Not sure if you remember the Blackberry spoof video from 2006 featuring a Blackberry Helmet. This helmet has a camera on it so Blackberry users can stare at their trusty device and walk at the same time without worrying about walking into something or someone.
Fast forward to 2021, someone actually came up with a similar device. Albeit not for Blackberry. Created by South Korean industrial designer Minwook Paeng, 3rd Eye is, well, a “third eye” for the smartphone generation designed to worn on the forehead.
The 3rd Eye is not a wearable video camera, though; it is more sophisticated than that. Packed inside the webcam-like, translucent plastic housing are a buzzer, a gyroscopic sensor and a sonar sensor.
When the gyro senses a person is look down at his or her phone, it opens the third eye’s “plastic eyelid” and the sonar get to work, monitoring the front of the user. When the sonar detects an obstacle, it will alert the user through the buzzer.
Third Eye is probably not the future we are heading (we probably have AR contacts in the future), but it is what Paeng imagined the future generations might wear based on the smartphone addiction of today’s people.
In a short period of its history, smartphones use have changed us physically and the 3rd Eye is an imagination of that evolution. Granted, the prototype 3rd Eye is a tech object, but we cannot dismiss the possibility that humans may one day evolved to be born with a sensor on the forehead.
Minwook is calling this project “The 3rd Eye: Evolution to Phono Sapiens” and “Phono Sapiens” here “is a new human species born from Smartphones.” You can learn more about the 3rd Eye HERE.
Images: Instagram (@mninwookpaeng).
via Oddity Central.