Friday June 03, 2005 Omni - where are they now? (September 1989)
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It's been over a month since I did one of these. Two Continuum articles: |
- Body Music:
Strap on a headband and a couple of armbands, close your eyes and start waving your hands around. Presto! You're making beautiful music with just the motions of your body.
The article mentions that this is the promise of Biomuse, an electronic music system being developed by researchers from Stanford University.
Biomuse's creators Hugh S. Lusted and R. Benjamin Knapp believes that the device can also be used to give 'voice' to the audibly handicapped or as a training device for athletes, who would then be able to literally "listen to their bodies" as they exercise. He also talks of hooking the system up to intelligent animals (presumably other than the human ones).
The inventors believe that the Biomuse system could retail for $2,000 to $4,000.
So where are we now? Biomuse looks like it peaked around 1992 with an appearance at the 1992 CSUN Virtual Reality Conference, with a paper entitled Biocontrollers for the Physically Disabled: A Direct Link from Nervous System to Computer. Nowadays, Hugh Lusted has more loftier bio-engineering ambitions.
- Spider Car:
This is the idea of Canadian inventor Gordon Dowton who, after watching
the Tegenaria atrica spider (that doesn't spin a web to catch its
prey but instead favours jumping in the air), thought that this approach
could be applied to the design of a car.
The spiders leaps are powered not by muscle but by bodily fluid that's pumped into its legs. Using the spider as a model, Dowton has now built a 14 pound aluminium and fiberglass vehicle - powered by hydraulics - that allows paraplegics to roll sideways, somersault and even stretch into a near-standing position. The vehicle gives the disabled a wider range of movement than a wheelchair can.
Riders sit low so they can push off with their hands. "It's like a skateboard except you sit on it," says John Hastings, a paraplegic who rides the device for an hour every week.
Fascinating, but where are they now? As far as I can tell from googling around, nothing as all materialized out of this.
( Jun 03 2005, 09:09:31 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink
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