{"id":90,"date":"2008-01-18T16:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-19T00:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=90"},"modified":"2008-01-18T16:54:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-19T00:54:00","slug":"arnievision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=90","title":{"rendered":"Arnievision"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>One of the bits of chrome I drizzled throughout the rifters books were “Tactical Contacts” (“ConTacs”, in the vernacular): contact lenses that acted as a kind of personal GUI, feeding information to the wearer and using the roving eyeball itself as a kind of trackball pointer. Yves Scanlon wore them sometimes; Patricia Rowan would have rather have been caught naked in public than with her eyes unTacked. (Come to think of it, the masking of eyes was a consistent general motif throughout those books. Which is kind of an interesting inversion of the usual sort of mask, which covers everything except<\/i> the eyes. But I digress.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, the guys over at the University of Washington claim to have developed a working prototype<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if I buy this. My understanding is that a passive ConTac-type display is probably unworkable in principle because of the eye’s focal length: you just can’t focus clearly on anything close enough to sit on your cornea (my own whacked-out version got around this by shooting images directly onto the retina using a teensy lenticular laserium setup, but I don’t remember if I actually spelled that out in the books). The UW PR flack doesn’t address this issue at all, and in fact the researchers don’t even seem to have generated a visible image using the technology. Their main claim to fame so far is that they’ve been able to embed circuits into a contact lens and plunk it down on a rabbit’s eyeball for twenty minutes without killing him, which is certainly necessary albeit not sufficient. That doesn’t stop them from cheerfully predicting that Terminator-vision is just around the corner, though.<\/p>\n

But they must have solved that problem. They wouldn\u2019t be going on like this if they hadn’t addressed such an obvious hurdle. Nobody could be that dumb. I mean, that would be about as likely like a famous geneticist claiming that Human evolution had stopped because God likes us the way we ar\u2014 oh, wait…<\/p>\n

Photo credit, as far as I can tell, is University of Washington Weekly.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the bits of chrome I drizzled throughout the rifters books were “Tactical Contacts” (“ConTacs”, in the vernacular): contact lenses that acted as a kind of personal GUI, feeding information to the wearer and using the roving eyeball itself as a kind of trackball pointer. Yves Scanlon wore them sometimes; Patricia Rowan would have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relevant-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}