Decrepit Old Fool

I seem to have been born without the “computer gaming” gene but I’ve watched the computing industry grow on that diet.  Serious stuff only goes so far; our entertainments have brought about many revolutions.  The versatility of today’s Internet owes a lot to capabilities driven by online porn and games.  The drive for faster, more capable computers is very much driven by games and video; typical desktop systems were fast enough to run spreadsheets a long time ago.  Now some incredibly exciting developments are around the corner driven by video games:

• Neurophilosophy reports that Sega is developing toys controlled by brainwaves.  My prediction is this will promote development of brain interfaces on a heretofore unimagined scale.  It will be a revolution for people with Lou Gherig’s disease, people with artificial limbs, and people who work using remote robot avatars in hazardous environments. It could have applications in education.  And that’s just the applications that (pardon the expression) pop into my head.  The unexpected ones are always what turns out to have the biggest economic impact.  (Oh yeah, I think you will be able to play video games with it too)

• And speaking of unexpected applications: check out the WiiMote Multitouch Display.  An extremely clever grad student hacked a Nintendo Wii to produce an extremely sophisticated way of interacting with screen information.  It won’t replace a multi-thousand $$ system but I bet it will fire up some imaginations to drive creation of less expensive multitouch interfaces.  Nintendo would be crazy not to hire this guy.
• The first time I handled a Rubik’s cube, I figured out how to take it apart and simply reassembled it with solved sides.  Took me about a minute.  I doubt I’ll be doing that with the Fentix Game Cube, a visual/electronic version.  You can see it in action on YouTube to get the idea.  It reminds me of a science fiction story I once read that featured a deceptively simple game put on the market clandestinely by aliens to train humans to make telepathic interstellar jumps.  But this one may help with spatial logic development.  What the heck, start small.
• Intel has come up with an ultrasmall flash hard drive that will soon change the amount of storage tiny portable devices can have.  I think in the next two or three years we’re going to see portable computers the size of paperback books with big-system power.  You’ll carry them around and drop them in a cradle wherever you work, or just use them by themselves.  This will be a big part of that puzzle.  The other effect will be super-fast computer hard drives.  Who knows, we might even make Microsoft Windows run acceptably fast. 

But technologies converge, and computers will be fading into other devices.  Take prosthetic limbs for example: already some are first-generation cybernetic devices.  In the future, figure the use of Stanford Batteries (last week’s SciFri), a redeveloped Sega brain interface for control, and Intel flash chips built in.  You might not realize someone has an artificial arm until they start recording video with it.

Trouble with SciFri posts is that they’re fun to write and there’s no logical stopping point.  I’m writing this one at 4 in the morning due to some discomfort, which has faded a little. So I’m going to post and try that sleep thing again.