The Touchy Feely Wearable Panopticon

Dogcam. It’s supposed to be a petcam, but I can’t imagine it not turning a cat into a struggling furry ball of hooks and spitting-fire. Dogs are more malleable. Ductile etc. Maybe it would work for ducks as well. They’re ductile.

Neat idea though – especially when cameras get small enough to mount on insects etc – bringing one of my favourite subjects: Spider-Safaris one step closer. First-Personism again

These things have also been made for humans apparently – years ago,

There’s a great article about Sousveillance here – the universal panopticon, and The Blue-Spaghetti Monster that I was on about earlier. Little brother looking back up the hierarchy… which is one of the things that is starting defining so many conflicts – Iran, The London Riots etc. At one point, if you went into any shopping mall in the UK and tried to take photographs, the security people would jump on you (especially, I suspect, if you were taking photos of their CCTV cameras). These days it’s kindof moot though because everyone has a cellphone and everyone seems to be taking photos with them all the time.

It’s a simple leap from this, to having some sort of peripheral which allows you to have a lens mounted on glasses or a button, ready to go (or even going) all the time.

Which kindof leads into this…

Which is a Fiber Fabric that Could Create Whole-Body Camera – which contains the C-word “could”, which is one of my least favourite… but it’s an interesting concept to me, because not only…

“Scientists say the optoelectronic fiber could lead to bizarre new imaging products like a wall-sized, all-seeing camera or a soldier’s uniform that captures 360-degree views.”

… but it kindof represents a missing link. A sensory mesh.

Prosthetics have come a long way (and are progressing rapidly) – this video turned up recently:

Something that’s missing from these prosthetics – or robots generally from a bio-mimicry point of view is that real organisms are covered by a layer of nerve-cells – not a single censor, but a whole mesh of them, reporting back an entire “touch-picture”.

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So there you go. Starts off on one thing, winds up on another… tenuously connected, but I can imagine this scenario of immersive-sensors. Where everything everywhere is being watched or recorded all of the time… which seems like a terrible or scary idea, but I have this feeling that the universal mind gets what the universal mind wants – and maximum sensory input is one of them. It wants omnipotence.

I think.