Knock Knock!
Who's there?
Knock KNOCK!!
Who's THERE?!
KNOCK KNOCK!!!
WHO THE *!$**# IS IT!!??
Silence.
Silence who?
Shut up and you will know!
I know better than tormenting my audience with such humour but I like to take things to a crescendo and then end with a low note. That my friends was a classic example. Now why would I want to do such a thing? That is because there is no climax for the joke teller when he has to tell a conventional joke. He knows the only outcome is that people are going to laugh but when he tells a joke (if you can call it that) like the one above he gets to see a variety of expressions. Starting with curiosity, restlessness (on the last KNOCK), surprise, disbelief, disappointment and anger. I love these expressions more than just seeing a blissful mirth on the recipient's face. Of course there are other jokers that like to see much more than simple expressions. They like to see confusion, trauma, anguish, pain and sheer terror. The one of the most well known of such sadistic Jokers is the The Joker from the Batman comics.
I was watching the Dark Knight the other day. Ledger's performance is mesmerizing. He creates such an embodiment of evil that its going to be very difficult for anyone else to recreate the manic chaos he creates in the movie. Its interesting to note that he was given "Batman and the Killing Joke" graphic novel as the reference. If you read that, you will realize the movie personification of the Joker has fewer dimensions to his character and has no emotional department in his upper floor above the neck compared to the Graphic novel. Essentially the Joker is what he is because of "one very bad day". That's why he says the Batman and he are very similar as the batman is also a result of one very bad day i.e day when his parents are murdered.
Incidentally the idea of keeping the Joker a very evil character devoid of any emotions whatsoever was director Nolan's idea. He wanted the emotional burden of the movie to be carried by Harvey Dent (Eckhart). So in actuality the movie is focused on the origin of Harvey Two Face and the emotional turmoil his mind goes through rather than that of the Joker. He is the main guy who swings from an extremely moralistic righteous path to the path of chaos and crime. And Why? Because he has one very bad day. He loses his sweetheart Rachel Dawes and his face literally in that one day. That said however the whole movie is about how the Joker is trying to prove a point. The point being how one very bad day can drive an average or even a more than average stoic man to insanity. How the binding of rules is nothing but a pathetic attempt to cling to rationality. He is trying to convince Batman more than anyone else and uses Harvey as his guinea pig. In the Killing Joke he tries to do the same to Commissioner Gordon in a much more brutal fashion but ultimately fails.
While Batman Begins showcased the origins of Batman extraordinally well the Dark Knight showed him to be a more or less regular superhero. I love Batman because he is the most complicated superhero. To start with he isn't a superhuman at all. He is a just a mortal who is walking the thin line between normalcy and insanity and juggling challenges of his orthogonal superhero life at the same time. He is a billionaire extraordinaire by day and a masked vigilante by night who beats the criminals to pulp with his bare hands. He is a chaos within himself but he tries to channelize the chaos towards goodness by having principles and ethics. He has left in him a small spark of sanity that acts like a light at the end of the tunnel. The light is guiding him in his life but the reality is that he is never destined to reach the end of the tunnel. So he is stuck in perpetual chaos but uses the light at the end of the tunnel as a goal, a taget for him to reach and to keep himself sane. There have been numerous situation where the Joker and others have driven Batman insane but he has managed to crawl back to sanity. He has seen both the worlds but yet he is frustrated by the fact that he doesn't fully understand the Joker. He actually has no clue about what the Joker is thinking and he doesn't realise that there is no point knowing what the Joker is thinking because the Joker's behaviour is chaotic beyond comprehension. Alfred in his infinite wisdom tries to make Batman understand that its impossible to get inside the Joker's psyche without going mad. The Batman series has some of the best character development for a comics. Every character has his or her own distinctive private and intellectual space. Bruce Wayne and Batman are two completely different characters even though they are the same person. The comics have been very particular in keeping it that way but the movies (not only Nolan's) have made that distinction a little fuzzy.
While I really think is that Health Ledger was a good choice for that role and has done ample justice to it but there could have been others who could have added much more shades to the Joker. Jim Carrey and Adrian Brody could have been great too. Adrian Brody is unbelievably talented and his persona very closely resembles the Joker in the comics as a bit more vulnerable earlier and I am sure he would have played the insane part as well as Ledger. Jim Carrey on the other hand is a natural as a lunatic and if used well has the potential to deliver surprisingly powerhouse performances. For all said and done, history has been written and I am waiting with baited breath for the next Batman cinematic installation due in 2012.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Man. A social and sociable animal.
Man is a social animal. He lives to communicate more than he communicates to live. The former and overwhelming category tends to call the people in the latter category reticent. People in first category also quite casually put the reticent into a more extreme group of the Taciturn. However Silence is a powerful communicative tool if used correctly. Most western cultures react differently to silence. People from such cultures tend to become uncomfortable when they see a silent man in their midst. They are unable to understand whether the person is angry, unhappy or whether he is brewing a malicious plan. The main reason for such confusion is that usually in Western Cultures when people are happy they will try and communicate their happiness readily and naturally to the person next to them and at the same time they also share their unhappiness. Thats why a silent man is sure to make people confused.
Like I said earlier, Silence is good in socially tolerable limits and if used with good sense of timing. Social people which is the majority of the populace commonly exhibit qualities like gregariousness, extroversion and vocal friendliness. These are the acceptable qualities with which one gets stamped as Social.
In today's times when communication is considered as a vital path to success it also seems to imply that introvertness is a sure path to failure. Agreed that the world is shrinking. It shrank a lot when telephone was invented but people weren't satisfied. The concept of sharing was still incomplete. Something more was needed. Just voice didn't suffice. With the advent of computers and internet came the bridging of that gap. Vast amounts of information was being exchanged through voice, video and data-files. People who rarely opened their mouths were perceived to be gregarious when they started typing on chat. However with ever increasing channels of communication the human mind quickly gets bored and starts to feel lonely. Something more entertaining fun, educative, provocative etc. was required to keep their minds active. Essentially alive. Enter socio-networking sites. I akin them to interactive TV. Its still wastes a ton of your time but you perceive yourself to be actively involved and keeping your mind alive. I as a avid movie fan can't figure out how that is better than watching movies but experts say it is. Probably because at least some muscles like your fingers are moving other than just your eyelids.
It always strikes me as interesting when in an extremely fast-tracked life people can still afford to spend countless hours updating their facebook pages with minute details of their daily mundane life and commenting on equally mundane activities of other people's lives. When millions do it actively and I don't see the point, I am clearly missing the point. However a deeper question is in an increasingly shrinking world why is everyone becoming more isolated? Why are people becoming more reserved in real life and extremely garrulous online? All these new mechanisms of communication are actually in some way mutating our natural behaviour of real-life face to face communication. Thankfully the online emoticons can never replace the actual emotions and its impact on the participants of a face to face communication. Am I saying this as a fact? Hell no, I am just making a blog out of my personal experiences.
Like I said earlier, Silence is good in socially tolerable limits and if used with good sense of timing. Social people which is the majority of the populace commonly exhibit qualities like gregariousness, extroversion and vocal friendliness. These are the acceptable qualities with which one gets stamped as Social.
In today's times when communication is considered as a vital path to success it also seems to imply that introvertness is a sure path to failure. Agreed that the world is shrinking. It shrank a lot when telephone was invented but people weren't satisfied. The concept of sharing was still incomplete. Something more was needed. Just voice didn't suffice. With the advent of computers and internet came the bridging of that gap. Vast amounts of information was being exchanged through voice, video and data-files. People who rarely opened their mouths were perceived to be gregarious when they started typing on chat. However with ever increasing channels of communication the human mind quickly gets bored and starts to feel lonely. Something more entertaining fun, educative, provocative etc. was required to keep their minds active. Essentially alive. Enter socio-networking sites. I akin them to interactive TV. Its still wastes a ton of your time but you perceive yourself to be actively involved and keeping your mind alive. I as a avid movie fan can't figure out how that is better than watching movies but experts say it is. Probably because at least some muscles like your fingers are moving other than just your eyelids.
It always strikes me as interesting when in an extremely fast-tracked life people can still afford to spend countless hours updating their facebook pages with minute details of their daily mundane life and commenting on equally mundane activities of other people's lives. When millions do it actively and I don't see the point, I am clearly missing the point. However a deeper question is in an increasingly shrinking world why is everyone becoming more isolated? Why are people becoming more reserved in real life and extremely garrulous online? All these new mechanisms of communication are actually in some way mutating our natural behaviour of real-life face to face communication. Thankfully the online emoticons can never replace the actual emotions and its impact on the participants of a face to face communication. Am I saying this as a fact? Hell no, I am just making a blog out of my personal experiences.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Criticising the critics!
A few nights ago I watched a wonderful marathi movie named Harishchandrachi Factory. Its a Marathi movie by director Prakash Mokashi about the Father of Indian Cinema Dadasaheb Phalke's journey to immortal fame. Its a commentary on a significant period of Phalke's life where he got tremendously inspired by "moving pictures" i.e cinema and decided to make one for the Indian audiences.
The movie shows his passion for learning and his struggle to achieve his goal in a much lighter vein. To many people's surprise this was intentional. Many complained about the Chaplinsque style that Mokashi decided to use to portray many of the scenes but most people failed to get the point. The point was to show Phalke's struggle to success in the same way he would have shown it had he made the movie himself. You see Phalke was a master of silent films and silent films were to remain his only choice even after the talkies had made an entry into Indian Films. The picture's style is in actuality a tribute to Phalke's films and his film making style.
The film is about the making of Phalke's first film. It is not Phalke's biopic. The intensity of Phalke's problems is deliberately toned down to show Phalke's point of view in dealing with the situations like his approaches to raise money by quickly selling off house hold stuff, his grit and determination and his tremendous sense of focus in learning of the film technology in London without any contacts there to help him out. Phalke is shown as an eternal optimist but thats a question of individual interpretation of a character. When I saw the movie, I realized the movie played out the sequences like they would have played out in Phalke's mind, light with a sense of tangy humour.
It goes without saying that Phalke in his financially troubling times suffered and made his family suffer with him but the manner in which he never lost focus, hope, his sense of humour or his love towards his family through the bad times is a lesson to all of us. Many people were irked by the feel of the movie and the very set like atmosphere. Consider the fact that the movie was set in early 1900s and loud almost garish sets were available back then that brought out different colours in shades of grey in the black and white movies.
Overall the movie entertains and is meaningful. Its exactly how Phalke would have intended it to be.
The movie shows his passion for learning and his struggle to achieve his goal in a much lighter vein. To many people's surprise this was intentional. Many complained about the Chaplinsque style that Mokashi decided to use to portray many of the scenes but most people failed to get the point. The point was to show Phalke's struggle to success in the same way he would have shown it had he made the movie himself. You see Phalke was a master of silent films and silent films were to remain his only choice even after the talkies had made an entry into Indian Films. The picture's style is in actuality a tribute to Phalke's films and his film making style.
The film is about the making of Phalke's first film. It is not Phalke's biopic. The intensity of Phalke's problems is deliberately toned down to show Phalke's point of view in dealing with the situations like his approaches to raise money by quickly selling off house hold stuff, his grit and determination and his tremendous sense of focus in learning of the film technology in London without any contacts there to help him out. Phalke is shown as an eternal optimist but thats a question of individual interpretation of a character. When I saw the movie, I realized the movie played out the sequences like they would have played out in Phalke's mind, light with a sense of tangy humour.
It goes without saying that Phalke in his financially troubling times suffered and made his family suffer with him but the manner in which he never lost focus, hope, his sense of humour or his love towards his family through the bad times is a lesson to all of us. Many people were irked by the feel of the movie and the very set like atmosphere. Consider the fact that the movie was set in early 1900s and loud almost garish sets were available back then that brought out different colours in shades of grey in the black and white movies.
Overall the movie entertains and is meaningful. Its exactly how Phalke would have intended it to be.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Sun's demise or a revival in the making
With the Sun Microsystems acquisition complete, everyone should expect at least a million blogs about the golden and brilliant days of Sun at its peak and its subsequent retardation. While many inside Sun will lament its demise as an open cultured fun loving ass-kicking technological company, I for one believe the Oracle takeover might be the best thing that has happened to Sun. I am not talking about Oracle saving Sun from death because that goes without saying but the fact that Oracle can give all the Sun technologies a sense of purpose and direction.
Agreed that the two merging companies don't share a lot of culture. Oracle is known for its ruthless demeanor doing one thing it knows how to do best. Making money. Sun over years of extraordinary research and development has developed hordes of bleeding edge technologies but looking a bit deeper one can't help but wonder that all of them look like orphans. This is comparable to developing the coolest operating system with little or no applications running over it. Of course, I am not talking about Solaris here but Sun as a whole. I believe with the acquisition most of the Sun technologies have now got a singular purpose. To make sure Oracle applications work best on them. Oracle in that sense is a very lucky company to get hold of Sun. It now has to its disposal some of the most advanced "tools" it can use to make sure it stays ahead of the applications race.
No matter what anyone says the feeling of satisfaction when one gets after being appreciated for developing a good piece of art is way more than developing a stupendous piece of art that no one will ever appreciate. The fact that the merger will kill Sun's working culture is undeniable but I think if there is a sense of purpose and return on "research and development" investment thats far more important than anything else.
It will finally give people a sense that no one at Sun is wasting their time doing ultra-cool stuff that had the potential of never being used because Sun couldn't find the right user application to sell it with.
Agreed that the two merging companies don't share a lot of culture. Oracle is known for its ruthless demeanor doing one thing it knows how to do best. Making money. Sun over years of extraordinary research and development has developed hordes of bleeding edge technologies but looking a bit deeper one can't help but wonder that all of them look like orphans. This is comparable to developing the coolest operating system with little or no applications running over it. Of course, I am not talking about Solaris here but Sun as a whole. I believe with the acquisition most of the Sun technologies have now got a singular purpose. To make sure Oracle applications work best on them. Oracle in that sense is a very lucky company to get hold of Sun. It now has to its disposal some of the most advanced "tools" it can use to make sure it stays ahead of the applications race.
No matter what anyone says the feeling of satisfaction when one gets after being appreciated for developing a good piece of art is way more than developing a stupendous piece of art that no one will ever appreciate. The fact that the merger will kill Sun's working culture is undeniable but I think if there is a sense of purpose and return on "research and development" investment thats far more important than anything else.
It will finally give people a sense that no one at Sun is wasting their time doing ultra-cool stuff that had the potential of never being used because Sun couldn't find the right user application to sell it with.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Iconoclastic ...me?!
I am truly fascinated by the people who lived thousands of years ago who studied, observed and recorded their countless observations about our environment, plants, humans and their harmonious existence. Not only were the observations recorded, but they were studied thoroughly by future generations, added to and amended. As time passed, future generations understood and assimilated vast amounts of information quickly and using this information they concisely wrote down guidelines for a better living. These included guidelines on physical health, spiritual or mental health, occupation, civil works and social living (morals and ethics). These people in their minds had a clear vision of how their guidelines if implemented properly had the potential of creating the most harmonious existence of humankind. . The guidelines were supposed to help humans achieve harmony with nature, other humans and self.
In the Hindu way of life, these guidelines are called the "Vedas" which means knowledge or wisdom imparted through the speech of god. Over the years across centuries man then translated and manipulated these practical texts to give it a sacred and religious colour to it. While doing this, considerable alterations were done to the original text. These alterations not only diluted the guidelines but also paved way to create fundamental schism in the original teachings. The hand-me-down approach is possibly one of the reasons why changes to these texts happened in the first place.
During this time there was no idol worship or at least there is no known record. The classification of labour was introduced during this time and was done based on capabilities. The obviously stronger people got into more physical jobs like civil works, farming and security. People with known talents in many arts like clothing, sculpturing were given a free rein to develop these further. People with higher cerebral capacities were given the task of research and town-ship planning. Some people were isolated from society due to their exposure to communicable diseases, exhibition of disorderly social behaviour and other malicious reasons. Along with these people another group of people were isolated with them to help them. While this classification started of well, vested interests, ulterior motives to gain more power which mark the basic human trait started tilting the equilibrium of this system. The cerebral people wanted to gain more for less. They started making schemes so that people start to trust them more than others. The people with physical power tried to take control of other weaker people instead of protecting them. The isolated people were further distanced. The increasing rift between these classes became so fundamental that across centuries people forgot why the classes were created in the first place but instead a malicious misinterpretation of classes was to remain thousands of years to this day to plague the Hindus in all aspects of their lives. It seems logical to say that these classes were never created to act as a classification to define one's standard of living but as a practical guideline for work.
It is indeed sad to see today's Hindu society fighting amongst themselves over these classes when the whole idea behind them was harmony, With the introduction of god and idol worship, people have morphed themselves to be the followers rather than leaders. While the concept of god does seem to give the people the power to stay mentally stable it is in fact detrimental to their mental power as they push the responsibility of their stability onto someone else. While determining the happiness quotient, Indians rank high for just this particular reason as they make god responsible for everything that's happening to them which makes them feel secure and in turn happy. While this pattern of misinterpretations of original teachings over centuries is not just valid for Hindus but more or less applies to all religions. The people who created these religions were great men but lesser men after them got more power and following than they deserved and chose to mutate the teachings of these great men into scriptures of illogical doctrine.
Fortunately looking at history there has been no dearth of great men and time and again, great men have rose to the opportunity and tried to create an equilibrium and a harmony for humankind. Currently we are in a hiatus in that harmony but things will change soon for the better. The only thing unknown here is how soon.
In the Hindu way of life, these guidelines are called the "Vedas" which means knowledge or wisdom imparted through the speech of god. Over the years across centuries man then translated and manipulated these practical texts to give it a sacred and religious colour to it. While doing this, considerable alterations were done to the original text. These alterations not only diluted the guidelines but also paved way to create fundamental schism in the original teachings. The hand-me-down approach is possibly one of the reasons why changes to these texts happened in the first place.
During this time there was no idol worship or at least there is no known record. The classification of labour was introduced during this time and was done based on capabilities. The obviously stronger people got into more physical jobs like civil works, farming and security. People with known talents in many arts like clothing, sculpturing were given a free rein to develop these further. People with higher cerebral capacities were given the task of research and town-ship planning. Some people were isolated from society due to their exposure to communicable diseases, exhibition of disorderly social behaviour and other malicious reasons. Along with these people another group of people were isolated with them to help them. While this classification started of well, vested interests, ulterior motives to gain more power which mark the basic human trait started tilting the equilibrium of this system. The cerebral people wanted to gain more for less. They started making schemes so that people start to trust them more than others. The people with physical power tried to take control of other weaker people instead of protecting them. The isolated people were further distanced. The increasing rift between these classes became so fundamental that across centuries people forgot why the classes were created in the first place but instead a malicious misinterpretation of classes was to remain thousands of years to this day to plague the Hindus in all aspects of their lives. It seems logical to say that these classes were never created to act as a classification to define one's standard of living but as a practical guideline for work.
It is indeed sad to see today's Hindu society fighting amongst themselves over these classes when the whole idea behind them was harmony, With the introduction of god and idol worship, people have morphed themselves to be the followers rather than leaders. While the concept of god does seem to give the people the power to stay mentally stable it is in fact detrimental to their mental power as they push the responsibility of their stability onto someone else. While determining the happiness quotient, Indians rank high for just this particular reason as they make god responsible for everything that's happening to them which makes them feel secure and in turn happy. While this pattern of misinterpretations of original teachings over centuries is not just valid for Hindus but more or less applies to all religions. The people who created these religions were great men but lesser men after them got more power and following than they deserved and chose to mutate the teachings of these great men into scriptures of illogical doctrine.
Fortunately looking at history there has been no dearth of great men and time and again, great men have rose to the opportunity and tried to create an equilibrium and a harmony for humankind. Currently we are in a hiatus in that harmony but things will change soon for the better. The only thing unknown here is how soon.
Friday, April 17, 2009
A detour from the mainstream hindi cinema? Maybe. Maybe not.
Yesterday I was cursing as to why did I have the privilege of watching Nagesh Kukunoor's latest flick 8x10 tasveer. The movie starts normally with Akshay showcasing his acrobatic antics as fast as Salman khan can remove his shirt but then in this movie AK also gets the opportunity to do some actual acting and he fares well. So bottom line is AK can act if he wants to and if the director wants him to but what can AK do if the director doesn't want to direct. I think thats what happens in the last 20 minutes of the film. It feels like some amateur who while trying to complete Beethoven's unfinished symphony totally totals it. It almost feels like Kukunoor for some sadistic reason decided to take one of the best suspenses in Hindi cinema and push it down the very cliff from which Akshay takes his fantastic leap at the start of the movie.
I think Nagesh Kukunoor went blank and he could never really figure out what to write for the climax. In my opinion he should have appointed Anurag Kashyap for the task . That would have been a cracker of a movie. Agreed that AKashyap is a highly self-indulgent film-maker but what 8x10 tasveer needed was a whacky/shocking/revelating climax and he seemed to fit the director's bill perfectly. Overall the 8x10 tasveer has a very good international feel to it. The scenery selection is excellent and the NRI characters look just right. As a counter-argument, Kukunoor did well to take the film into familiar Indian cinema grounds rather than taking a very abstract detour. So to sum up the movie is a decent effort that raises the technical bar of hindi movie making but lacks a good script and ends up in a banal climax.
If you haven't seen either DevD or "No Smoking" you should. They set foot into a totally new territory never before ventured by any Hindi movie director and kudos to Kashyap for making such movies. Of course, it takes a twisted mind to make one and yet another one to understand such movies but then Kashyap knows there are too many of these twisted minds around. For people who saw "No Smoking" and didn't get it please read Stephen King's Quitters Inc short story and if you still don't get, forget it you are the one of the few unlucky ones with an untwisted mind
I think Nagesh Kukunoor went blank and he could never really figure out what to write for the climax. In my opinion he should have appointed Anurag Kashyap for the task . That would have been a cracker of a movie. Agreed that AKashyap is a highly self-indulgent film-maker but what 8x10 tasveer needed was a whacky/shocking/revelating climax and he seemed to fit the director's bill perfectly. Overall the 8x10 tasveer has a very good international feel to it. The scenery selection is excellent and the NRI characters look just right. As a counter-argument, Kukunoor did well to take the film into familiar Indian cinema grounds rather than taking a very abstract detour. So to sum up the movie is a decent effort that raises the technical bar of hindi movie making but lacks a good script and ends up in a banal climax.
If you haven't seen either DevD or "No Smoking" you should. They set foot into a totally new territory never before ventured by any Hindi movie director and kudos to Kashyap for making such movies. Of course, it takes a twisted mind to make one and yet another one to understand such movies but then Kashyap knows there are too many of these twisted minds around. For people who saw "No Smoking" and didn't get it please read Stephen King's Quitters Inc short story and if you still don't get, forget it you are the one of the few unlucky ones with an untwisted mind
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Something to boggle the mind...
On a clear night if you start looking at the sky and think about the countless stars, the endless sky, the infinite number of galaxies the mind starts to boggle. After a while you give up as there is only so much the mind can comprehend before it starts reeling. My mind does the same when I think about technology advances and that mind you is happening right here on earth. The speed with which technology is advancing and the world is shrinking is truly mind-boggling. Some of the new gadgets like Apple's iPhone are not just eye-candy but the next step in how humans are going to interact with the information available to them at any given time.
Not only is innovation in top gear but the assimilation of different innovations to generate a synergistic and coherent uber-innovation is also happening at a faster pace. The iPhone uses many of these innovations like e.g utilizing the street view from google maps to pin-point your location and orientation using simple web interface and not GPS. Of course, you will need to personally co-operate with the searching process in at least identifying whether the building that you are standing in front of is actually the one showed in the street view map.
Some years back I had seen an invention for a auto-focusing camera that uses retro reflected eye focus measurements. What that essentially means is when a user looks at something say e.g. part of a scenery, the view finder optical system detects the eye direction and focuses on the object your eye is actually focused on. Now combine this with the latest and the greatest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithm and you can actually compute/translate/ what you are seeing onto the screen. Let say you are looking at a signboard, the camera will auto-focus on the sign board and the OCR will read the characters out of it. Third invention is the micro-camera that can almost fits in the corner of a spectacle frame. There was also an invention which projects an image on the glass of the spectacle and so it feels like you are watching a giant TV but in reality the TV is a 4x4 mm square on your glass of your eyeglass frame. With rapid advances in wireless and information exchange, you can quickly process what you are looking at. So the total assimilated invention will be something like this.
Say you are walking down a street and decide to grab a bite. You basically (and always) want the best food at the best deal for your money without wasting your time. Your choice of cuisine for that day is lets say Chinese food and you look at the banner of the first Chinese restaurant you come across. The moment you look at the banner the camera in your eyeglass frame will auto-focus on the letters and the OCR will kick into action and capture those letters. The letters are then sent over the ubiquitous wi-fi/mobile/3g etc to an online search engine. The search engine searches the text and realizes its a search for a restaurant and gives back a table of data. The table of data shows relevant details like alternative (/better) restaurants in that area, current menu, today's special, cheapest item on the menu, how long the hotel is open etc. These results can be custom prepared for you if you have a profile uploaded on the search engine. The results are then either neatly tabularized or mind-scaped (brain-graphed) to suit each person's preference and ability to understand information in a preferred format. This is then projected on the micro-tv on the eyeglasses' frame. All this should complete in one fraction of a second so the moment you look at the restaurant you know if you want to go in there or not. The information available is endless. A tiny camera scanner combo can probably scan your retina for secure transactions that needs authentication and say access your bank or credit card account to see if you can afford the chosen place or not.
While all this may seem fantastical its really not anymore. All the individual components are already ready. Its just a matter of time before somebody realizes their collective potential and creates a uber-device.
Not only is innovation in top gear but the assimilation of different innovations to generate a synergistic and coherent uber-innovation is also happening at a faster pace. The iPhone uses many of these innovations like e.g utilizing the street view from google maps to pin-point your location and orientation using simple web interface and not GPS. Of course, you will need to personally co-operate with the searching process in at least identifying whether the building that you are standing in front of is actually the one showed in the street view map.
Some years back I had seen an invention for a auto-focusing camera that uses retro reflected eye focus measurements. What that essentially means is when a user looks at something say e.g. part of a scenery, the view finder optical system detects the eye direction and focuses on the object your eye is actually focused on. Now combine this with the latest and the greatest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithm and you can actually compute/translate/ what you are seeing onto the screen. Let say you are looking at a signboard, the camera will auto-focus on the sign board and the OCR will read the characters out of it. Third invention is the micro-camera that can almost fits in the corner of a spectacle frame. There was also an invention which projects an image on the glass of the spectacle and so it feels like you are watching a giant TV but in reality the TV is a 4x4 mm square on your glass of your eyeglass frame. With rapid advances in wireless and information exchange, you can quickly process what you are looking at. So the total assimilated invention will be something like this.
Say you are walking down a street and decide to grab a bite. You basically (and always) want the best food at the best deal for your money without wasting your time. Your choice of cuisine for that day is lets say Chinese food and you look at the banner of the first Chinese restaurant you come across. The moment you look at the banner the camera in your eyeglass frame will auto-focus on the letters and the OCR will kick into action and capture those letters. The letters are then sent over the ubiquitous wi-fi/mobile/3g etc to an online search engine. The search engine searches the text and realizes its a search for a restaurant and gives back a table of data. The table of data shows relevant details like alternative (/better) restaurants in that area, current menu, today's special, cheapest item on the menu, how long the hotel is open etc. These results can be custom prepared for you if you have a profile uploaded on the search engine. The results are then either neatly tabularized or mind-scaped (brain-graphed) to suit each person's preference and ability to understand information in a preferred format. This is then projected on the micro-tv on the eyeglasses' frame. All this should complete in one fraction of a second so the moment you look at the restaurant you know if you want to go in there or not. The information available is endless. A tiny camera scanner combo can probably scan your retina for secure transactions that needs authentication and say access your bank or credit card account to see if you can afford the chosen place or not.
While all this may seem fantastical its really not anymore. All the individual components are already ready. Its just a matter of time before somebody realizes their collective potential and creates a uber-device.
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