I am currently watching Alan Alda on PBS, he is at the MIT media lab talking with developers of wearable computers, which have went from bulky cumbersome helmets, belts, backpacks, and visors to an overcoat and glasses. | More on garments via boingboing
Previously they were demonstrating fabricating machines that could create things quickly from a simple template, and the idea that these fabricating machines could proliferate and become common. Then when you wanted a knew bicycle it would be emailed to your GE home fabricator and be made in minutes. It also briefly touched on how this could become an "open source" direction for product development. Real time input from users. Imagine.
The next segment is a piece about a backpack that records in "360 degree" "panoramic" shot of a students entire life. The student has rewound the stored video and audio date through computer algorithms searching for the rhythms in life and using the oddities as searchable benchmarks. Your whole life on a hard drive, mobile computing with head mounted screens? Have they been reading my blog? Or Cory Doctorows book?
The final segment is robots-Blah blah blah. I am tired of robots. I want to see more exoskeletons, that seems neat. Maybe one that is cheap, simple, and low powered that can help the average construction worker, or fruit harvester.
Seeing the MIT media lab workshop reminds me of visiting the San Francisco museum as a child, there were spinning stools that held you on by gravity, Laserbeams set in sand creating lighted paitings, and giant rooms covered in tinfoil and lit with strobelights, (Dad do you remember that? *auto email here.) My question is why don't highly creative environments like MIT create miniature development labs that visit every school every year?
*How could you flag a post on your blog and when it is published the flag sends and email requesting input or information from someone simultaneously, and copies the post to the email? This could be useful and seems like a logical step in the free flowing think environment of weblogs.
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