Google Glass concept unveiled. Cyborg styled vision overlays are here.

Google Glass concept unveiled. Cyborg styled vision overlays are here.

The Google Glass Augmented reality glasses have been unveiled. This consists of a pair of glasses that overlay computer information about the scenes that you are viewing. Rather like the Ghost in the Shell anime series, where the characters had augmented reality overlays on their vision as well as those cybernetic bodies. A cybernetic body is still a far away dream, but the augmented reality and integration of the functions of a smartphone into a virtual overlay for your day-to-day life is already here. Will this use the Google android OS? I would think that it would, and this is developed by the Google X labs that are working on the driverless car and many other futuristic projects that will revolutionize the world we live in. I wonder if this technology would distract people whilst they are walking around the streets or if they are using it while they are driving a car. I guess that the design of the overlays could be made less obtrusive and they could be made more translucent so that they do not cover as much of your field of view. If you could tuck the display off to the side of your vision with a simple command, making your field of view clear, whilst keeping the display off to the side and visible, just like in Ghost in the Shell, then you could still ride a bicycle or drive a car and have a good field of view for safety.

That would be good from a safety standpoint, although you could also have a Heads Up Display on the car windscreen as well, but it would be good to keep this technology to a minimum whilst driving for safety, a lot of accidents are caused by distracted drivers. There has been an interest in this kind of technology for a long time, there were those people that were using wearable computers that made you look like a Gargoyle from Snow Crash, or a Borg drone. Now that the technology can be miniaturized sufficiently to be wearable like the photos show, it is less obvious. It would be even better if the actual lenses in the glasses were a screen and you did not need that white thing sticking out one side, but I am sure that will come very soon. This technology could be very useful for tradesmen and medical staff that could make good use of a augmented reality display that would overlay useful information onto whatever job they are working on. Eventually, this information could be transmitted directly into the brain via the optic nerve, adding the augmented reality information to the information the eye sees, then the technology could be implanted, bringing humans closer to cybernetic enhancement and replacing the worn out parts of our bodies with cybernetic prosthetics such as the ones in the movie Bicentennial Man.

This way we could adapt our bodies to cope with the changing climate on our planet due to the changing output of the Sun, as well as building bodies that can cope with long term space travel, if that ever eventuated with the way the political climate is changing right now. I am not sure if Apple are working on something that can compete with the Google technology, this is true futuristic technology for sure, we are moving into a new age, the age of total information availability, where you can just look at something and bring up information about it without too much fuss. Walking around an art gallery would become even better if you could bring up information about the painting you are looking at just by looking at it and requesting the information and you would get detailed information about the artist and his works. I can predict that this will be quite popular, but could cause many car accidents, just as the mobile telephones are causing accidents right now. of course there will need to be some common sense required when using this technology, but I am sure that it will be very useful for many people. Movies such as Iron Man have shown cool looking augmented reality displays and this has fueled the publics desire to have this technology for themselves. it would be cool if you could load a program into it that allowed you to look at the night sky and it would overlay information about the bright points of light you are looking at.

That would be indispensable for astronomy fans. There are programs for Linux that display a worthwhile facsimile of the night sky and you can click on a point of light to have it identified. That would be awesome if the augmented reality glasses where able to display the same thing. Stellarium is the one I am thinking of, it would be awesome with GPS integration and using the Google Glass technology.