Feb 12
13
What’s That Device You’re Wearing?
By Richard Romano, Managing Editor, WhatTheyThink’s Going Green
The history of computing since Day One has been to bring the computer physically closer to the user. Giant mainframes in computer centers were eventually scaled down to the desktop, and then compressed down to the laptop. Now, increasingly, our computer is the mobile device we carry around, be it a smartphone or a tablet. (Just to show how far we’ve come, here’s a link to an unintentionally funny photo of a 5MB hard drive from 1956—which weighed over a ton—being unloaded from a plane. It certainly puts that 2GB thumb drive into perspective …)
The next step, logically, would be wearable computers. And, actually, they have a very old legacy, dating back to the 1950s (although, one hastens to add, not with a 5MB hard drive). The “father of the wearable computer” is generally held to be Edward O. Thorpe, who, in 1955, conceived of a miniature computer that could predict roulette spins. He and M.I.T.’s Claude Shannon jointly constructed a working prototype and tested it out in Las Vegas in 1961, although a hardware glitch ended their betting prematurely, probably for the best, lest they fall afoul of casino owners who, uh, frown on that sort of thing.
If we’re simply talking about a small computer that can be attached to clothing, that exists already: the iPhone, iPod and related devices. Visit any gym or watch many runners and you’ll see these devices strapped to people’s arms as they work out. Apps designed for the iPod Nano, for example, can also help keep track of workouts and other fitness stats. Bluetooth and other wireless technologies can let the device interact with other peripherals, such as audio output devices.
But what about displays? Here’s one thought. In his 2006 novel Rainbows End, science-fiction author, futurist and speaker Vernor Vinge envisions the not-to-distant future of 2025 in which people (mostly young people) interact with the world through computers embedded in clothing that send images to contact lens-based displays. The “world” was experienced via what we today refer to as Augmented Reality. Computer apps changed the display and thus the view of the world the user was experiencing. (In the 1960s, I think they called this “LSD.”)
Far-fetched? Actually, many readers claimed that Vinge’s vision (as it were) was set too far in the future; that his “2025” would actually arrive much sooner than that. (In the January 2012 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer takes a more skeptical look at the rate of technological progress.)
Still, 2025 vision edged closer to reality last November with the first successful test of a contact lens that had a built-in computer display. New Scientist wrote about the test, conducted on rabbits (which, I hasten to add, were not harmed):
The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit’s eye. To focus the light on the rabbit’s retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens – in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.
The tests were conducted by a research team led by Babak Praviz at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the paper appears in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Concludes the abstract:
In order to extend display capabilities, design and fabrication of micro-Fresnel lenses on a contact lens are presented to move toward a multipixel display that can be worn in the form of a contact lens. Contact lenses with integrated micro-Fresnel lenses were also tested on live rabbits and showed no adverse effect.
While I wonder what someone displays to a rabbit (maybe Night of the Lepus?), it’s not hard to imagine how this technology may soon bring the computer, in the form of a mobile device, even closer to us than it is today. Those of us with smartphones are often glued to their displays, texting (sometimes while driving, proving that the phones are sometimes smarter than the users), interacting with location apps, checking out social media and many other things, including actual Augmented Reality. The integration of the display with our own eyes is merely the next logical step. While many of us—myself included—have a difficult time with contact lenses and get creeped out by the idea of putting things in our eyes, I suspect generations that are born “natively” to these things will have no such squeamishness.
And yet, that’s only the next step. The next question: at what point do computers become implanted in the body itself?
