Saturday, March 2, 2013

To see the future

It's been a while since I've had a clear vision of a future technology. Today, via failblog originally, I've seen one. Nobody seems to get what possible use Polytron's transparent smartphone would have. Consider this: Google Glasses are operating in the same space. Consider what the phone might be with holographic infrared and/or nanometer wave radar and/or sonography. Add GPS, internet access, image recognition and a bit more computing than today's smartphones to drive it all, and what you have is a device you hold up to any given thing and it will tell you what it knows about it /in an overlay/. Extra points if it has a stereoscopic camera so you can pick the depth it scans at with precision. Like a tricorder only better. Remember, you heard it here first. So anyone trying to patent this in five years? I have two words for you. Prior art. -JRS

1 comment:

Jeff Duntemann said...

I'd wager that that is what the world's heading for. As whole electronic functions are cooked down to jelly-bean logic, tossing in dedicated image-recognition chips (basically special-purpose graphics engines) becomes trivial. In computing (as in some other areas) specificity is easy; generality is hard.

I'm not sure a phone/tablet has to be structurally transparent (as Polytron's device is) to do the job. My 10" tablet has a camera, and when it's in camera mode, it's virtually transparent, in that it shows an image of what the camera's pointed at, on which an enhanced reality overlay could easily be placed.

But the more prior art of this sort is placed out there, the better. (If often wondered if blog posts count as prior art. Have never seen good case law on this.)

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