Acquiring target...

Stalking friends through facebook (hurrah!) I stumbled upon the following bit of Tai Chi for the tech-generation:

my morning ritual Date: 2004-05-10, 9:56AM EDT I have a morning ritual that I need to share. I call it "the terminator". First I crouch down in the shower in the classic "naked terminator traveling through time" pose. With my eyes closed I crouch there for a minute, visualizing either Arnold or the guy from the second movie (not the chick in the third one because that one sucked) and I start to hum the terminator theme. Then I slowly rise to a standing position and open my eyes. It helps me to proceed through my day as an emotionless, cyborg badass. The only problem is if the shower curtain sticks to my terminator leg. It ruins the fantasy. I think maybe I read too many comic books when I was a kid...

Having returned to my chair from the floor (which I should probably hoover one of these days) I remembered something I'd read recently about research happening at the University of Washington. Forget massive virtual reality headsets from the nineties, forget cinema specs from the noughties, think Terminator style text superimposed on the world - the contact lens display is here.

Ok, it's not totally here yet, at the moment it's an array of minute LEDs in a contact lens, but the possibilities are intriguing. These circuts are so small that manufacturing them by hand is impossible. Instead, somehow the team harnesses capillary action to have the components assemble themselves. This to me is a marvel in itself - that a collection of parts can somehow be designed in such a way that it is their very nature to combine in an ordered way is completely mindblowing. This is apparently old hat. The main issue was to make the lens itself biologically inert. To do this, the circuit, which is itself only nanometers thick, is sandwiched between a couple of layers of an inert polymer. Nevertheless, the lens has only been tested on rabbits so far to check for adverse effects.

No doubt this will soon be snapped up by some corporation or other for further investment. In a few years we'll all be able to play at being Arnie...