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While the first part of this comment alone is compelling, what excites me is that the second half was already in our hands before slipping away. The idea of IR

While the first part of this comment alone is compelling, what excites me is that the second half was already in our hands before slipping away. The idea of IR vision firefighting, being able to see the elements in your water, etc, these are all basically ubiquitous computing, and we're kind of getting there with IoT putting sensors in everything. What is missing is a way of intuitively accessing and building it into our thought processes in a manner less clunky than fetching a phone, unlocking, launching an app. What we need is Google Glass, or equivalent. The real place where Google Glass fell down was not in it's handling of privacy concerns, strictly, it was there attempt to try and make it exclusive and elite, like they did with the Google Mail launch, where you needed invites. I can't help but feel that if Google had made the "explorer" program humbler and quieter, followed by an accessible general release, we'd have access to so much more today.

Balgair 10y ago
I have some friends that were on the team trying to make a sonar system for divers. It would take the sonar info from a receiver on your forehead and them play that out onto an array placed on your tongue or some patch of skin. Applications were in murky water search and rescue, navy seal operations, underwater construction, etc. The major issue was the failure modes. When the device flips out, or is struck, or has a battery failure, or is misproduced, what happens? For these body interfacing electronic devices, the failure modes are typically brutal. Reliability engineering is something that can't be hacked or dismissed and they are a major reason that many AR devices can't make it to market.
- abstractbeliefs 10y ago
  I don't think that Google Glass strictly needs to be considered body-interfacing to the degree that it's failure presents real hazards to the person, but what it does allow us to trivially bring a screen with data into not just day to day lives, but literally everything. I think right now lots of people are trying to boil the ocean and try to make AR truly part of our bodies, when really there's a huge amount of low hanging fruit in simply getting information to be ever-present and available. Flicking your eyes up is a good first step. Later, overlaying the same information into our field of view. Later still, integration of that data into the body, rather than just presentation of it to the physical senses.

Balgair 10y ago

I have some friends that were on the team trying to make a sonar system for divers. It would take the sonar info from a receiver on your forehead and them play that out onto an array placed on your tongue or some patch of skin. Applications were in murky water search and rescue, navy seal operations, underwater construction, etc. The major issue was the failure modes. When the device flips out, or is struck, or has a battery failure, or is misproduced, what happens? For these body interfacing electronic devices, the failure modes are typically brutal. Reliability engineering is something that can't be hacked or dismissed and they are a major reason that many AR devices can't make it to market.

abstractbeliefs 10y ago
I don't think that Google Glass strictly needs to be considered body-interfacing to the degree that it's failure presents real hazards to the person, but what it does allow us to trivially bring a screen with data into not just day to day lives, but literally everything. I think right now lots of people are trying to boil the ocean and try to make AR truly part of our bodies, when really there's a huge amount of low hanging fruit in simply getting information to be ever-present and available. Flicking your eyes up is a good first step. Later, overlaying the same information into our field of view. Later still, integration of that data into the body, rather than just presentation of it to the physical senses.