Noncontact coupling between your body and weak electric fields can be used to create and sense tiny nano-amp currents in your body. Modulating these signals creates Body Net, a personal-area network that communicates through your skin … Your shoe computer can talk to a wrist display and keyboard and heads-up glasses. Activating your body means that everything you touch is potentially digital. A handshake becomes an exchange of digital business cards, a friendly arm on the shoulder provides helpful data, touching a doorknob verifies your identity, and picking up a phone downloads your numbers and voice signature for faithful speech recognition.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, writes about the research being done there and shares his speculation for the future of bits: ”Tom Zimmerman [of MIT] has shown that the noncontact coupling between your body and weak electric fields can be used to create and sense tiny nano-amp currents in your body. Modulating these signals creates Body Net, a personal-area network that communicates through your skin. Using roughly the same voltage and frequencies as audio transmissions, this will be as safe as wearing a pair of headphones. Keeping data in your body avoids the intrusion of wires, the need for an optical path for infrared, and conventional problems such as regulation and eavesdropping. Your shoe computer can talk to a wrist display and keyboard and heads-up glasses. Activating your body means that everything you touch is potentially digital. A handshake becomes an exchange of digital business cards, a friendly arm on the shoulder provides helpful data, touching a doorknob verifies your identity, and picking up a phone downloads your numbers and voice signature for faithful speech recognition.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Wearable Computing: Bits Are as Insubstantial as the Ether, But They Tend to be Packaged in Hard Boxes. Hardware and Software Must Merge into Softwear
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/negroponte_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney