LED Tattoos. What would you use them for?

Another post courtesy of Wired. This one was just too good to pass up.

How LED Tattoos could make your skin a screen.

To quote:

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

Check out the Wired article for a creepy yet awesome video from Philips that decided to make some future-casting as to what this would possibly look like—in this particular video, they explore the more… sensual side of the concept. I've re-posted it here:



Creepy? Maybe. But in my opinion, very cool. Aside from the cheesy and overcommercialized applications, such as turning one of your cheeks into an LED screen you can sell online as mini-billboard advertising. I really wouldn't be surprised if that happened. But of course, if it did happen, I would hope at least that more identity-related applications could be explored. Having images that shift and change according to an implanted device that can sense the chemical compositions in your bloodstream (a.k.a. your emotions) seems to me to just be novel. Human body language is complex and subtle as it is, but some part of the artist in me, which finds its home and lifeblood in self-expression, just thinks this is a great idea, actually. It adds a whole new dimension to physical and personal expression, which is one of many ways to express meaning and memory. Maybe that is actually why, if this existed, it is a tattoo I would actually seriously consider getting.

Of course, it's a can of worms too. I find it funny—things like this are just going to push certain aspects of our society until what we really value becomes more and more oblique. I've been considering lately how innately consumeristic American society is. Obvious? Yes—but down to its very core, I really think that the buck stops at profits. Beyond religion, beyond liberty—I think we really are the self-serving slaves of our own pursuit of wealth. If an answer to a question or a solution to a problem presents capital gain, it usually makes sense above most others. Why is that?

The ancient Maori were the ones who started tattooing, and that was back when tattoos were sacred and had meaning. They related to ancestry, personal milestones, challenges, and triumphs. For the American, would he or she actually find a celebratory, identity-related use for something like this, or would it just be another tool in the "pursuit of happiness?" Or a false display of meaning, like tattoos of the name of an ex boy or girlfriend?