Anyone ever play video games recently and wonder how come your objectives and various elements on screen can be highlighted with blinking lights and arrows? How come you have a map and a radar in some games? What is this crap? Well actually, it seems likes a very common feature in video games to give the player tools that help them navigate their environment, identify important objects, track the movement of in-game characters, and more. Let's call this Game Vision, as in video game vision. Can you imagine one day humans beings possessing the ability to actually have Game Vision in real life?
Here's Fry from Futurama using his Eyephone. It's a comedy exploring the possible direction technology can take, but due to it's format being a comedy, the creative staff probably had to make this joke into a very simple visual and also, because it's a just comedy, failed to consider how this tech could be realized. Fry still has to use his eyes and hands to interact with this technology. That's not acceptable. Also, holograms? No thanks.
I started learning to type a couple years ago, that plus by gaming habits and I think I have carpal tunnnel now. I started to lament that I still have to use my body parts to interact with my smartphone. Why am I still using my fingers? What if we had eye tracking software and the cursor would follow my eye and by blinking just so I could doubleclick? What if I could just think and the apps would respond? I think the ideal Eyephone would bypass the fingers, eyes, and ears, and go straight to the brain. Game Vision is what you'll get when you make the first cyborg by combining the human brain with the future smart phone.
And your descendants will enjoy vision like this:
In Star Ocean 3, you build a virtual map up as you explore. It gives you a compass and remembers basic information about the area such as save points and enemies.
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| It even gives you a crosshair! |
In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Spider Sense is represented with infrared, and he receives warnings when his opponents do things his brain recognizes as dangerous and threatening, which it's able to do well in advance. It can be very easy for a computer to identify a human shaped object and recognize that it is moving suddenly or when the silhouette takes on an offensive shape.
Batmans Detective Mode in Batman Arkam Knight tracks enemies for you! Imagine if it can anticipate their path and give you a predicted location on your virtual map so you can have an approximation for their placement in space when they're not in sight. What if it can also identify and remember which enemy is which and remember things like strengths, weaknesses and vitals for you. Batman also has some kind of radar.
In Metal Gear 4, Snake's Solid Eye identifies objects in your field of vision as well as estimate their distance away from you, updating every time it changes. It can use information like that to give you a very intuitive sense of your space. It also tracks all kinds of activity as it happens all around you with a radar. He also has night vision mode.
Game Vision could to impose a crosshair in what you see in real life that could make aiming an automatic process for you. You would have to get used to it, but it would probably feel like using a light gun,
or a Wii remote.
Anyway, that's what I think about when I look at my phone. Woe is me. No but seriously, fuck Apple. You're not that fucking impressive, shithead! Ok? I'm not fucking impressed! You're not that fucking great. Calm the fuck down with your shitty promotions. Fuck you. Thanks for reading and remember to expect more from your purchases.
