Men have a infamous tendency to let their phallic tendencies dictate what they create. It is perhaps why some of the most famous builds like the Great Pyramids, Taj Majal and the Washington monument were made.
So, it didn’t surprise me when I recently read about an effort to create the world’s first male organ controlled computer.
So now that men have brought the inevitable to the realm of technology, I wonder how else humans of the future might interact with their computers?
With the recent (or not so recent) popularity of Nintendo Wii and its gyroscopic features, the rest of the human-computer interface market seems to have entered an innovative period. It looks rather likely that we’ll soon be playing games through VR googles, gesturing in the air to perform fluid dynamics calculations and maybe even writing Dear-John letters by thought alone.
Best of all, we won’t have wait decades for many of these advances as some amazing new products are already in prototype and will be market-ready in the very near-term. Here are some of the particularly interesting interface candidates:
1. In 2004, four people, two of them partly paralyzed wheelchair users successfully moved a computer cursor with a sensor cap that reads your brain with electrodes. In late February, technology pioneer Emotiv Systems announced the EPOC neuroheadset, a light weight, inexpensive ($300 USD), wireless headset that detects conscious thoughts, expressions, and emotions. Emotiv’s aim is the video games market and could open up a whole new generation of emotional immersive-ness in games.”
2. A modern take on a classic: The Livescribe pulse Smartpen is a pen that doubles as a stereo voice recorder, a music player, and most unique of all, a tiny infrared camera that picks up commands from a specially designed notebook. The ‘Dot’ notebook has record, pause, stop, playback, and navigation ‘buttons’ that you can tap on the bottom of the page to control the pen.
3. How about turning ANY surface, wall, table, or floor into a primary input device that can read handwriting, act as a musical instrument, a touchpad, or even a keyboard if you’re so inclined. The technology is called Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction (TAI-CHI) and the power is in sound waves.
We’ve seen the future … and we may not be doomed. The just
published 2008 United Nations report, with input from 2,500 experts
from around the world finds life is improving for people worldwide
– but governments are failing to grasp the opportunities offered.
“This is a unique time in history. Mobile phones, the Internet,
international trade, language translation and jet planes are giving
birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement
global strategies to improve its prospects,” the report states. “It
is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address
our common challenges. Ours is the first generation with the means
for many to know the world as a whole, identify global improvement
systems, and seek to improve them.”
The world is about to enjoy a prosperous future with an
unprecedented ability to extend lifespan and increase the power of
ordinary people. The life extension movement is growing
exponentially and could be the next significant field targeted by
venture capitalists as alternative energy and clean tech wane.
Made possible by soaring healthcare costs, unfunded
Medicare-type liabilities in every industrialized nation, and the
demographic aging of populations, the rapidly expanding life
extension industry encompasses the commercialization of scientific
findings from stem cell, genetic engineering, regenerative
medicine, human enhancements, and other areas of health
research.
“Advances in science, technology, education, economics, and
management,” the report continues, “seems capable of making the
world work far better than it does today.” Medical breakthroughs
are offering the hope of defeating inherited diseases, tailoring
cures to individual patients – and even creating replacement body
parts.
What you are seeing is a literal replication of movie magic come to life. Dubbed “g-speak’ by its developers, it uses a “combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.” They believe this method of computer interaction will be far better suited to the “data-intensive” work people are increasingly doing with their computers (the fact that more than one user can operate a single machine speaks volumes towards this belief).
The tie-in with Minority Report is no coincidence. One of the founders of Oblong worked as a science advisor on the set of that movie and incorporated many of his earlier work at MIT into the set. You can see similarities in the design like having a dedicated room, wearing special gloves, even specialized hand gestures that give it an almost Tai Chi-like feel to it. You could Zen out while doubling your productivity.
