Rock Exoskeletons: The Future Of Music Belongs to Cyborgs

Japanese artist Nobumichi Tosa has an interesting concept for the future of musical performance: Interactive, movement-controlled exoskeletons programmed (much like a synthesizer,) to produce any range of sounds. It’s operated by the speed of the user’s movement, the position of his poses, and the appearance of certain specific gestures. And though this particular device is only used for performance art by Nobumichi’s design troop, Maywa Denki, the idea in general is gaining a lot of ground.

The Cocoon: The Sad, Embarrassing Future of Virtual Reality

Ever since The Lawnmower Man first showed us that virtual reality could do just about anything - even turning even the mentally handicapped into poorly-rendered demigods of murder – our culture has been obsessed with bringing VR to life (well, maybe the concept existed before that movie, but come on – did anybody really care about virtual reality before the landscaping retard became the undisputed king of dialup?) And so far, there have been just two major obstacles in bringing V.R. rigs into the main stream:

Internet Sixth Sense: “I See Pornography About Dead People”

MIT’s Fluid Interfaces group debuted a prototype device at TED a few weeks ago, dubbed the “Sixth Sense” device. And what is that sixth sense? Divination? Telekenesis? Spidey?!

No! It’s the internet! That’s awes…wait, what? The internet is a sense now? I was barely beginning to accept it as a sort of encyclopedia of depravity, and now it’s evolved into a sense? Well, apparently so. Previously, you could ‘hear’ a tree falling in the woods, ’smell’ a rose, and ’see’ a sunset, but now you can ‘internet’ something - which I assume means you can either spontaneously generate fan-art porn about it, render misspelled captions beneath it, or maybe just crudely Photoshop it into 9/11.