I’ve recently been watching the original Star Trek series – it’s really quite interesting, especially when you consider that some of the ‘futuristic’ technologies in the show are now realities. Others aren’t quite real just yet, but we’re getting closer – such as the TriCorder.
The TriCorder in Star Trek is a multifunctional hand-held device used for sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data. When a landing party arrives on a new planet, they typically use the TriCorder to get ‘readings’ of the environment and various things that they discover.
Recently, something close to a TriCorder was launched on Kickstarter, called SCIO. SCIO is a really small hand-held spectrometer that allows you to simply scan various things to get a readout of their makeup. Some of the examples given by the company are scanning food to determine the number of calories, or scanning a pill to find out what chemicals are contained within. This could be huge for the older generation, who may not be able to read the label on a pill bottle or visually identify which pill is which.
The SCIO is just a kickstarter for now, but they’ve blown through their funding goal of $200k, and it’s likely we’ll see a version on store shelves by 2015, if everything goes well. This could be HUGE for a number of functions, and it’s definitely very exciting.
Ricky Cadden 