The buzz in the United States these days is about the upcoming ‘Internet Contact Lenses’ and Dr Michio Kaku, a New Yorkbased Physics professor of Japanese origin. Americans are excited about the latest news from Google — smart contact lenses that allow the wearer to access the Internet with just the blink of an eye.
Google already has Internet glasses, but it’s difficult to wear them without being noticed, and sometimes laughed at. But contacts can, no doubt, be more discreet. Experts contend that a lens with even a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. They say, “The repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visualcues from a navigation system.”
Obviously, one of the key challenges of putting displays into contact lenses is that the eye can’t normally focus on something that close. But experts claim that they can alter the contact to reduce the focal distance and experiments have demonstrated that the technology is safe. The most excited among Americans is Michio Kaku, who has been writing bestsellers on the future of this technology. Kaku also believes that one day we will be able to ‘insert’ memory in the human brain and fatal diseases like Alzheimer’s will be curable. In movies like The Matrix and Total Recall, memories were inserted directly into the brain. That was science fiction but science is catching up, says Kaku.
For Kaku, the brain is a computer made of meat, and understanding it is just a complex engineering problem. The fundamental laws are already known, and Kaku believes we’ll soon be manipulating the stuff of consciousness with the same acuity we push electrons around in our digital devices. He talks about it at length in his latest bestseller, The Future of the Mind. But he was also prescient in his outlook back in 2011 when he spoke to Bigthink.com. He said, “First of all, in the future, the Internet will be in your contact lens. You will blink and go online. You will see individuals and their biography will appear and subtitles will appear if they speak in Chinese. You will always know who you’re talking to and what they are saying even if they speak in a different language.”
He continues, “Now think about this — if you have Internet contact lenses, then you can imagine and conjure up different kinds of bizarre universes. Just like in The Matrix, you can be thrust into an alien environment. You can have all sorts of wondrous things take place inside your contact lens. But then the trick is what happens if you move? What happens if you touch things? Well, the (US) military has constructed something called ‘omni-directional treadmills’. It’s a treadmill in any direction.” Then Kaku narrates his experience when he took a film crew from the Science Channel with him to the US military facilities at Fort Benning in the southern state of Georgia where they filmed Kaku inside that omnidirectional treadmill. “I was surrounded by 360 degree screens showing the image of Baghdad. I had a backpack and I could walk in any direction and always wind up in the same place. As I moved, everything around me moved. The streets of Baghdad changed every time I ran in any direction.”
The professor with his long flowing white hair acknowledges that the only thing that’s missing is a sense of touch. “That’s where Haptic technology comes in. It is the ability to create the feel of a virtual reality. Now how does that work? Let’s say you have a platform with thousands of vertical pins such that when you put your hand on this platform, the pins then conform to the fingers because each pin is governed by a computer.
Therefore, if you put your hand on this set of pins, you can duplicate any texture that you want. So in some sense, if you’re surrounded by these Haptic devices, you’ll be able to touch objects and think that you’re actually touching skin or touching wood or touching metal. And then you have the Internet contact lens and then you’re surrounded by 360 degree screens with an omni-directional treadmill, you’re getting awfully close to The Matrix.”
Matrix or no Matrix, I am waiting for the day when I can log on to impactonnet. com without even blinking an eye. Sorry, let me say it again. It should be just by blinking an eye.
(Author/news analyst Ravi M Khanna is a former South Asia bureau chief of Voice of America. He now freelances from New Delhi)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
