I want to draw your attention to some technology developed by the impressive Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Labs. They have built a working model of what could be described as the 3rd generation in personal data assistants. You wear the device around your neck, it is comprised of a camera, a mirror, a projector, colored tabs on your fingers and it all talks to your phone via bluetooth networking. I could paint you hundreds of scenarios, all of them would sound like Blade Runner or I, Robot to you. Just watch this short movie and then you will understand.

If you stuck with it and watched it all, you should be seeing now that we are only a few years away from some truly amazing opportunities. I don’t want to focus on the marketing aspects, those seem obvious to me. You know, you walk towards a shelf of drinks and one of them glows, reminding you that you loved the taste. From the corporate standpoint, I hope you can imagine what it could mean to your working environment. Picture your technology workers looking at a server rack and the ones that are slow servers are communicating that fact to them seemingly in front of their eyes.Powerful stuff.

I especially liked the idea that you could see meta data on the object you are looking at. Like this student, projected onto his chest is a tag cloud of information. Though I would personally prefer to have that information projected right in to my cornea… Oh, how about a Twitter search about a product I am about to buy?

I will leave you alone now, have a great weekend,

Matt
@mattwilliamson