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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
 |
| Visi-Sonor | ||
| An entertainment device which appeared to create both sound and light by acting directly on brain cells. It also stimulated emotions directly. |
Okay, so it would never get FCC approval. But the basic idea is that of stimulating the brain directly, rather than being forced to go through the (primitive!) step of needing to create sounds that would be heard by the ears and then interpreted by the brain.
| His long fingers caressed softly and slowly, pressing lightly on contacts with a rippling motion, resting themselves momentarily on one key then another - and in the air before them there was a soft glowing rosiness, just inside the range of vision. |
| Technovelgy from Foundation and Empire,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Lots of unanswered questions; does this work regardless of how the brain was socialized?
Compare to the peeper from Shadow World (1957) by Clifford Simak, the empathy box from The Little Black Box (1964) by Philip K. Dick and the krang from The Tar-Aiym Krang (2007) by Alan Dean Foster.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
