TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human SenseThis sounds like an admission that we have reached a point where people depend on the internet for information. Shit, I know I do. Don't know something? Google! Wikipedia! Snopes! We have wonderful tools available that would make people of even twenty years ago insanely jealous. For those of us who know how to search for things (surprisingly few people, I've come to realize) answers to most of our questions exist right behind a decent query. Only seconds away on a decent connection. Indecent queries on indecent connections produce enough indecent results to keep indecents just as satisfied.
In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn't come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.
How often have you gone about your day and wished you could get a few hyper links from that news paper? Maybe search for technical manuals while out back working on the car. Perhaps as you peruse a menu at a restaurant you wonder what total strangers would recommend. Yeah, it has never crossed my mind either. But all that could change.
The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror -- all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface -- walls, the body of another person or even your hand.Let's denounce this conjurer of images as a witch and have us a good old fashioned burning. Stuff this cool must come from the devil.
Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the brains behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, and colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers (red, blue, green and yellow) helped the camera distinguish the four fingers and recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created.
5 comments:
on one hand, i'd love to be able to plug google straight into my head. on the other, i'd be afraid of viruses.
in other news, i finished the "holographic universe" last night. i thought the first two chapters were awesome, but it quickly decayed into a bunch of hocus-pocus. the ideas of a holographic universe and mind still intrigue me... but probably better to go straight to the sources (Bohm and Pribram).
On one hand, I think some brains would do better fighting off viruses than others. It would turn into a more organic process.
On the other point, the holographic mind model has a lot to support it. The holographic universe model starts to fail when you leave theory and try to test it. I have spent far too many hours of my life trying to get my hand to effortlessly pass through a wood table. Atomic structure says both consist mostly of space, but I can't pass through. The holographic model suggests the two exist as 3D projections, but my hand still can't pass through. Yet I continue to try. Something in my holographic mind refuses to admit that it can't happen.
you wouldn't expect something like that though. if we were to discover that there is a holographic nature underlying the universe, the laws of physics wouldn't suddenly change and allow you to magically pass your hand through stoya's blouse and feel her warm, firm breasts (no love, even in holography).
on the other side of the coin, though the whole idea strikes a chord with me, i keep thinking of sagan and "well, where did the hologram come from?" and "why not save a step and just say we don't know."
then again (my coin is, like, extending into another dimension by now), we're only familiar with the projection of this hypothetical hologram (or any other Theory of Everything) and the rules that govern it wouldn't necessarily be the same that govern us... probably couldn't be (i would think the laws we observe would be less granular than the laws governing something we sprang from--but even that is based on my own observations of reality, which don't necessarily apply). so... once you enter that realm then all bets are off and anything is possible.
though maybe not. maybe you could infer something about it by the way the observable universe behaves. i guess that's what the hologram idea is an attempt to do.
yeah. so i'm going to put in pirates 2 and drool over stoya's boobs.
I may or may not ever succeed in exciting the atoms of my hand to the point where they pass through a wood table. I'll keep trying and let everyone know if I meet with success.
And you have enlightened me to the true dangers of the technology mentioned in the initial post. The internet allowed people to search for porn at rates never before imagined. If people walk around projecting internet browsing options on those they meet... just trying to wrap my head around the pornographic universe we will create for ourselves. Combine it with the TV contact lenses. My brain has started to buzz a bit from this contemplation.
You've got the right idea. I need to check out Stoya's Atomic Tease.
yeah, i'd love to interfere with her waves.
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