justin@inmet (11/11/88)
Re: Dan Mocsny's Lady in the Boat Bravo! What a marvelous way of making the point! Now, what I'm curious about is: is anyone actually working towards this stuff? I mean, it's seems to be obvious way to go (although my friend Alex and I tend to argue about whether glasses or direct neural implants are more likely...) But is anyone seriously thinking about it yet? I figure that within the next 5-10 years, technology should have advanced enough to start prototyping a crude version of this idea. Is anyone working on the implications? For example, speculating on how to do textual input if, say, speech recognition doesn't keep up with display technology? Doing away with the keyboard paradigm in favor of simple, subtle finger movements? Figuring what resolution one would need for an LCD to look decent at a 1/2 inch distance? The sociological implications of computers becoming that portable? This is fascinating stuff, and there certainly *should* be people thinking about it... (Followups should probably go to alt.cyberpunk, I guess; I'm on a notes system, so I can't set the fields up...) -- Justin du Coeur
jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) (11/15/88)
In article <207400003@inmet>, justin@inmet writes: > >Re: Dan Mocsny's Lady in the Boat > >Now, what I'm curious about is: is anyone actually working towards this >stuff? At least some of it has been demonstrated. Ivan Sutherland, while at Harvard, built a system based on the PDP-1 with the following: . "sword of Damocles", a telescoping arm with gymbal joints and shaft encoders, attached to a helmet with: . a pair of 1-2" CRT's mounted on the sides and projected with prisms into wearer's eyes. . the PDP-1 ran a program which tracked the wearer's position in the room, and generated a stereo pair of line drawings of the room's walls and maybe some furniture (the PDP-1 cabinets, e.g.). The trick to this system was finding anyone crazy enough to put 30 kilovolts upside his or her temples. Ivan designed the graphics hardware to generate 3D images in real time, the approach that he went off and built into a company at E&S. -- /jr jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr