that’s because he invented the WearComp (wearable computer) and WearCam (eyetap camera and reality mediator), and he likes to use them every chance he gets.

So back to the WebTalk Radio interview, Hiemstra says MicroVision, a company in Bothell, Washington, has started selling its commercial version of Nomad, “a wearable computer” aimed at the automobile repair industry.

“You wear a little computing device on your hip and then you put on a baseball cap and attached to the underside of the bill of the cap are devices that enable a virtual retinal display to bounce off a little mirror-like device in front of one eye,” he says.

“It beams a computerized image onto the little mirror and reflects off that mirror direct into your eye using a red laser. So you have a laser computer display painted onto your eyeball.

“It?s kind of like if you were looking through the point of view of the Terminator. The Terminator would look at a subject and get all kinds of readings in his eye. They have prototypes of full-color versions, but right now the cheapest is to use a red laser device. But if you remember the original Gameboys were only in red, then they became color.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2004 at 12:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2145 times