Mechanical Engineering

You were still in wonder of the latest gadget you were wearing. It’s a lot lighter than your current head-mounted-display, but that’s not what has impressed you most. It’s the clarity! Everything looks so natural. You can see overlaid computer generated visuals even at the periphery of your eyes. It’s as if the overlaid features belong to the scene. The effect is even more noticeable as you move your head around. With your head-mounted-display you could only see objects when they entered the display in front of your eyes as you looked towards them and you always struggled with focus. Despite great advances since the early days, it seemed they still couldn’t get the hang of it. But now, this retinal display was such a joy to use.

Virtual retinal display works by drawing a laser raster display directly on your retina. You get to see a conventional display in front of your eyes with a large field of view. If carried out accurately, you won’t be able to tell the difference from what you see normally. Ultimately, there will be no edges, no flicker, no sense of looking at a computer display.

1. What is it about

You are sitting in a train. You were lucky to find a seat with a table in front of it. Great! Now, you can get some work done. You are travelling light. You just want to note down some of your thoughts from the previous meeting before you head for the next one. You take out you iTube. It is a cylindrical object with a few buttons on it. You press one of the buttons and roll out a fairly large display until the device clicks. Done! You put it on the table. It’s time to reach for the other gadget in your pocket. This one is also wrapped. You unwrap the keyboard and put it next to your display. You press a button and all devices come out of sleep. The display is now on. You tap on the display to activate an application. No you start typing away. You always preferred your own keyboard. The keyboard and the display are wirelessly connected to the PDA which is somewhere in your pocket. You are online … You are glad you didn’t have to bring that heavy laptop again. This is so much better.

You are standing on the surface of Mars and are wondering how much effort it took humanity to get this far. In front of you there are three domes. One is your habitat, the other is used to extract water from the ice found in the rocks underneath and the third is the amazing BioGenDome, the eco system that supports life, you and is the main reason you are on this planet.

It took several spaceships, many missions and a lot of engineering to set them up. It’s been many year since that historic day when men set foot on Mars. A lot has happened since then. It still took anywhere between 6 month to two years for a round trip from Earth. The long term residents had to make this place like their home. Most of the difficulty wasn’t the lack of resources or day-to-day survival issues, though these had to be addresses anyway. The biggest problem was psychological. It could be very lonely here. With just a handful of people, there wasn’t much to interact with. At least you can be sure of one thing now. This mission, this whole colony, wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t because of the robots. They made all the difference. Everybody thought that the robot’s most important use on Mars would be to explore, make geological and biological discoveries or help us make the domes. Instead it turned out that they were far more useful as companions. We use them like pets. It’s wonderful. They are quite intelligent, though they are really like pets because sometimes they don’t understand the most obvious things. Either way, we love them. They keep us happy, engage us mentally and emotionally and it always feels that they know us better than ourselves. They make this place much more bearable. Actually it’s quite enjoyable here. “Hey R. Andy, where have you been all this time. I was starting to get worried…”

Imagine you are on your holiday and you are exploring a city you have never been to before. You want to know everything about this new place, understand its history, how people lived here in the past and how they live today. You want to quickly understand what this place stands for.

Now, imagine if you took your ‘Wearable Computer’ with you. While you are exploring the city, you come across some ruins. You are curious to know what they are. You use the touch screen on your wrist to request information for your present location. The GPS device embedded in your gadget knows where you are. Based on your location, information is pulled from a variety of sources available on the net and are aggregated by your device. At the same time, the camera attached to you is recording the environment around you. The camera records the orientation when pictures were taken. The collected information is then displayed back to you overlaid on top of the images taken by your camera. Names of places hover over various ruins, buildings and features of the environment you are in. You can even get to see extra pictures (taken by other visitors in the past), read the place’s history, news and latest developments. You can also add your own inputs, pictures and any other sensory information you collected for others. You can even set it to automatically broadcast this information, so you don’t have to think about it.

You can accomplish all of this with a number of devices attached to your body that seamlessly work together.