I love history, though I struggle to internalize it without context. I find it challenging to put all those dates and names and places together without a narrative or visual aid. Travelling Europe has helped, especially when I read topical history books before and during the trip, aware of past events and visiting the sites where they occurred. Not everyone can afford the expenses or time to travel, but advancements such as augmented reality may be ready to offer some help.

Augmented reality overlays computer generated images over realtime visuals. The field was limited for mobile use until smartphones with cameras were able to provide a realtime view for a graphical overlay. Phone screens are nice, but limited. Several technologies are coming together to provide data overlays to provide rich environments, including wearable glasses (Google Glass), interactive street views (Google Stretview), and metadata tying content to a space based on both GPS coordinates and date identification. Not the current date, but the time frame the media represents.

Technology is slowly infiltrating every area of our human existence. I read Alistair Croll's Race Alongside the Machine today on re/code and it led me to a reflection on how we humans are being changed by the technology we develop and where this might lead in the future.

When I came up with the original idea for a future-focused site, I immediately created a short list I called "aspects of human existence." I've changed them to "elements of how we live" and use them as story tags, a taxonomy vocabulary in Drupal terms, in order to help users find content. After reading Croll's piece, I decided today's exercise would be to look at the (now much longer) list and see what I can come up with for where current trends and predictions will take us as we continue to combine humans, technology and big data.

The Japanese lingerie manufacturer Ravijour has a new product out they call the True Love Tester bra. You can watch the video linked off the Popular Science article for their presentation of how it works, but the truly interesting detail is the graph of heart rate responses to varying stimuli - and how a company looking to market a new product uses our data.

If I understand this correctly, the bra senses the wearer's heart rate and when it "exceeds a certain value, the bra hook is unlocked automatically." A situation where a biological response can act as a trigger may be a bit part of our wearable future, but is it something we can trust or simply a gizmo to play with?

While the novelty isn't world-changing, it is an example of how our biodata can be used in different ways and how wearables can impact the world around us using our biology as a key.

Wired offers an overview of photographer Vincent Fournier's Post Natural History artwork, in which he speeds up the evolution of living organisms to incorporate technological capabilities.

These creatures come from the future—an imagined future, based loosely on current research on synthetic biology and genetic engineering. The idea is that these are living species, reprogrammed by mankind to better fit our environment as well as to adapt to new human desires.