I could just be paranoid, but I’ve seen entire major products disappear like they never existed, such as the original Firefly software that MicroSoft bought up and sequestered. That was a key concept, a crucially important product, and MS owns it, even though I believe that the original development took place at MIT, partially funded with taxes… Recall also how Farnsworth lost TV, due to RCA’s legal skuldugery.

Then, in the same era, there was a device developed by a man from Mexico – or so my source at the “Electronic Cafe” claimed – which got coverage many years later in Nova. It involved an array of vibrators strapped to the subject’s back, again lo-res – I think maybe 24 x 24, and the camera and blackbox weighed about 40 pounds, but it was portable and people were able to very quickly learn to spot a telephone across a room and go to it, etc.

According to Karel Struyker – “Lurch” – who did quite a bit of research on his own involving use of videoplace (aumented reality) systems for use with retraining the disabled, stuff that he showed off at SIGGRAPH in the early ’90′s, the problem is not the technology, but rather the politics. There is a LOT of money to be made in treating blind people and caring for them and providing special facilities for them. There is comparitively very little money for an actual effective CURE for blindness. Similarly for deafness, etc. The deaf community has carried it one step further, of course, with some of them opposing cochlear implants for their kids, in the case of hereditary defects, on the grounds that the kids BELONG to the deaf community. This is sick.