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Old age and experience

December 13, 2014 future, Writing Comments Off on Old age and experience

Image from alwaysoncommunications.com

 

Knowledge is power.

It’s an old adage, to be sure, and it’s right on the money.  Mostly.  Getting access to information is the first step.  It’s the “easy” fix we all crave.  As ubiquitous as big guns and fast ships are to sci fi, the acquisition of knowledge is one of the ultimate powers a any hero can lay hands on.

But knowledge is a thing.  It’s an acquisition, albeit an intangible one.  It’s something that you can hoard, something you can keep or spend.  But knowing how to APPLY that knowledge, that right there is the key to power.  That’s what puts a person in the Presidency, not his or her personal smarts, but how to apply the smarts of the people who HAVE all the information.

A cyberpunk future, where we can download knowledge straight to our grey matter, is on the horizon.  But it’s not going to help anybody.  It’s not going to make anything better simply because people can learn facts (with all the petaflops of information out there right now, cat videos are still what everybody googles for first thing in the morning).  Downloading just HOW to apply that information, grabbing slivers of more experienced lives and minds, THAT is going to be where the true power lies.

IRL Collisions

December 9, 2014 future, Writing Comments Off on IRL Collisions

Courtesy of the Epic Games forums

 

In games we use collisions to figure out what touches what.  It’s not a precision tactic, in fact, it’s one of the reasons you sometimes get hung up on “invisible” objects, or see someone’s arm stuck through a chair, but it IS one of those things that makes games possible.  It simplifies the interaction so that you can run a virtual world full of dozens of people and hundreds, even thousands of objects.

This bit about using ultrasound to create in-hair haptic feedback seems to me to be an ideal intersection.  For many applications, you don’t need precision, you don’t need to have a shape mapped out perfectly to get a reasonable interaction with it, so even with the very simple forms this ultrasound system can generate, you should be able to get some very good results.

 

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