My favorite new gadget: the HeadLamp 6, known as the Pilot. It looks like a Bluetooth earpiece, the type you fit over an ear and appear to others as if you’re being attacked by a plastic mollusc. But it ain’t. It’s an LED light:
It delivers a relatively powerful, focused beam onto whatever you’re looking at. Great for reading in cars or on planes when you don’t want to disturb folk sitting next to you. Good for interrogating people too: By looking them in the eye you can appear quite intimidating, backed up by the focused LED beam. Or you could sell them at pop concerts, saving people the pain of burning their fingers holding their lighters aloft. Wear one on each ear and you could pretend you’re driving a car, even if you’re only riding a bicycle. Plus it has a social function too: Place it on the lunch table next to you and you can pretend you’ve got a cellphone even if you don’t.
That’s not all. There’s an undocumented feature which lets you set the lamp on blinking. I haven’t quite figured out what to use that for, but I guess if everyone at a concert has one and does it, it might create quite a funky effect. Or have a dozen people standing in a field, their IQ HL 6s set to blinking and pointing at the sky, and you’ve got yourself a homemade landing strip. The possibilities are endless.
I found one in a local hardware store, selling for about $10. The manufacturer, Hong Kong’s IQ, sells only to distributers and retailers and requires you to sign up before you can see what they’ve got for sale, so I’m not sure how you’d get hold of one.
This is the first step, you know — towards sharks with frickin’ LASER BEAMS strapped to their heads!