BFTP: The ultimate rose-colored glasses

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post April 20, 2008. Now with Google Glass, are we getting closer?

egocasting: Reading, watching, and listening only to media that reflect one's own tastes or opinions. wordspy.com

Daniel Wilson, in his Popular Mechanic's article "10 Genius Inventions We're Still Waiting For":

Augmented Reality
Kids’ knees and noggins can be protected with padding and helmets—but how do we safeguard their delicate minds? The answer may lie with Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that combines sights and sounds of the real world with virtual information. AR eyeglasses could detect inappropriate sights and remove them from view, while AR-enabled earbuds would delete ambient cursing. Meanwhile, adults might wear glasses that substitute blessed blank space for roadside billboards, television commercials and the annoying corporate names on most stadiums. Professor Jie Yang of the interACT research center at Carnegie Mellon University recently laid the groundwork for this technology. His prototype digital camera picks out street signs and billboards from a scene and translates their text to another language. Next on his to-do list, we hope: figuring out a way to translate obnoxious on-hold music into songs we actually like. 

The ultimate in rose-colored glasses - or goggles? Put these on and all the "unpleasantness" in the world simply goes away. Gee, let's blank out not just commercials, but:

• people who are too fat or too thin
• people who are a different race or religion or culture
• poor people, street people, scary people
• any person with a pimple, scar, or wart
• boys wearing those baggy pants that show their drawers
• people with bad hair

I can see this list might get very, very long... 

Here's the scary thing. Are people who egocast already using a "reality filter?" How much do any of us look only for like minds in the blogs we read, speakers we invite to our conferences, or journals we study and cite? Do we only work with the other teachers in our schools who share our educational beliefs?

I thought about this as the LWW headed out this fine spring day to tend her beloved flower gardens. Wouldn't it just be ever so much easier to wear glasses that would block the weeds than to take the time to pull them ?

Put a blogger you disagree with in your feed today. Read a real newspaper. Talk to the social studies teacher who lectures and hates computers.