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.