Music By Thought

What if we could find the areas of our brains where thoughts of singing or instruments within our brain occur, and decipher these representations through to some channels of output. And in between participating parties' brains to form an imagination where brains could listen to each other's internal singing or instrument imaginations, and compose a band from pure thought. Imagine a band configuration of people in relaxed chairs and music emanating from pure imagination. Maybe a sketch would be ok to include, and later maybe some references as to how this could be possible will be added.

True North Chip

"They found that TrueNorth cut energy use by 176,000-fold compared to a traditional processor and by a factor of over 700 compared to specialized hardware designed to host neural networks." Computer science is nearing mimic of natural processes in the brain, more at http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/ibm-researchers-make-a-chip-full-of-artificial-neurons/

Advancements in Augmented Reality

Technology being released soon include Microsoft's Holo Lens (Might be available from June 2015), Oculus Rift 3 (unknown), Magic Leap (rumors say 2016).

For Communication

Imagine if you could communicate with more than facial/body language and words/sounds? What about communication with colors? Emotionally colored speach f.ex. could help to let people understand things, that sometimes goes missing in translation. What if questions were yellow, discern or frustration was red, when you felt blue, well err, blue, friendly and nice was green, etc. And what if even whole field of vision could be slightly tinted by emotional states.

Imagine being together with someone and the lighting and how "reality" looked around you was transformed to have movie-like colorings, if you're into romantic, or action-movie, any sort of colorpalette could be achieved as a modification of actual visible input, through realtime filtering.

Shapes and curves could also be used as forms in communication, as f.ex. attributes facilitating accentuation and/or emotions.

For Health

If you have trouble feeling well in any given situation, not talking about clinical depression or such, but if you are in a very sad/unfortunate condition where you are, based on what you see around you, you could modulate that impression with augmented reality in many ways. Imagine if you could change colors on anything you want and the computer of your vision could remember the shapes you colored the way you wished, or if you feel a place is without much happening in it.

You could include all sorts of items and characters, and even modify whatever appeared in front of your eyes, you could have tons of fun f.ex. with an algorithm to make people walking around you into caricatures and even add behaviors to what they were doing based on recognition from actual events. You could have helpers in the form of drones, and kids could have their own protector / play-organizer / teacher drone which with vision can to the kid be seen as something less scary than a drone, maybe a flying ferry f.ex.

For more serious health issues like impaired movement, if you are in a wheelchair, you could get cues as to what places and in which direction you would be able to get from one point to another while in a wheelchair, also what places you could get help and by whom, which could be cues into your vision.

At health institutions a guide could even appear in augmented reality and interact with you to get you help and answer lots of common issues while you wait, and your thoughts could control it, or you could speak and lip-reading could be done by local measurements. Lots of ways this could be done, just imagining on the fly here.

For Education

We could have class-cooperation in sharing vision

For Work

Learning to use tools the correct way: To be able to see exactly how something would look before it is built, how to build it, where to do what and when.

Safety precautions: warnings and avoiding danger and hazards.  To be able to exclude people walking around a person if working in a tight environment with many co-workers, and also modulate auditory input to avoid disturbance (of course done by earphones or something, but it could be processed based on importance with AI and all sorts of things. Should be a separate post about what auditory signals one could gain control over by programmed hearing aid/reduction based on wish.

For people with concentration issues at work, one could modify the amount of noise in the work environment by both changing sound perception and visual perception, as to 

 

If you have trouble f.ex. spotting subtle, but important changes in any you could add a reactional mechanism to that sort of decoded input to alert a person, it could be

In Play & Entertainment

Harmless play can be achieved through the possibility to play with things that can not harm you or be destroyed.

Interactive Movies might deserve a separate post, as I've had dreams of being inside of movies (and knowing that was what they were) as part of a character, and you could f. ex. change character of a movie when you see someone interesting to "be" in it, and the plot could be a vague story outline, still with you being able to within some limit control it. Well this sounds a bit like eXistenZ, that movie if you've seen it, really weird stuff. But it could be done and something more fun than that perhaps.

Extended Vision

More to come here, it is definitely a new adventure into "seeing the world very differently, beyond what one could think possible before".

Small Scale Holographic Display

If one could think of a cellphone or similar device as one of our key control units as it might be today, one could think that having it capable of producing a bigger scale 3D display would in some cases be beneficial for more precise interaction and some exciting new ways of manipulating and creating, within all fields of human action and interaction. It would still be mediocre compared to a full blown AR experience where such would be more unnecessary, but it does have a revolutionizing usage potential.

We see Apple recently patented a display for holographic object display with interaction capabilities. And there could be many ideas for usage of such. I tried to envision more of a massive block display, will try include sketch in this article, but who knows what yet it will yield from Apple development with this patent.

Microsoft's Holo Lens and devices from other vendors are coming soon, here are some videos and links:

Avegant Glyph - website - Infographic Video from envisionit on Vimeo.

OSVR (Open Source Virtual Reality)

CastAR

Atheer AiR

NextVR

A list of 70 AR / VR devices can be found at Augmera.com

Epson Moverio BT-200 (Bluetooth Smart Glasses)

Kopin Develops Innovative NanoJet Process for Micro LCDs to Serve Emerging AR and VR Markets

Other mentionable references:

Almost like normal glasses: Shima from Laforge Optical

K-Glass AR Chip

Augmented Reality Fun And Games At The British Museum

KAIST developed an extremely low-powered, high-performance head-mounted display embedding an augmented reality chip

ODG Smart Glasses

Telepathy - Single Eye fashion-foldable AR

Magic Leap, overhyped!? Make magic leap augmented reality experience ..uncertainty around all this of course. 

Camera based on sound

What about a depth camera that operated based on sound? I hear people say reality is like vibration and that "everything is sound" so why not try. A lot is waveforms, and also I've read some can locate obstacles using clicking sounds, and dolphins can remember and tell which object is inside a closed box with the use of sound, so why not a depth camera sensor which can do something similar.

 

 

Programming Vision Directly

In more of a long-term possible development, we could envision having come far enough with investigating the workings of our brains to be able to program directly the visual cortex, hence all of display technology and a lot of design-related things wouldn't have to be "made" as per-se if not wishing for other senses, which of course also could be programmed some ways, so a lot of our reality could actually exist (maybe as it might do already) but be programmed in new and very innovative ways.

In Art

Future of Graffiti and other art could be a stored meta-state, so let's say you have artwork that is accessible by visual cortex programming/distribution, it could be interactive or static, but people in said areas could chose to have them present or not, and pretty much decorate their surroundings different ways as they would wish.

You could both help people who have lost sight or reduced sight, as well as reduce distractions in workplaces, change color on almost anything you'd like, and who needs to carry huge display devices if it was all directly onto your eyes there could be an interactive screen or 3D environment anywhere. Much more than this too.

In Learning

Future learning sessions with teacher(s) could be either as a group at one location, or as separated students anywhere through the potential of presenting real world scenarios of wisdom and learning to heighten skills within manifestation of a better future.

Visual Cortex Plasticity (2012)

Local Medicine Diagnostics

We would like to see better technology shared to hospitals and places for quicker diagnostics of illnesses and treatment options with less waiting process than before.

Diagnostic Chip For Blood Tests

There are people having worked on diagnostic chips for almost instant recognition of viruses and this technology should be made available to more places in the world. Not that from what I've read it is all complete, but an intermediate version which could heavily reduce the time processing patients would be beneficial to get to a working state, specially if it does not involve use of too much non-bio-degradable materials and a supply chain could be put in place. Patients have before been waiting too long on results from blood-tests and in general some premature deaths could be avoided with that being more readily available, as once one knows the illness a person has, the quicker can a cure be given for those illnesses particularly which has simple cures which, if waited too long would give much more trouble and administration too for all medicine systems.

More to come.