The Inevitable, Incredible, Wearable Holodeck

In our Sci-Fi dreams of lovely ideas and technologies we occasionally completely miss something that’s not only plausible but pretty obvious in retrospect.

Right now we have great movie-destroyers like cell phones and flash drives and wireless computing and the internet and washing machines and a huge number of toys along those lines

So what’s our next big toy?

The Wearable Holodeck.

The Wearable Holodeck is the fusion of two technologies that we know are perfectly viable and are in the process of improving: Augmented Reality and where Tactile User Interfaces and Powered Exoskeletons meet.

Once they’re properly combined, they’re going to make a whole lot of movies look dated.

Imagine almost all the features of a Star Trek Holodeck…

• Make it so that you can take it with you wherever you go.
• Throw in the ability to make surgeons better and people see things that they never could before.
• Include an economic incentive that makes it a juggernaut once invented and simultaneously saves the environment.
• And make it something that requires no new inventions, just refinements of things we already have.
• Then make it possible not in decades and centuries but months and years.

That is what the Wearable Holodeck do.

Let’s begin with the basics.

The basic idea of 3-D augmented reality is pretty solid already, and we’re just going to keep miniaturizing those technologies until they’re pretty innocuous, so don’t let the clumsy headglasses fool you. This is huge.

Once they’re nice and comfy, why would you ever, ever buy a big screen TV?

One of the greatest incentives of the Wearable Holodeck are economic, because even in the rawest form you drive people away from big disposable wasteful things and towards precious treasures, comfort, and better virtualization.

But what happens when we start blending in other technologies.

A while back there was a demo of a Welder’s helmet of all things, and it completely blew my mind… as it should yours.

First and foremost, they’ve designed a system that completely offsets the limits of human vision while using cameras and sensors set up at a number of different angles.

Basically, you can see things nobody could ever see before.

This is known as Mediated Reality. You enhance your view of the world so you make tasks easier or safer.

Heck, these Welder’s helmet guys were just getting started, they even got to show off a little!

They made a guide….an interactive guide that tells you when you’re about to do something stupid (There’s even more in the linked video! These guys are awesome!)

What happens when we give this technology to our surgeons?

That only leaves one thing…if only way there was some way to offset our shaky, inconsistent hands.

That’s where Haptics come in.

Now, I don’t want you to start off thinking high-tech fancy-pants haptics. Keep it simple in your head for now.

Just imagine little tiny servos at each joint of your hand, just like you see in all kinds of toys.

Then let each one be hooked up to a computer, and provide a little bit of resistance or tug right when you’re interacting with something visual.

Because this…

This isn’t awesome. It’s LAME. We can do SO much better.

We’re already almost at floaty holograms that you can’t touch, but we’re not very good with interacting with them. We’re kind of embarrassing at it, actually.

We can do better, we just need a world we can TOUCH.

Professor Kaku explains the basics a bit better here…

The only difference is that in our case it’s even better, and you wear it instead of visiting it.

Of course, lots of people are also going to make gaming very, very interesting. I’m sure you’ve got the foundation down now, feel free to be creative.

Your clan will LOVE this.

Now, this can’t do everything. It’s not REALLY a wearable Holodeck…it’s just augmented reality with the ability to duplicate a limited amount of of physical interactions. You won’t be able to lean on anything with it, you’ll need physical analogues for that… but it’s not really about a perfect illusion. It’s about better interfaces, safety, quality of life, ecology, and economics.

While doing research a while back, I came across a lovely video a while back and used it as a bit of a challenge, how close can we get? Obviously sensory other than auditory and tactile and visual might be a bit down the road, and whether or not we can get messages to people in comas is more a matter of the injury and our ability to get data from and to them, but other than that?

Maybe we can have it all if we’d start pointing in the right direction?

Yes…perhaps even sending gifts to loved ones in comas. That one’s the only part of this that’s much of a stretch.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

Who wants this? Anybody have Elon Musk on the line, because I’m pretty sure this IS the next big thing, and it’s going to change everything for the better.

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Originally published at will-holz.kinja.com.