forcefield of some sort being used in a thunderstorm on the scottish moors in winter
basically, sitting in short sleeves and shorts on dry, warm grass, in the middle of the night, with pouring torrents of rain, blasting wind, and constant lightning around you
obviously my knowledge of scottish moors is nil, but that's what's always come to mind regarding this. Generally a useful thing - while walking around it keeps you dry - it's basically just a different pressure of air at a certain distance. High enough that water would hit it and slide around it instead of travelling through it... hm. A generator that fires off charged particles that will 'detonate' or 'react' at a certain distance of like 1 meter or something, causing that region to have a high temperature and thus pressure, or something? Wouldn't want it to be harmful to humans.. or would you? Military applications! neat.
I had something else..
oh there's something, not what I wanted but something nonetheless
Brain surgery during sleep. hm, not useful in the way I wanted - what I'm thinking is, electrical stimulus to regions of the brain may be showable to have consistent effects on a person's dreams. The end result is virtual reality (we drug you and then apply electrical stimulus to create virtual worlds that you experience through your natural dream mechanism) - but the issue is of
communication here, first.
There's work being done on catching speech before it's said, I don't know if it's already at working prototype stage or what - apparently most people think a lot in 'voice', so we effectively are moving the muscles in our throats _without_ moving any air through them - and those signals can be caught and decoded by training something to recognize the way you move your muscles when you speak.
To go off the deep end with assumptions, let's think that among all people there will be 5-10 'patterns' that most people fall into with a few outliers - and beyond that that the signals can be traced farther back, deeper into the brain, as opposed to at the neuron level near the actual voice chords. This might allow mutes and other physically disabled people who have lost the use of their mouth, voice, or throat the ability to speak. This is a digression though -
The idea I'm pulling from this is that you could likely pull some forms of imagery, emotion, speech, and sound from the brain of a person. If you could get a bit deeper than the neuron level, you might actually be able to do this _while_ they're dreaming. This would allow for 'dream recordings', which could bridge the gap.
But this is hardly an idea, this is just logical thinking - I'm sure it's a well thought through region of futurism/speculative science.
Anyway, once you had that (hahaha) you could
totally do some reverse engineering, and provided people have enough similarity between them, create a fairly comprehensive virtual reality system out of some simple electric stimulus.
I wonder if we can put people to sleep with a simple shock to the right part of the head?
.. I wonder how dangerous that is? .. kinda scary.
Anyway, I haven't remembered the other idea I had. It needs to be said that StarCraft had awesome, awesome music, and it should be listened to through some decent headphones.
