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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Overlay Specs | ||
| Glasses that provide an additional feature; an overlay that lets you see information and graphics along with the real-world view. |
It would be great to be able to see more information along with your view of the actual world. Like looking a building, and seeing all the companies and people that work in it. And you could use it for other things.
| There's also a brief printed note on paper. "Attach to front of building above eye level facing the street. When attached, initiate pairing with your phone to 'unnamed device 1142.' Passcode is 46hg52Q. Once paired, dial ##*49##*, and leave the area..."
Bloody typical. You pocket the bugging device, or whatever it is, key the co-ordinates into your specs, and let the overlay guide you along the pavement towards the target building..." |
| Technovelgy from Halting State,
by Charles Stross. Published by Ace in 2007 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote:
This sort of augmented reality device can be seen in a slightly more compact form in the smart contact lenses from Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge, and somewhat earlier, the DreamTime contacts from Niven and Barnes' 1992 novel The California Voodoo Game.
Compare also to magic spectacles from Pygmalion's Spectacles (1935) by Stanley G. Weinbaum, video glasses from Islands in the Net (1988) by Bruce Sterling, Tru-Vu Lenses from Earth (1990) by David Brin, data goggles from Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson, spex (spexware) from Deep Eddy (1993) by Bruce Sterling, eyecaps from Starfish (1999) by Peter Watts and HUD glasses from Daemon (2009) by Daniel Suarez.
He passes you a pair of heavy, black-rimmed military spectacles and a ruggedized phone... You put the glasses on and boot them. There's a brief flicker as they check your irises against their preloaded biometrics, then the world outside the BMW is drenched in unfamiliar information all the way to the horizon...
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Halting State
More Ideas
and Technology by Charles Stross
Tech news articles related to Halting State
Tech news articles related to works by Charles Stross
Overlay Specs-related
news articles:
- Google Glasses With Heads Up Display Coming Soon?
- Transparent Mobile Search - Just Frame The Question
- Google's Project Glass May Augment Your Reality
- Google Glass: The Next Big Platform?
| Did Frank Herbert Predict Bistable Displays Like E-Ink? |
| I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display |
| Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large |
| iPhone Air Fulfils Jobs' Promise From 2007 - A Giant Screen! |
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
