Now this, I am sure you will agree, is a damn cool presentation of some excellent ideas.
http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html
If you haven’t seen it, then do so now.
If you have, proceed…
So if I can be allowed to blow my own horn for a moment, I’d like to boast that I occasionally seem to have quite marvelous ideas independently or others. Admittedly, others who were lucky enough to think of it earlier enough and/or had resources enough to make something of it. But my claim is that I sometimes think of these things _independently_.
And it has has been said of inventing – the best inventions are obvious, which is why it’s so humbling to remember that one didn’t think of these ‘obvious’ things themselves.
But in my case, can I finally “prove” that I did…?
Back to the video – I’d like to draw your attention to a point approximately 3:45 in: “…time travel. I’m not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here – there’s some in here with horses and carriages as well [...] it also is the foundation for augmented reality“.
Now compare with an email of mine to a friend, where I wrote this:
What would be kind of cool: augmented reality goggles (this is one of those ideas I had years before I knew there was a word for it) that show recreated historical versions of the world… but, instead of just showing a certain era, you see the ‘prettiest’ building at any given location. Making a best-of-all-possible-eras virtual world
So as far as I can tell (can anyone confirm?), this talk was made on Feb 11 or 12 (based on dated video comments afterwards). My email has a date stamp of: 10 Feb 2010 15:17:07 +1000). And, frankly, even if the video was recorded first, I sure didn’t see it till today
As an aside, my email was prompted by a rather ugly house I see regularly in town, and my own wonderings if it used to be pretty…
I especially love how you get basically the same angle on all three – which was, of course, the key to my own inspiration
So clearly, the next thing for me to work out is real time travel – at which point I can begin to start sending these ideas of mine back to people in the past with the resources to make them a reality asap! =)
