Circuits so flexible they'd wrap around your hair This could be the ultimate in “wearable computing”: while CES visitors are excited about Intel's earbuds, Swiss scientists have created a circuit so flexible it can wrap around a human hair. The first test of the circuit, created by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETZ), was to embed it into …
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When you walk around with a faraway look in your eyes because you're surfing the web and not paying attention to the world around you. When you walk into a fountain, off a dock, or into traffic. When you crash headlong into a line of stopped cars ahead of you.
Maybe YOU won't, but people will. Technology is great, but giving people more ways to ignore what's around them is going to inevitably lead to more people ignoring what's around them. As has already been shown by the large increase in accidents attributable to texting while driving.
Imagine if you can read texts/emails in your contact lens and send them by thinking. Hopefully by the time that becomes a reality self driving cars are also a reality so distracted people are only a danger to themselves, instead of others.
"When you walk around with a faraway look in your eyes because you're surfing the web and not paying attention to the world around you."
not that this isn't already the case with mobes
I refuse to apologise to some twat who believes that communication takes precedence over navigation..
That can be solved with clever optics. A more interesting concern is trying to actually look at anything - the image will move with your eyeball, so as soon as you turn your gaze to part of the image that part will be elsewhere. You'd need some way to actively sense eyeball position and translate the image accordingly, and very quickly too.
It's actually even more interesting - an image that's fixed on the retina simply disappears. The rods and cones only sense the time derivative of light intensity, a spatial contrast is only made visible by constant saccades and a bit of integration going on in the brain.
Oh well! We will be driven around by robots, so we won't need to worry about crashing. I saw a show today about Nissan announcing that they will be selling robot cars in the US - I assume if it is approved, that is! This will be very soon, they showed one of them driving around with no driver or human on board at all. Maybe they can make a Segway like that so we don't walk off cliffs and stuff! HA! We all will be moving around with our heads in the clouds(or up our duffs) very soon! :D
I'd have thought a better solution would be those power cells that metabolise glucose.
Good idea for implants in blood-perfused tissue, but the surface of an eye is not well-supplied with blood or glucose.
The best way for an eyeball implant would probably be photovoltaic ("solar power"). Eyeballs are well supplied with light, at least while you are awake. Transparent solar cells can be made (indeed, large ones are being installed as windows on "green" skyscrapers).
Another way would be wireless power (I'm assuming only microwatts are needed). You'd need to wear a power transmitter elsewhere on your person if continuous power was needed. You might be able to scavenge power from a 21st century environment if continuous power was not vital. (ie, parasitise off WLANs and mobile phones).
Yet another way would be piezo-kinetic power scavenging (as in the Seiko Kinetic watches). Again I can see that working much better for implants in other parts of the body.
quote: "Yet another way would be piezo-kinetic power scavenging (as in the Seiko Kinetic watches). Again I can see that working much better for implants in other parts of the body."
Spend the next 30 seconds actively thinking about how much your eyes move while you read this text ;)
Assuming you can make the circuit small enough and harvest enough energy from it, the eyes should be able to provide enough kinetic movement over time themselves.
I was thinking how completely irritating and disabling it is, if there's anything on your eyeball that doesn't move exactly the same way as the eyeball. Think of a grain of sand in your eye, or conjunctivitis.
If the implant does react exactly the same as the eyeball with no added mechanical resistance, there's no way to harvest mechanical energy.
Solar power sums: the usual figure is 100 watts per square meter harvested from bright sunlight. That's 100 microwatts per square millimeter (10 microwatts on a dull day, maybe 1 microwatt indoors with office grade lighting).
"You won't get useful amounts of energy from the cosmic microwave background,"
True.
The background microwave "noise" provided by the fog of mobile phone towers in most parts of the developed world should be quite adequate for a little NFC system.
The definition of "remote" reading in this context is likely to be <1m
But the tech to make it flexible enough to go on a contact lens is staggering.
Of course for those HUD contact lenses some people will have to learn to put contacts in in the first place.
Which looks a bit nasty to me.
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