Cyberpunk Sunday 007 - Dipping into the roots of cyberwear.

Microsoft, widely thought of by many to be the corporation of evil (until Apple started to blossom again) has always dabbled into areas a bit off the normal beat and path. This time they are looking at using the human body as controllers for electronics. While still in the early stages it has some interesting concepts. Your own body becomes a big remote control in a sense, so by doing a certain gesture or by touching a wall you can set off certain predetermined actions in electronics. So you wouldn't even have to walk five feet to hit a button to turn on your coffee make you could just point at it. Isn't technology grand!

You are the human antenna.

Actually technology is grand, especially when doing things like enabling the blind to see. Those wonderful German scientists are working on some cutting edge tech that implants a microchip carrying 1500 photosensitive diodes right into your retina where normal healthy photoreceptors of a non-blind person would be. Now it's still tied to an external power source, so this means a wire coming out of the eye. But in the test subjects who underwent this procedure all of them can identify bright colors and one could even read large printed words. Pretty damn spectacular if you ask me. One note to this on the test subjects though, it doesn't state if these were people born blind or had an accident or disease that rendered them blind. So the overall benefits of this aren't to clear yet.

Electronic implants allow the blind to see.

On another look into some more protocyberwear technology we have an implant that has helped a paralyzed man move again. Putting am electronic stimulator into the lining of the spinal cord has helped 'reconnect' severed connections. While not perfect it does allow the subject free movement of his legs although not up to the state of walking again. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of neural pathway mapping that has to be done to make the leap. But this gives us the great grandfather of the neural interface that would be necessary to operate a set of artificial legs. A small step in the direction of cybertechnology.

The full article on this.

Well that's the three links for this installment of Cyberpunk Sunday... or as it happened this week Cyberpunk Monday. Any suggestions for future articles or topics please send them to me at peteramthor@trulyrural.com if you don't mind. See you in two weeks.