by Jessie Roberts

Researchers at MIT have developed a wearable reading device called Sensory Fiction:

Sensory Fiction was inspired by two sci-fi visions of what media in the future will look like. The first is Neil Stephenson’s steampunk classic, The Diamond Age, a novel that features interactive books with built in AIs. (The book that is often seen as the fictional inspiration for many of today’s technologies, like the iPad and Siri.) The other is The Girl Who Was Plugged In, a 1974 novella by James Tiptree, Jr. about a future in which the desperate are allowed to pay to take over the bodies of attractive human vessels.

“You feel this story in your gut,” Hope says about The Girl Who Was Plugged In. “It is an amazing example of the power of fiction to make us feel and empathize with a protagonist. Because our imaginations…