You won't have to wait for Google to reveal the next generation of Glass (aka Project Aura) -- regulators just stepped in on its behalf. A newly published FCC filing shows the previously rumored Enterprise Edition headset, and it's clearly a big improvement over the Explorer model from years earlier. The work-focused eyepiece touts a much slicker (and likely more durable) design with both a larger display prism and a hinge that lets you fold it up for travel. The test photos also reveal a spot for a magnetic battery attachment and what looks to be a speedier Atom processor.
And now for something completely different: Cyborgs. No, this is not a joke. For years, certain technology enthusiasts have floated variations on the question or whether we are becoming cyborgs—or already are cyborgs. In our newly released paper, titled “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” we take a different, more legal angle.
The law remains embryonic on virtually all points of interest to the adolescent cyborg: everything from your right to access your own data, to your right to restrict access to your data, to your ability to secure something more than property restitution when an airline destroys your custom mobility assistance device and leaves you bedridden for a year. That’s right: whether you rely on a pacemaker to stay alive or on a cellphone to stay connected, when we say “adolescent cyborg,” we are talking about you.
After 20 years of unsuccessful efforts to produce a wearable display to provide foot troops digital data without blocking their view of the real world around them, DARPA has invented one called ULTRA-Vis.
“The prototype was completed within the past several months. The breakthrough [was] the holographic wave guide” program manager Yiftach Eisenberg told me as he displayed me an admittedly clunky demonstration model at this afternoon’s “DARPA Demo Day” in the Pentagon courtyard.
Yes, he said “holographic,” but no, the wearer doesn’t see a three-dimensional image hovering in front of him like Princess Leia in Star Wars asking Obi Wan for help. The holographic wave guide is a system of channels etched into high-tech coatings on the glass. Those channels convey light from a 0.3-lb projector mounted on the side of your helmet — the prototype is awkwardly unbalanced — to the display over your eye.
That makes it possible to superimpose data directly over your natural field of vision, without requiring you to look up at an eye-straining angle as with Google Glass or look down at a smartphone display as with the Army’s Nett Warrior system. Nor does the display block your field of vision like the ill-fated monocle display on the Army’s earlier Land Warrior.
Instead, you get an augmented reality effect where the data you desire — say, the direction to the nearest friendly unit or your objective — floats over the landscape. The indicators move to stay superimposed over the correct place in the real world as you turn your head, because the helmet-mounted device tracks the direction you’re looking as well as where you are. If there are friendly forces on the other side of the hill, their icon will stay over that hill. A flattened ring on the bottom of the display gives a compressed 360-degree view so you can see if what you’re looking for is currently behind you. (Fighter pilots have long had such “heads-up displays,” but it’s a lot harder to implement in something compact enough to wear).
