Future x-ray specs

Recently I had occasion to have my hands x-rayed. Those hands you see in the highly revealing photo are indeed mine. You could say it is a good digital likeness. 😉

After each x-ray has been scanned, the result goes up on a large computer monitor in the x-ray technician’s office. When the technician momentarily stepped out of the office, I snuck this photo with my SmartPhone.

Since human hands have a lot of structure, it occurs to me that in the near future, when we get to wear those forthcoming AR glasses, we will be able to do a much better version of those x-ray specs I used to see in ads on the back pages of comic books when I was a kid. Except this time it won’t be a silly optical trick.

Instead, our future x-ray specs will be able to use a built-in depth camera to analyze the shape of your hand, recognize what sort of object it is, retrieve the corresponding skeletal structure from a database, and thereby use a combination of machine learning and real-time 3D graphics to superimpose an image of your skeleton directly onto your actual hand, as though you are peering into your own body.

Whenever those specs come out, it would be cool if kids could still buy them from an ad on the back page of a comic book.