My Cart - One question that is always asked in the industry of electronics, by producers and consumers alike is ‘what’s next for television?’ There have been considerable leaps forward in different avenues of technology, such as 3d televisions, LCD TVs and ever higher definition, but what comes after that?
One of the predicted developments that have yet to happen is to do with the senses. By this point, many futurists and science-fiction writers had predicted that we would have technology such as ‘smellovision’ or holograms that you could touch. And even if these may be terrible and unrealistic ideas, it does tell us a lot about people’s obsession with increasing sensory experience.
So how do we push our technology forward past the limit of just sight and sound? It is possible that the secret could lie in synesthesia – which is the denotation of one sensory experience for another. There are many variants of how this could happen, some people may perceive numbers or days of the week as having a certain colour, or perhaps they see a month as existing in a physical space. But it can be used to make up for a sense that you are lacking in.
For example, artist Neil Harbisson has achromatopsia which means that he only sees in black and white; he uses a head attached webcam with a computer that plays a certain sound for each colour that the webcam sees. From this he is able to distinguish colours and has even started dreaming in colour since he started wearing it. Rock climber, Erik Weihenmayer, is completely blind, but he uses a special pallet on his tongue with many diodes that make small charges based on the image from the camera mounted on his sunglasses, allowing him to interpret a basic sort of vision.
With these remarkable achievements of technology, perhaps the television industry could look into how to make up for the senses which we are deprived of when watching. We have all doubtlessly experienced something similar when watching someone cooking on screen, the visual and audio experience have made it seem as though we can almost smell or taste what is being cooked. TV of the future could take a step forward into a more engaging, immersive experience for all of our senses.
