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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Dental Switchboard | ||
| A control device tied in with teeth and nerve endings. |
This device provides a hands-free way to control other devices; in this case, a set of body modifications. In the novel, Gully Foyle seeks revenge on those who abandoned him in space; he has his entire body rewired for greater strength and speed.
| He pressed hard with his tongue against his right upper first molar. The operation that had transformed half his body into an electronic machine, had located the control switchboard in his teeth. Foyle pressed a tooth with his tongue and the peripheral cells of his retina were excited into emitting a soft light. He looked down two pale beams at the corpse of a man... |
| Technovelgy from The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -
|
I can't find this as an assistive device for people who are unable to use ordinary controllers (like people with high spinal injuries); I wonder if it is worth exploring. An interesting use of computers as an assistive device is found in this article Spinal Cord Injury and how to live with it. It describes a mouse-substitute that can be operated with lips and tongue alone. Left and right mouse clicks are done by sipping from or puffing into the "hollow joystick."
It would be handy for athletes; here's a bit more:
Foyle touched his tongue to the switchboard wired into the nerve endings of his teeth. He accelerated...
He backed a step and pressed his tongue against his upper incisors. Neural circuits buzzed and every sense and response in his body was accelerated by a factor of five.
William Gibson uses this with his razorgirl Molly in Neuromancer (1984):
She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. `Okay, honey. Now we go out to play.'
Compare to the Ullran enunciator from Uller Uprising (1952) by H. Beam Piper and the tongue mouse from Quantico (2007) by Greg Bear.
Every nerve plexus had been rewired, microscopic transistors and transformers had been buried in muscle and bone...
TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Stars My Destination
More Ideas
and Technology by Alfred Bester
Tech news articles related to The Stars My Destination
Tech news articles related to works by Alfred Bester
Dental Switchboard-related
news articles:
- Tongue Controller Uses Tongue Magnets
- Tongue Drive System Validated In Clinical Trial
- iLickit App Reveals iPhone Tongue Interface
- Intraoral Tongue Drive System
- Tongue Mouse Created By Valve Engineer
- Cyborg Eye Flashlight Lights Up The Room
- MouthPad Supports Head And Tongue Tracking
| MIT Headset Lets You Communicate Without Speaking |
| Tongue Mouse Created By Valve Engineer |
| Skinput Uses Your Skin As An Input Device |
| AcceleGlove Open-Source Data Glove |
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
