Listening to music is nice and probably the most obvious answer, but I intend to do some very creative things with it. The implant itself is completely undetectable to the naked eye. The device & coil necklace are are easily concealed under my shirt so nobody can really see it. I can see myself using it with the gps on my smartphone to navigate city streets on foot. I plan to hook it up to a directional mic of some sort (possibly disguised as a shirt button or something) so I can hear conversations across a room. Having a mic hooked up to it and routed through my phone would be handy. You could use a simple voice stress analysis app to detect when people might be lying to you. Not to say that is a hard science, but I’m sure it could come in handy at the poker table or to pre-screen business clients. I have a contact mic that allows you to hear through walls. That might be my next implant actually.
I plan to hook this thing up to an ultrasonic rangefinder so that hums can be heard when objects get closer or further away. This will basically give you a sense of echolocation like a bat has. This could be really handy for blind people (many of whom use echolocation for navigation) since it will be audible only to them and doesn’t require making clicking noises with your mouth or using some other manual noisemaker. Echolocation is something I want to start practicing with now because I might be legally blind soon. I lost much of vision in my right eye overnight a few years back. I just woke up and couldn’t see well up close or far away. My other eye has compensated for the vision loss but the doc says the good eye can go at any time and when it does it will be very rapid. I’ll lose my drivers license, won’t be able to read, and glasses won’t correct the problem. Making money will be harder. A cornea transplant will be my only option and that is a bit out of my budget at the moment. So I figure learning to navigate with echolocation is a good thing to develop now, not that I’ve resigned myself to blindness or anything.
Beyond that, I’d love to hook a geiger counter up to it and experience the world or radiation. Living near the old Nevada nuclear testing grounds provides a lot of opportunity for this. I wouldn’t mind finding some yellow cake uranium while on a hike because that stuff is expensive. Hearing a gentle hiss around warm objects might be a novel way to experience the thermal realm. The implant is going to allow for a lot of new senses. Plugging new sensors into the jack will allow me to experience a lot of the world that is normally invisible. Well, it still might be invisible but now it will be audible. This new synesthesia of sorts is an exciting way to explore the world and develop new instincts about the way the world works around you.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 