Volunteer Cyborg

For at least a decade, if not two, I've been threatening to replace one of my eyes with a camera attached to a hard drive, and it looks like it might be coming along any day now!

Unfortunately it's Micro$oft (maybe I'll wait for the competition), but they are working on something called "SenseCam" which will do exactly that! It's a camera that continuously takes pictures.. storing them on a hard drive or sending them to the internet. The main goal is to help people retain better memories.

Beyond therapeutic uses, both Wood and Bell predicted that people would chose to record more and more of their lives as the technology became available

.. and yes... they are reading my mind particularly well... just as other sites like MySpace, YouTube, various blogs, etc are showing that people ARE already falling in to that predictable pattern.

As for capabilities... sure.. your human eye is pretty good... even GREAT! But just imagine if you also had the ability for infra-vision, night-vision, or totally INCREDIBLE ZOOM. The Gigapxl Project has already created a camera that is taking massively large (detailed) images:

the camera captures images at 4 gigapixels -- a resolution high enough to photograph four football fields and capture every single blade of grass.

Here we can see an image they took, and zoomed in, and in again, and again... where we can perfectly see people sitting on a cliff from such a distance that they don't even show up in the full, overview image. Just think if your eye could take pictures at THAT detail, and then a computer could scan at the lowest, most detailed level for things of "interest" (perhaps using face recognition), and then displaying those things back to you at your convenience? WOW!
Sure, the camera is large right now, but as technology advances, these cameras will shrink.


I suppose another really handy feature will be when they fix up the software (image tagging) features so I (or allowed guests) can sort/search for specific images based on recognized/tagged items and people or time/date stamps.

Also, I might start looking in to some Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation, which the US Defense Advanced Research Project (DARPA) is funding so that I can run extra long distances, jump super high, or anything needing extra strength, speed and endurance.

I'm READY!!
Sign me up!

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