Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Creepy!

I was recently reading this post on 5 Educational Trends for 2013 just to see the top 5.  Most of them didn't surprise me except for trend 4 - augmented reality.  The author talked about Project Glass and shared the following video:

Since I'm not real familiar with augmented reality, I decided to Google "What is augmented reality?"  I found the best user-friendly definition on the website Pocket-Lint.  They explain augmented reality is "the art of super-imposing of computer generated content over a live view of the world."

Mashable, an Internet news blog, provided a little more complex definition, but they also had a slew of articles to discover more about augmented reality.  While I was sharing the above video with Yvonne, she started wondering when they would come out with a contact lens version of these Google classes.  Wouldn't you know, The Pentagon is already working on this endeavor.




Image from http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/m.t.-anderson
After viewing and reading this information, my first thoughts went to a young adult scifi book called Feed by M.T. Anderson that came out in 2002.  The people in this society have computer implants in their head that feeds them information about their environment, but also sends out advertisements.  I thought how creepy is that!  With these glasses we aren't that far away from the concept in this scifi book.

It started a discussion in the tech office as to what will happen with technology in the next 10 to 20 years.  Of course ever the jokster, Stan started depicting himself as the crochety grandpa who doesn't like any technology you can't touch.  "Give me a keyboard any day!"  I wondered how wearing a device like this would impact every day tasks like driving.  We have issues already with texting and driving.  What would happen if I were watching Finding Nemo in one eye and watching the road with the other.  How would your brain handle that input of information?  How would this impact our society and everyday living?  What would the have and have not divide look like?  How would this impact education?  One thing I can say is it makes science fiction seem more like science fact.

So, what  do you think?

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