I See Into The Future!

... or, at least, I wrote about what I saw as the next logical step in personal computers.  In Painted Doll, which I did a few years back - and is now available from Sizzler Editions - I wrote about an alternative culture in New Zealand that used an elegant head-mounted display:

(here's a bit about that, from a letter Flower wrote to her lover about this group - called the Noos - and their tech):

After dinner – did I mention the glasses?  Shit, forgot about them.  Easy to do, I guess.  They're a huge part of the world here, so big you don't even notice them.  Gave me my pair after the first week.  They called them iglasses, a joke they say no one under forty understands.  Which I'm not, so I didn't.  Anyway, they're mnemonic plastic.  They look cheap but they aren't.  Big guy named Star, like a golden bear with a huge bristly beard, told me they'd cost something like 5 million new yen if they sold them, which they don't.  He also told me they are a "mesh networked, micro thermopile powered, molecular computer system with a virtual retinal display" which I don't understand.  But they work, I know that.  You put them on and you can see and hear all this stuff that is and isn't there.  Like you can look at the ground and see where the irrigation pipes are, and then reach out and touch a little icon and then see instructions on how to fix them.  Or look at someone and see their name, what they are good at, what they don't like – stuff like that.  Sometimes it's like cartoons, little symbols and stuff floating around, other times it's like a ghost world that you can but then can't see.  I'm writing with them, too.  They showed me how to get them to show me a keyboard, and then I just touch where the letters are.  Kinda cool, but also kinda creepy.

They use the glasses to talk to one another.  They shoot videos with them, make cartoons, write poems, do all kinds of things, and send them to each other.  They may look like primitive, but they're really wizards with this kind of stuff.  It makes me sad to think how I know that, but I do.  

And now - guess what? - we not only have Project Glass from Google but now rumors that Apple may be getting into the game.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow, people: we're not writing it - we're living it