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Skin-Based Display Screens From Nanotech Tattoos
destinyland writes "Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York is developing flexible nanotubes
inserted under the skin to create a handheld display — inside your hand. They wirelessly receive data and display reminders and text messages, and the concept has also been broadened to suggest endlessly programmable digital tattoos, while Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics is also exploring the concept of
the body as 'a platform for electronics and interactive skin technologies'." That middle link is quite old, but is still loaded with interesting links.
Finally a way to change my tattoo every time i feel like it, and get rid of my gf's complaints that she doesn't want me to have more tattoos.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
If you thought fun with programmable road signs was something, wait 'til tatoo hacks become the new fad!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Illustrated Man coming alive!
Implant this under all exposed skin and a solider could have camouflage patterns turned on/off and changed for the terrain.
but most Geeks don't have a high pain threshold.
Its only a matter of time before someone figures out how to get porn on it.
Without reading the article, should we assume this kind of technology can be used to help college student cheat on tests?
If programmable digital tattoos catch on, it might be a good idea if the data feed in your "handheld display" was used to ensure that the name in your tattoo matches the name of the person you're with.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This reminds my of the futuristic OCtattoos (Organic Circuitry tattoos) that Peter Hamilton makes use of in his Commonwealth Saga stories.
They're described in the Wiki as:
Would be really neat to have this in our lifetime.
Where can I get some hands-on experience with this technology?
... In Farewell horizontal
wristwatch without the watch, for a long time now.
This cant be healthy.
...of the possibilities the porn industry could come up with.
Hmmm. OK. On second thoughts, don't.
I can be a very willing guinea pig, lab rat, et cetera. Just tell me where to sign!
Yes, the prospect of long-term, irreparable skin damage is nothing next to the coolness of having the dermatological equivalent of animated GIFs. And I mean that sincerely.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
with these and that new speaker film.. can we have futurama tatoos that abuse you and others... imagine your shoulder telling you that you are a big fat loser... ahh technology
Good luck with that the next time you're at the security check at the airport. Pacemakers they know about, but with people getting withheld due to t-shirts with *images* of electronics, this thing is just asking for trouble.
"Good news, everyone!"
It all sounds cool...for a movie or a fad. The next thing you know you have to keep your virus defs up to date or your tatoo will be throwing up all kinds of unwanted pop-ups. If it can be 'reprogrammed,' that is just a freq that manipulates the nano devices, then it can be maliciously altered as well. I still don't understand the fascination with putting electronics in the body (medical reasons notwithstanding). And there is already an issue with people being tracked and watched. They tie the screen to your vitals and it will glow green if you are telling the truth or red if you are lying. It will tell folks your current medical status. _IF_ that is what you want.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Nobody bring up the movie!
(Opps!)
palm flowers. Anyone fancy a run?
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
...then somebody is going to try to put DRM on it. I'd love to see that court case...
I think I read about this somewhere before... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
Don't network it, make it stand alone.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Already been done
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
"I can't wait until the tattoos on Amy's butt hear about this!"
Hypothetically, if this were to become common. It'd force police to rethink how they document and identify distinguishing marks on the body. Or a gang member being some kind of double agent and switching inks from one gang to another. Its the stuff of scifi. Makes me think of The Illustrated Man of Ray Bradbury.
as someone who went to MANY many birthday parties for 30 year olds at lazertag centers-
it was 30 for renewal, not 21
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If they could figure out a voice-command interface to this, "Talk to the hand" could get a whole new meaning.
One step closer to Ghost in the Shell's brain hacking becoming an everyday reality!
Now, I guess, the Beast can make his mark interactive. (For the ignorant, refer to The Revelation of St. John the Divine.)
Fata viam invenient.
No but seriously i came up with this long long ago in my days of staring at stucco walls that were at the time very interesting. Mine were not super nanotubes though, just molecules that imitate those people in crowds that put big cards over their head to form a larger image.
What happens when after a little practice/meditation the owner of these electronically responsive tattoos gains control of them! We could be like cuttlefish people. The possibilities are endless. Oh oh nano-repair tubes that you can actively control to quickly clot and temp repair lacerations, but otherwise chill in your dermis eating free radicals from the sun.
In one of the 5 books of the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, Arthur Dent's daugher, Random, had something like this implanted in her hand that gave her all sorts of information about the planet she was on.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Atomic Pink hair color will give the effect you're looking for without the risk of affecting the immune system.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I can have a graphic equalizer for my heart beats on my chest.
...I'm wearing a full-body tattoo of clothing!
As soon as the cop turns away, the tattoo can morph to a new form, perhaps au naturel but exaggerating one's finer points. Or try au naturel of the opposite sex, if you're wierd enough. That might spook the cop out completely - is it public nudity, a porn show, or performance art?
But it's probably only old fat hirsute gargoyles who'd dare do this.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones were banned, if every car had a rigid steel spike sticking out of the middle of the steering wheel, then speeding would become a self limiting problem;
No, then driving would become a self-limiting problem. Besides, people have actually died in car accidents because of something idiotic a bicyclist or even pedestrian did. The solution isn't to make cars more dangerous; that's stupid. The solution is to make getting a driver's license harder. A lot harder. However, the car companies were allowed to buy up the public transportation in the USA and now if you want to be a part of the rat race, you need a car. Calling it a privilege is a bit disingenuous.
Exceeding the appropriate speed for the conditions is not quite as bad a crime as premeditated murder... but the difference is small. And no-one is as good a driver as they think they are.
No, this is a stupid idea and it's even stupider to express it, because "the appropriate speed for the conditions" varies from person to person, vehicle to vehicle, and condition to condition. If a pinecone rolls down a hill out in front of you, the conditions have changed. You might argue that they haven't, that that pinecone was a probability-event for which you should have been prepared, and you would make a good point! But since there is no way to tell if an individual is exceeding the speed at which they can "safely" (another subjective statement, by the way) traverse a specific section of road, we must identify the crime when it's "too late".
Our society has decided that it's worth the trade-off to have cars and put them in the hands of average people. That does occasionally go very, very wrong. However, physicians still kill more people by prescribing them the wrong drugs or combination of drugs than people manage to kill each other with cars. If I were going to be incensed about one of these things, it wouldn't be the cars. Instead, I got a big safe car (mass and crumple zones) and I stay in my fucking lane.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I anticipate correlation between exam grades and nanotubes tattoos. If they ever make then colour we could use elephants as large portable televisions.
Oh crap, mood tattoos.
..as most nerds know, it's not a real watch unless it's a calculator watch.
Thankyou. Your response to the second quote is exactly what I meant - if you lose control and crash (and it could reasonably considered to be your fault, things like "some guy running a red through a blind intersection and t-boning you" come under the category "shit happens and nothing will ever stop that") then by definition you were exceeding the appropriate speed for the conditions at the time. This speed seldom has much relation to the posted speed limits, and varies wildly with driver concentration, weather, traffic etc.
:D Left could be your speedo, right is your rev gauge, or you can select what gauge to display by clenching a finger tighter for an instant. That'd be way cool. Sorry about the rant, as you can guess from its position in my sig this is one of my pet topics. :P
(The first bit, I sort of agree with. The solution IMO is to make getting a driver's license a lot harder on actual driving skills, emergency reactions, car handling etc. What Australia has done in the past few years is implement a system where you have to do a series of tests in which you have to raise your pinky to the exact angle when you indicate, and you need exactly the right number of flashes of your indicator before you turn, or other inane details, but you can still pass it while not knowing what the hell to do in a "the sprinkler sprayed on the roundabout and now I'm sideways" situation. I never heard of anyone who's been injured in a parallel parking accident, but I've heard of plenty who've died due to not knowing what the f**k they were doing at speed.)
The parent poster's attitude is in line with the bozos that run Australia's road safety department. They removed the section on "how to control your car if it slides" from the driver's handbook, with the justification that "if people know how to control a slide then they may drive more recklessly". Yeah, apparently it's more dangerous to know what you're doing. A quick drive on on Perth roads will quickly fix that misconception - being surrounded by incompetent morons at 80km/h (in a 100km/h zone, all weaving and none paying much attention) is *scary*.
The comparison I use is that ~2000 people die each year on Australian roads. ~20,000 people die each year of smoking-related illness. If that policeman who's spending his whole life filing speeding tickets really wanted to save lives he should f**k off and become an anti-smoking campaigner. But road trauma is messy and dramatic while smokers hack up a lung and die, quietly and neatly, in homes and hospital beds. So they parade the 'mothers against motor vehicles' around and make an election issue of it.
To pull this back on track - how cool would it be to have a car which streamed all its instrumentation directly your OC tattoos on the backs of your hands?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Yes, they are thinking about possibly being able to, at some point in the future, have the theoretical ability to create smart tattoos.
All they need to do is create an intelligent ink, that is bio-compatible, and that can be switched in color by some as-yet undeveloped method, along with some form of bio-compatible computer that could be implanted to control the ink, some bio-compatible means to connect the computer to the ink, some bio-compatible power source, and some way to interface to those components.
But hey, they have a cool picture of what it might look like, so that's good enough for a Slashdot entry.
OT: I have a really cool design for a transparent flying car that can fold up and fit into your pocket. I only have a couple of small issues to tackle, like a reactionless drive, a total-conversion power plant, and a magical^Wnanomaterial that can be rigid when it needs to be and yet can fold up very small, with almost no weight.
But I have a render of what it might look like here:
So, when do I get my front page article?
Sarcasm aside: when can we actually get a bit of critical thinking before these wishful fantasies get posted?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Finally I can have BSOD all over my face. I also look forward to having this on my tombstone: "I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST DEAD PIXEL!"
Frog blast the vent core.
We currently have a problem with old displays and cellphones filling up landfills with toxic materials because these devices are obsolete after a year or two. Just wait until planned obsolescence hits the bionic world. Landfills full of arms, legs, heads, organs, and poor people in the rest of the world will be sewing on body parts discarded by rich wasteful Americans.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
the mark of the beast? If I were the inventor I'd want to wash my hands of it.
This doesn't bode well for people with skin-shedding fungal problems, does it?
... they have also experiemented in implanting a digital tattoo in the palm of a persons hand flashing it red when they are sub-optimal in age... ... they have also done extensive research into selective breeding where an additional digital tattoo on the chest (Just below the neck) indicates which individuals are in your required breeding program...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
While dynamically updatable tattoo displays are interesting for output, one could achieve 90% of the tattoo value using an eInk, and externally applying an electrostatic pattern gadget to "print" the tattoo pattern.
1) Buy shares in prosthetic teeth companies.
2) Send out the "knock my teeth out" tattoo virus.
3) Profit!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Two weeks later: "Wait a second.... is that a dead pixel??"
I mean it.
Read them.
I am going to patent the use of the forehead tattoo screen Indian poker app. Well of course when you loose the big L appears.
Having to hold my hand on a flat plate for 10-30 seconds and then having to manually OK an update via some system which wasn't spoofable, interceptable, or complex enough to be digitally hacked would be a good start.
Start by assuming commercial and public seating will try and 'update' your images or software, including in summer when clothes tend to be thinner and with less coverage, or at places near beaches. Go on to assume that doorknobs and sections of sidewalks will do the same. What should be in place to get around this?
A non-overridable, non-blockable reset process requiring no external equipment should be mandatory. Then there are the issues of the lifespan of a given hardware installation, the difficulty and long-term medical effects of upgrading hardware, potential medical problems arising if the hardware is damaged (crushed, cut, splintered)...