Com­bine the allure of voyeurism and the engage­ment of curios­i­ty with this ulti­mate new tech­nol­o­gy and you have, what I’m call­ing,  the WiFi Eye.

Native Adver­tis­ing is all the rage today with adver­tis­ers vying to get clos­er and clos­er to “nat­ur­al” place­ments.  With this new tech­nol­o­gy in the works native adver­tis­ing could take on a whole new meaning.

Could this be Native Adver­tis­ing’s entry into YouTube?

Just as we change out the ton­er in our print­ers you could be chang­ing out your eyes for a new set.  Per­haps you want 10/10 vision or to be able to see well in total dark­ness.  New tech­nol­o­gy is being devel­oped to pro­vide those and many more options includ­ing the abil­i­ty for what you see to be broad­cast to the world with Wifi.

Imag­ine watch­ing what its like to climb a moun­tain right from the moun­tain climber’s eyes, or how about a sky­dive over Las Vegas. It all could soon be com­ing to your tele­vi­sions or phones.

Imag­ine being able to buy the ad just as the sky­div­er is about to jump from the plane?  Or how about spend­ing a day with the Pres­i­dent (that would be on PBS of course!).

The Dawn­ing of new YouTube Stars

PewDiePie with over 6 bil­lion views has lots of fans.  How much would they pay to see the world through his eyes?  How much would that Native Adver­tis­ing cost? How about play­ing Minecraft with Sky­DoesMinecraft as seen through his eyes?

When Read­ing Fic­tion leads to the New Reality

So I want to just say that I do my best to stay cur­rent of tech­nol­o­gy and media trends and in doing so I make an effort to ded­i­cate a good por­tion of my free time seek­ing out the most cur­rent and cut­ting edge sci­ence fic­tion authors pos­si­ble. I do this because as time has gone by I’ve noticed that while yes the sto­ries can be fan­tas­tic, the tech­nol­o­gy intro­duced in these nov­els are very much with­in reach, and not by hun­dreds of years, but usu­al­ly decades. I find that if a mod­ern day indi­vid­ual is think­ing about these con­cepts, then there are dozens and even hun­dreds of oth­er peo­ple glob­al­ly doing the same.

When Real­i­ty is Bet­ter than Sci­ence Fiction

I’ll give you an exam­ple, in this past month alone I read two very inter­est­ing books. The first was Peter F. Hamilton’s Abyss Beyond Dreams. In the Hamil­ton book which takes place a thou­sand years from now, the stan­dard default for all cit­i­zens of this future is Bion­ic. Not the Bion­ic from the 1973 TV show Six Mil­lion Dol­lar Man, where he has most­ly robot­ic parts, but Bion­ic where bio­log­i­cal cells are redesigned to inte­grate seam­less­ly with com­put­ers and to give us machine enhanced capa­bil­i­ties. For instance in the book peo­ple can share what they are view­ing in real-time via Wi-Fi, because the cells have com­put­er connectivity.

Pic­ture going to the rodeo to ride a bull, real­iz­ing Jane from down the block would love to see this, so you send her a mes­sage ask­ing her if she would like to “Optic Ride” along with you. Jane receives a mes­sage in her field of vision from Tom @ the Rodeo ask­ing if you would like to watch. When Jane approves the request her entire vision is replaced with Tom’s at the rodeo. Now Tom and Jane are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the same visu­al con­tent. I know, sounds crazy but read on. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

In Han­nu Rajaniemi’s The Frac­tal Prince, this same type of visu­al­ly con­nect­ed con­tent is shared but this time via actors who go about invent­ing inter­est­ing script­ed or unscript­ed lives and shar­ing them with every­one. In this future an indi­vid­ual can become a spe­cif­ic TV show or a chan­nel for expe­ri­enc­ing unique con­tent. The actors feed is pro­vid­ed via a net­work in which the con­sumer or view­er syncs direct­ly into. An inter­est­ing com­po­nent of the book is how fanat­i­cal view­ers respond to the actors for not liv­ing their “lives” accord­ing to the viewer’s ide­al, and phys­i­cal and vio­lent con­fronta­tions did occur in the novel.

So where am I going with all of this, how does this relate to a future pre­dic­tion? Well, it’s hap­pen­ing right now, the devel­op­ment of the tech described above is under­way. If you haven’t been fol­low­ing the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal trends 3D Bio-Print­ing is a real thing, sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical orga­ni­za­tions are using 3D print­ers to man­u­fac­ture work­ing bio­log­i­cal com­po­nents such as skin, lungs, hearts, you name it. So this is won­der­ful news for the health indus­try and a thrill for Tran­shu­man­ists every­where who want to live for­ev­er. What about media and here it is, an Ital­ian research stu­dio MHOX has unveiled a con­cept to allow folks to swap out their old eyes with new Super Eyes.

I’ll take the Guc­ci Eyes Please

In the last year MHOX has been work­ing on EYE (Enhance Your Eye), a syn­thet­i­cal­ly bio­print­ed prod­uct for sight aug­men­ta­tion. Guess what, those Sci-fi books I was talk­ing about, not so ridicu­lous now? EYE would pre­vent blind­ness, sharp­en and fil­ter sight, and con­nect the eye to Wi-Fi for record­ing and shar­ing visu­al experiences.

Boom! Not fic­tion, this is under scruti­ny and devel­op­ment right now. MHOX part­ner and lead design­er Fil­ip­po Nas­set­ti states the “Lat­est devel­op­ments in bio­print­ing and bio­hack­ing let us imag­ine that in the near future it would be pos­si­ble to eas­i­ly print organ­ic, func­tion­al body parts, allow­ing the human to replace defect­ed dis­tricts or enhance stan­dard per­for­mance.” MHOX is envi­sion­ing 3 mod­els of syn­thet­ic eye, each made on a 3D print­er using “bio-ink” con­tain­ing all the unique cells required to make a com­plete­ly organ­ic human eye. The print­er would be able to switch between dif­fer­ent types of bio-ink to lay down com­bi­na­tions of cells, even­tu­al­ly build­ing up into a full organ.

The pro­posed mod­el range is EYE HEAL — which replaces stan­dard eye func­tion­al­i­ty, pro­vid­ing a cure to sight dis­eases and trau­mas. EYE ENHANCE, to sharp­en sight up to 15/10, thanks to its hyper-reti­na. Also visu­al glands allow the oppor­tu­ni­ty to fil­ter the visu­al sig­nal. Fil­ters like those avail­able on Insta­gram can be acti­vat­ed or changed swal­low­ing spe­cial­ly devel­oped EYE pills. EYE ADVANCE, pro­vides the abil­i­ty to record and share the visu­al expe­ri­ence, thanks to the includ­ed gland that sup­ports Wi-Fi com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Once acti­vat­ed the Wi-Fi mode through the EYE con­nec­tion pill make it pos­si­ble to con­nect the EYE like an exter­nal cam­era, images cap­tured by the syn­thet­ic eye could be trans­ferred direct­ly to a smart­phone or tablet as a live stream or as video clips.

MHOX believes that the sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure would go a lit­tle some­thing like this. First the cus­tomer would under­go an oper­a­tion to remove their nat­ur­al eyes and insert a new organ­ic com­po­nent called the deck into their heads. Nas­set­ti claims “the tis­sues of the Deck and the EYE con­nect auto­mat­i­cal­ly.” This would act as a per­ma­nent con­nec­tion point between the mus­cle fibers of the syn­thet­ic eye and opti­cal nerves in the brain, allow­ing new eyes to be swapped and upgrad­ed like any oth­er elec­tron­ic device. “Addi­tion­al­ly, it is pos­si­ble to pre­serve or change the reti­nal mor­phol­o­gy and accord­ing­ly the iden­ti­ty of the user,” Nas­set­ti said.

New Face­book Native Adver­tis­ing Pro­gram: Mon­e­tiz­ing the Wifi Eye

So here’s the pre­dic­tion, com­pa­nies like Youtube, Face­book (Jobs at Face­book) and a myr­i­ad num­ber of oth­er con­tent dri­ven orga­ni­za­tions have been for­ev­er try­ing to find ways to increase their ad rev­enue through every pos­si­ble scheme known to man, nat­ur­al and native adver­tis­ing seems to be the biggest trend because peo­ple hate ads. But imag­ine if you had the guts to be the first in line to remove your eye­balls and upgrade to eyes with Wi-Fi capa­bil­i­ties. Then you could set up a feed on a mul­ti-chan­nel net­work and invent, plan, script out your day; do crazy or mun­dane things and invite the world to watch through your eyes.

The Wifi Eye: You are the Tele­vi­sion Show

You could become the world’s first TV show in real-time first per­son. Devel­op native adver­tis­ing deals with major brands that you would order their bev­er­age while hav­ing brunch in Williams­burg and then take a trip on a jet-ski up the east riv­er and stare at the huge Coca-Cola sign by the Long Island City Water­front. The poten­tial for cre­at­ing orig­i­nal con­tent to gain mas­sive view­er­ship is unlim­it­ed. You could even be the dullest, most bor­ing human on Earth, peo­ple would still tune into to your visu­al feed just to see what’s up, and if you do it right get adver­tis­ers to pay you to inad­ver­tent­ly pro­mote prod­ucts and make some mon­ey. Adver­tis­ers are already doing this with influ­encers on Insta­gram and Twit­ter (Jobs at Twit­ter).

This form of media tech­nol­o­gy is aligned very much with the cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy of Tran­shu­man­ism, which is the use of tech­nol­o­gy to improve and upgrade the human form, which if you didn’t know, Zoltan Ist­van the head of the U.S. Tran­shu­man­ist Par­ty is run­ning for the 2016 pres­i­den­cy.  This kind of biotech­nol­o­gy is no longer sci­ence fic­tion. We have legit­i­mate polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions and con­sumer prod­uct indus­tries going full steam ahead with Bio-Technology.

Nas­set­ti told Dezeen, “While in our opin­ion the 3D-print­ing of full human beings is still a far reach vision, at least for tech­ni­cal rea­sons, we believe that the 3D bio­print­ing of func­tion­al parts and replace­ments is a con­tem­po­rary issue that design­ers have to start address­ing,” The dilem­ma isn’t if it’s going to hap­pen but when and if you have the will to jump in and become the media which will dri­ve eco­nom­ics in the com­ing years. Your new eyes should be ready by 2027. Come on, when every­one is killing time, wouldn’t you want to see (lit­er­al­ly) what some­one else was up to and vice versa?