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Science fiction is terrific at helping you imagine how you'd enhance, hack, and upgrade your own body — especially your eyeballs. Humans have been trying to improve on the sense of sight since 1300, when spectacles were invented. What comes next? Take a look at our list of some of the vision enhancement tools that science fiction has offered up. It goes way beyond seeing more clearly or getting a glimpse of the infrared side of the spectrum.
- Geordi LaForge's visor: When Star Trek launched The Next Generation in XXX, one of the most striking visuals was Levar Burton wearing what looked like a car air filter over his eyes. The visor allowed his character, who was born blind, to see in the infrared spectrum, at the microscopic level, and to detect energy levels. He could even detect vital signs and tell if someone was lying, making him handy to have around. However, he must have been happy when the First Contact film came around, because he didn't have to wear that wacky visor anymore.
- Predator-Vision: In the Predator films, the titular aliens have evolved to the point where they have developed their own infrared vision. However, they've invented helmets with enhancements that take the vision even further, letting them see with X-Ray vision, to detect radioactive sources, auto-target, and even (in the Aliens Vs. Predator films) to see with sort kind of electro-magnetic vision that allows them to track Aliens, who don't show up on infrared scanners. While those helmets looked sleek and cool with awesome functions, they still resembled fugly crab-aliens underneath.
- Luke Skywalker's binoculars: When Luke was trapped on Tatooine as a teenager, he had loads of time to daydream and imagine what life was like on other worlds. So he'd frequently scan the sky and the horizon with his binoculars, hoping to find some sort of excitement. Plus, they came in handy when R2D2 and C3P0 went missing. No idea what all the different numbers and gauges mean, besides distance (maybe Luke had ganked his Uncle's golf binocs) but the view through them was 1977 gee-whiz tech.
- Cyclop's visor from The X-Men: This special visor which was outfitted with ruby quartz lenses that have the ability to block his optic blasts. So, it might not allow him to see things closer or at the molecular level, but it does keep him from blowing the hell out of everyone and everything he looks at. If you ask us, that's not a bad enhancement. Later he was able to sport some ruby quartz sunglasses, although that sort of makes his "Cyclops" name a bit useless.
- The glasses in William Gibson's Virtual Light: In this novel, the characters are trying to track down a pair of glasses that you can't see through. Instead, they use EMP drivers to send signals directly to your optic nerve. As a result, they allow you to see without having photos hit your retinas, and they can also pump more information into the signal. For instance, one of the characters describes that the glasses cost about the same as a "small Japanese car", and that when you look at things through them, "Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that." One pair to go, please.
- Nanotech eyes in Deus Ex: In Warren Spector's dystopian future video game, you play a "nanotech operative" who has the ability to upgrade and enhance his body in the field, which you'll have to do in order to complete the game. One of the coolest modifications was upgrading your eyes so you could see in the dark and through walls. This usually comes in handy when people are trying to kill you, as you can imagine.
- The HUD in Down and Out in the Magic Kindom: In Cory Doctorow's future, people live with onboard computers in their brains that allow them to make phone calls, record their daily lives through sight and sound, and provide heads-up displays in their eyes where they can check the time, read files, surf the web, and check other people's "whuffie" scores. Whuffie basically tells you "how cool is this person?" and becomes the currency of the day. As interesting as that is, we're most exciting by surfing the net on our eyeballs.
- The sunglasses in They Live: In John Carpenter's "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" humans vs. aliens film, former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper finds a pair of very special sunglasses. They let him see the world as it actually is with fugly aliens controlling the human race, subliminal messages they keep them sedate and to "Obey." Of course, Roddy isn't too happy with this, and goes on a killing spree.
- The Bionic Eye: In both the Six Million Dollar Man and the newly rebooted The Bionic Woman (sorry old Bionic woman, you got stuck with a Bionic ear), the main characters are both outfitted with bionic eyes that give them the ability to zoom in on subjects and see into the infrared. Not one was this one of the coolest Bionic upgrades in my opinion, but it also made for the best action figure I ever lost. Colonel Steve Austin's action figure had a big hole in his head that you could look through to "simulate" bionic vision. My parents probably thought I'd glued that thing to my head. Bionic eyes or bionic contact lenses, let's hope you get here soon.
Comments
and in another show of south park creators' love for sci-fi, the timmy/jimmy cripple fight is based on the fight scene between rowdy roddy and keith david in They Live.
It's a great list, but I might mention the low tech solution to better vision. In L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz there are Emerald Glasses. If you can't afford to build a city out of emeralds just force everybody to were the same glasses with green lenses. They work on the gullible, and for all those people that are running around with infomercial sun glasses- I mean the gullible.
Have you seen these sexy seethrough Lumus VR goggles?
[www.lumus-optical.com]
We might not be too far off from getting a heads-up display of information about people or places we look at. I'd love to see geographic art like in Gibson's weirdly retro-tech "Spook Country".
How can you mention Geordi LaForge without the words "banana clip"?
Anybody remeber an '80s movie where a guy goes blind and they give him "sonar" vision where reflected sound allowed him to see?
@BloggyMcBlogBlog: "Blind Date" or "The Incredible Mr. Limpet".
@BloggyMcBlogBlog: watch this clip... even better is that it is REAL!
[www.monstrous.com]
i started reading this article thinking i was going to make some cliche' curt post about how deus ex and/or ghost in the shell should have been on the list but i was plesently suprised to see deus ex make an appearance.
impressive io9 writter kevin kelly, most impressive.
@Tepoz: Blind Date looks right. I remeber a scene where instead of plugging his sonar glasses into the unit, he plugs an Atari into and sees Breakout all funky like.
Man, I'd trade in my busted old eyes for some of that Six Million Dollar sweetness.
Uh... Clockwork Orange? Hello?
And don't forget the humans-gone-cyborg world of Ghost in the Shell, were phone calls, surfing the internet, video conferencing, even copying and pasting memories are all available to anyone willing to augment their bodies. Good bye having to pretend to listen during lectures, hello a whole new level of zoning out.
Can I have Geordi's ocular implants instead of the Visor?
No? All right then, I'll take the Visor.
And of course, you must remember all those futuristic eye surgeries
- Borg eye-laser attachment (helps with powerpoint presentations and playing with kittens)
- Minority Report eye transplant (to fool iris scanners ... it would have been easier to perform an iris transplant, but where's the fun in that!)
- Leela's (Futurama) prostetic eye to make her seem less cyclopic.
I think we can all agree that eye surgery is much better in the future! These days we still worry about Jessica Alba's haunted corneal transplants:
[www.rootatlas.com]
I'll settle for a terminator-like overlay.
Gargoyle time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared, millimetter-wave radar, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type. They're all fully automatic.
...
a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?
...
The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro's goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECT DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. Me want, plus one of the new Yamahas, with the new generation smartwheels.
zomg what's wrong with Crecente's eyes?
...
On a more serious/on topic note, yeah i second the Ghost in the Shell comment. Nothing (IMO) beats that complete network integration.
OH OH OH!
My personal fav. Riddik's eyes. Nothing says BAMF like ghost white eyes that let you see in the dark.
the Ghost in the Shell eyes were awesome, but unfortunately prone to being hacked. oh, and monitored - you thought Echelon was intrusive now, just wait till you've got warrantless spying on your eyeballs....
@NervousPervous:
That seems similar to the IM Lenses in Doktor Sleepless, or even Spyder's iconic camera sunglassesn from Transmetropoitain.
Also, the Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses which serve to keep you calm by not letting you see anything that might alarm you.
I'd love to wear a Saiyan Scouter:
Designed by a race that worked briefly with Frieza before he destroyed them, these Scouters allow the wearer to determine the exact power level of any nearby person. This Scouter can also locate any creature that has a power level of over 10 within a radius of 50 miles (80.5 km). The Scouter can also be used to locate powerful magical items, such as rune objects, within a radius of 5 miles (8 km). The Scouters are also equipped with extremely powerful Faster-Then-Light transmitters and can instantly transmit information from one Scouter to another within a radius of 10 light years. Two-way communication is possible only within a radius of 2 light years.
@freznel: OVER 9000?!?!?!!
Oh, and how is one way transmission avalible at larger lengths then two way transmission if both devices have the same hardware, hence the same antenna/transceiver/amp?
@-emory-: And they make ya look smexy too. BASMF!!!
@lizhenry:
Although I'm happy as a child on xmas morn that wearables finally are getting manufactured commercially, I still think that a comment on the GUI design is in order:
Tech producers all over the globe - stop having your coders and engineers design GUI's. No matter what, it is always 15 years out of date. A quick peak at what they are wearing should give you a hint on wether they've moved passed the 90's or not.
all i can say is I was promised x-ray vision many times......WHERE IS IT!!!!!! I bet the Chinese have it lol :]
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