High-Tech Glasses Help Improve Memory

unassimilatible writes "MIT will reportedly announce new high-tech glasses which they claim will improve memory by up to 50%. The spectacles are implanted with a CPU that sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages - like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine - flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. Pardon me, but I'll wait for the reviews, since I am still smarting from buying those X-ray glasses in the back of magazines." These "memory glasses" were also discussed at the recent International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

Comments

Great for large meetings

[tessaiga]

Looks like another Media Lab project; you can link to the project homepage here.

Personally I'd find it great if they could add voice recognition to it. One of my biggest weaknesses is remembering new names, especially when I'm introduced to a whole bunch of people one after the other. (I remember a job interview where I was taken on a tour of the building, and met around 10 people in 15 minutes. Then near the end of the tour, one of those people joined us for the rest of the interview, and I was trying desperately to remember which one he was :) ). Being able to have it dynamically associate people's faces with names and display a prompt would be a huge assist.

Subliminal Messages?

[Webtommy88]

It looks like the text flashed onto the eye quickly is used as a primer to get you thinking about a certain thing and thus a memory aid.

From a Psych 101 example:

Whats a popular laundry detergent? Answer after you have read this list:
- Moon
- Ocean
- Water
- Ebb
- Beach

If you answered Tide detergent, congradulations, you may have been "primed" into answering that. Admitedly Tide has a good market share in the laundry detergent but the priming effect can be demonstrated with other non-local examples. (I belive this works best if you live in Canada)

I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...

I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...

So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.

More than that, if TV's or some permutation of a TV in the future can do this, whats to stop companies from flashing "BUY COKE" every 180th frame.

Advertisers' Wet Dream Come True

[NOT-2-QUICK]

Perhaps it is just me, but these seem as though they would be an obvious target for next generation marketing campaigns.

As per the article, they are triggered into action via RF. I am in Tokyo right now and the sheer magnitude of visual input from everything from neon to big screen televisions to giant posters is almost paralyzing at times. I am afraid to even contemplate how this annoyance would be compounded thru the use (and surely abuse) of this type of technology by the marketing drones of the world.

And then, there is always the conspiracy theorist angle. What if subversive powers (governmental or otherwise) tapped into this type of technology to recruit and/or spread propaganda. It would completely redefine everything from armed forces and/or terrorist recruitment all the way up to presidential elections.

Even worse, with the subliminal nature of this tech, you might not even realize at first why purchasing a copy of M$ Office 2003 seems like such a great idea all of a sudden, why you are suddenly craving some KFC only minutes after eating, or why you have completely changed your opinion of Dubya...

Scary shit if you ask me...

- n2q

Augmented Reality?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Personally, I'm more intrigued by their augmented reality wearable computing research. Instead of something subliminal, it displays the information next to the persons image, so that you can read it, scroll through it, etc. You could retrieve info based on past conversations, their name, their phone number, and other useful things. I personally think that has a MUCH greater chance of being picked up by the average consumer than this thing.

Does anybody have any information on affordable wearable computers (with the glasses and all) that you don't need a computer engineering degree to put together?