Via Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger, “The word-of-mouth killer product of CES“:
“It’s a $400 box with a lens that you look through.
It comes out in April. …
You look through this device at the night-time sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. Oh, it doesn’t need to be night, either.
Celestron is a famous maker of telescopes (I sold a truckload of their product in the Silicon Valley camera store I used to manage and they always made great products).
It has GPS, gravity, and magnetic field sensors to detect where it’s going.
But it just gets better from there. You can tell it ‘show me the cool stuff in the sky right now.’ It’ll take you on a tour and show you how to point the device with a series of LED’s in the viewfinder.
But it gets cooler than that. It has an audio guide that tells you what you’re looking at and gives you some facts about it.”
If this thing could be hacked to show arbitrary data about the world, it could be the mythic “urban spelunking” tool that Neil, Jason and I were dreaming about one day.
Say, you’re wandering around town, you look through this device at some building and it shows you “hidden” information that had been left by other people about that location in space. Notes could be left around anything in the ambient environment, viewed from any odd angle … a tagging folksonomy for the real world. Maybe even, somehow connected to concepts like Geocaching and some Google Earth API-based way to leave the notes.
Now, that would be cool.