The evolution of the portable music player has taken leaps and bounds over the centuries since they were invented in the 20th century. While wristcomps, portacomps, cellphones and comlinks tend to have these functions built in, an interesting evolutionary step involving cybernetics happened in the late 21st century.
Medical technology during the early 21st to restore hearing to the deaf also involved work to map the neural paths for those who needed digital implants hooked directly to the neural pathways because of severe damage. This lead to significant advances including miniaturization of the interfaces between the audio receivers which eventually led to suitable implants so such people didn't appear deaf.
With these pathways mapped the ability to allow implanted audio input jacks for communications equipment proved to be handy for espionage, military and even corporate purposes - eventually leading to consumer oriented products for communications use, or even radio reception.
ADEPT eventually produced an implantable music player using this technology that including a wireless transceiver to access a wider library than the local storage had available (so called cloud music lockers).
Brain to computer studies also were researching mood detectors so music could be played to counter negative moods in patients who suffer depression or other problematic conditions.
This mood player technology was eventually applied as a function of these neural music players as a selectable option.
Music playing, radio reception, comms receiver (or bluetooth style short range receiver), storage library and other functions merged into top end models much as they had in cellphones during the early 21st century as Smart phones.
Talking clocks, alarms, text to speech readers and other audio output applications can all be had with appropriate models.
A basic comm receiver starts at about 100EC, while basic music players start at about 500EC.
The advantage of these implanted players is that the noise doesn't annoy people around you - but watch out for your sing alongs, dancing to nothing etc - not everyone appreciates odd behavior.
RSS Feed
Digg this!
Add to del.icio.us
