Good news for Ray Kurzweil and his fawning, would-be immortal groupies: wearable computing like the Nike fuel band and Google (GOOGL)’s Project Glass are basically sentient technologies, so we should be merging our souls with robots any day now.
Network World published an in-depth look at the future of wearable computing yesterday, and apparently many analysts believe wearable devices will be a dominant industry within the next three years. And not only that, but technologies like vibrating tattoos and video goggles will eventually learn our basic wants and needs, predicting and serving our desires without us programming them to do so.
And so it begins.
According to an analyst at research company Altimeter Group:
Our research around this sentient world has more to do with the fact that machines and environments will begin to learn over time instead of simply anticipating our commands or making our commands easier to input. We believe that during the next 18 months, we’ll see more and more mass-market applications for multiple sensors on and around us that will take advantage of our omnipresent connected computers (mobile) to gather and communicate data and, in later phases, begin to proactively serve us.
That means that you could be passing by a coffee shop while wearing Google Glasses, and your Glasses could alert you to the fact that it’s around the time you usually like caffeine. Sounds pretty awesome to us.
Of course, there is a vaguely creepy element to all of that: “It will follow us wherever we are,” one researcher told Network World, presumably before scaring the ever living crap out of the interviewer with ghoulish noises and gestures.
