This is the Dyson Visor. Noise-cancelling headphones with air pollution sensors and mask filters that prove a plume of clean air to the mouth and nostrils. The filters will last for twelve months in a European city. On its maximum setting, it will provide five litres of purified air per second for ninety minutes.
I kind of want to see Google Glass superimposed on the image. I only saw Google Glass out in the wild once, on the corner of Mercer and Prince in New York, and it was an unmysterious fucking oddness, like the uncomprehension of a social cue stuck to the uncomprehending owner’s face. Like Glass, these Visors are going to be bloody expensive, like the thick end of a thousand pounds. Glass sent the social signal of seeing, recording, streaming everything around the owner. Visor will, if it actually makes it to the street, be the badge of “I can afford to breathe better than you.” It’s a prop for a bad science fiction novel. Except I guess we actually unironically live in a bad science fiction novel now, and nobody bats an eyelid at a clunking great crap metaphor being brought to market as physical goods.
What I didn’t expect to ask myself was: I wonder if Kafka would have been into it? For a hypochondriac, he was seriously into “wellness.”