Terminator Vision

I’ve just witnessed one of the fastest meme-burns I’ve ever seen.

I learned about these video contact lenses from a New York Times article posted to Kurzweil AI back in April (And Washington University’s original press release dropped on January 17th.). I confess, I even tweeted this story myself back in June (while attending CAT, in response to a comment made by Mike Geiger). But the story laid dormant for most of the last six or seven months. Until a few weeks ago when IEEE Sprectrum did an in depth, four page story on the technology that was picked up by Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb. With RWW’s large readership, the story took-off on Twitter. By Thursday WIRED Gadget Lab jumped on the bandwagon and set Twitter and the tech/media blogshpere ablaze. Robert Rice, Chairman of the AR Consortium, threw some cold water on the euphoria, in an attempt to reel people back in to reality… to little effect. I don’t wish to in anyway downplay the research being done by Babak Parviz and his team. Incrementally this will improve, and when it does I’ll be first in line. But that is at least a decade if not more away.

I write this as a sort of prologue to my next story, one I’ve been researching for a while, regarding Augmented Reality eyewear, I invite you to follow on to the next article, “Eye for an iPhone”.