Sunday, January 11, 2004

Glogs? (Cyborg Blogs)

Let's ramp the science of blogging up a notch. Suppose you are at a party and meet a famous politician who slips you a bit of information that is going to be announced later that evening. Suppose further that with a blink of your eye (literally) you can catch a photo, compose a blog, and post the scoop to your blog site --all before the politico can turn to squeeze the next hand in line.

Welcome to the world of cyborg blogging. At this point in time, pretty much exclusively the world of Steve Mann:

"While the small video camera gives him a recordable, real-time view of what's in front of him, the tiny screen is filled with messages or programming code fed by a computer and wireless transmitters that Mann straps to his body. He calls the experience "mediating reality" -- sort of like having icons from your computer screen transposed onto your regular vision."

This gets you to wearable computers and EyeTap technology: "The eye itself as display and camera."

"EyeTap is a device which allows, in a sense, the eye itself to function as both a display and a camera. EyeTap is at once the eye piece that displays computer information to the user and a device which allows the computer to process and possibly alter what the user sees. That which the user looks at is processed by the EyeTap. This allows the EyeTap to, under computer control, augment, diminish, or otherwise alter a user's visual perception of their environment, which creates a Computer Mediated Reality."