Because the future has just started
One of the key elements of any eccescope is its display module — the part that actually directs images into your eye. Light doesn’t bend around corners by itself, so the question remains of how to direct those light rays into your pupil. One possibility is to take the concepts suggested by the Brother Airscouter, … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 11”
Head mounted displays are usually clunky, because they are designed as research instruments. Here, for example, is a perfectly functional virtual reality device that you would probably not want to use at home: It’s pretty clear that an eccescopic populace would need something a lot less bulky and intrusive. The following device by Vuzix … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 10”
How would things look different in an eccescopic world? I’ve been having great conversations about this with some really thoughtful people, and I’ve begun to realize that the difference between a world of computer screens (even the little screens on SmartPhones) and a world where information is truly in the air around you, is at … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 9”
There was a time, not too long ago, when putting an electronic auditory enhancement device in your ear was something you did surreptitiously. A hearing aid was something you tried to hide — ideally you didn’t want anyone to know that you needed one. For example, here is an ad for a hearing aid designed … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 8”
I’ve mentioned before, in another context, Charles Darwin’s observation that every genotype requires a viable phenotype. That is, no mutation can survive unless it can produce viable offspring. Technology is like biological evolution in that it can’t just magically jump far ahead. Every step along the path to innovation needs to correspond to a set … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 7”
One could argue that coining a new word for what I’ve been describing is redundant, when we already have the perfectly good phrase “augmented reality”. But we’re not really talking about something like Layar, which provides a limited kind of augmented reality through your cell phone screen. We’d need to add some more words and … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 6”
Perhaps the most widely embraced recent pop cultural offering to the effect that “we can see whatever we want wherever we want” is the 1999 film The Matrix. In that movie, the solution is simple — and rather crazy. One’s entire physical world is replaced by a simulated world. In a sense, the conceit … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 5”
If you’re going to create virtual objects that appear to float in the air between people, one way to do it is to actually put a virtual object in the air between people. This seems to be the principle of the Holodeck from Star Trek, the Next Generation. Such approaches have the disadvantage that you … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 4”
While creating visions from a computer that appear directly in the world around us is a wonderful thing, it’s not the be all and end all of eccescopy. It was arguably George Lucas who whet our appetite for the real killer app: Using that information as a way for people to communicate with each other … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 3”
Forgetting for the moment how we would technically realize a vision of computer information simply coexisting with our physical world, it’s fun to see the fantasy versions of this vision that people have created — many of which are available on YouTube and Vimeo. One that is particularly nice from a technical/aesthetic perspective is a … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 2”