Imagine how this will change your view of reality from something mostly outside yourself toward something more like a dream come to life: Innovega is working on a combination of contact lens and glasses that can overlay an immersive 3D experience on what you see and hear (assuming the glasses have earbuds attached). Check out the video below to learn how that will work.

More interesting, perhaps, is imagining the combination of Innovega’s technology with mind-reading technology like Emotiv‘s. Emotiv’s headset has already been adapted for the iPhone so that you can think about calling, say, Dad, and your phone rings Dad’s number. I tried the Emotiv headset recently. After I put the headset on and the technician made sure the contact points were picking up my brainwaves, she told me to focus on a virtual floating cube on the laptop screen. “Imagine you are pushing the cube away from you,” she instructed. I imagined I was physically pushing the cube, and it almost immediately receded into the background. “Now imagine you are pulling it toward you,” I imagined the cube was tethered to a rope that I pulled, and immediately the cube zoomed toward me. It was surprisingly easy to teach the headset to read my mind.

Now imagine that you are wearing some combination of the Innovega interactive audio-visual display and the Emotiv mind-reading headset all connected to a smartphone device with next-gen Siri capability. You are at work, but wish you were sipping an espresso at a Rome cafe. Simply imagine the Rome cafe, and almost instantly you are immersed in a 3D experience of being in Rome, sitting in a cafe, hearing the traffic, glasses clinking as the waiter walks by, and a couple at the next table passionately arguing in Italian. You change your focus from the Rome cafe to the office cube wall, and instantly you are back in the office. Remember, all this technology exists in some form today. It is only a matter of time before the pieces are knit together. Lucid dreaming on demand is getting closer, people.