December 6, 2003 16:47 | Bits / Confession / Technology / WebBlogging

Lawnmower Man meets the Puppet Master

Part of an e-mail exchange with Aaron:

> I WANT what Kevin Warwick is working on! Hrm... Garr... :\

Ah come on, Boris. I know Kevin's all about thinking inside the body but try thinking outside the blog. You want to implant a chip with a copy of MT, the moz-gesture stuff and an 802.11b connection on it. Then you can stand around waving your arms like one of those airport dudes posting stuff to your weblog.

... you could surely get Canada Council money if you recast the idea as a modern dance project.

What happens when you start getting hammered by trackback pings and comment spam is a whole other story.

You *are* fuct in the head but who loves ya' anyway? ;-)

I almost fell off the sofa reading this. :D

Comments
Sat, Dec 6, 2003, @ 17:47
1- Aaron of Montreal

Despite having my tongue firmly wedged into my cheek when I wrote that it occurred to me, after the fact, that the moz-gesture stuff isn't altogether crazy.

Personally, I would prefer gloves to implants for a whole host (no pun) of reasons but my impression is that we have the technology to produce sensors subtle enough to "read" some flavour of sign language.

Said magic gloves could then buffer everything you wrote and shunt it off to a text->speech widget in, say, your collar. Not being deaf, or knowing any deaf people personally, I wouldn't try to presume whether that would be a useful tool to ease communication before people who speak *SL and those who don't. But it might.

At a minimum it would be for note-taking in the "field". (I want everyone to imagine Boris blogging the snow-storm, now. That's right, *hear* the sound of the fingers of his winter gloves th-wik th-wika th-wika -ing against one another.)

I'm sure the military will find some good way to use the idea to kill people. I'm going to go make cookies now...


Sat, Dec 6, 2003, @ 18:21
2- Boris Anthony

Exihbit A:
http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.html

Exhibit B:
http://www.geocities.com/mellott124/glove1.htm

Also, Steve Mann uses a sort of clicker in his pocket to do data-entry (typing if you will).

The problem here is the learning of yet another "language", whereas Warwick has proven that the brain immediatly "syncs" with implanted I/O. Since the human brain is predisposed to learn any system of codes you throw at it, provided context, it stands to reason that if you flow it text (in a human laguage it already knows) via some protocol (TCP/IP, IEEE 1394, USB, whatever) with practice it WILL.. erm.. assimilate (sorry!) and use it.

Yeah, the military is already all over that stuff. The next generation fighter jets already incorporate neural connectors to the pilots. Current ones use the eyes and ears as Inputs (heads up displays that would drive the untrained mind batty, nevermind leave it confused).

On that note, current mobile technology does this too (eyes and ears). IM on cellphones, vibrate alerts, SMS, etc etc etc. It's going that way...

Jack me in! I'm too lazy to type anymore!!!! I'm too lazy to translate my thoughts into words anymore!

Sigh... yeah I'm nuts. ;)