In case you were thinking that we were drunk when we wrote that title, we weren’t. According to a report from ABC News in Australia, this is the real deal. A professor at the Curtin University in Perth, Australia has literally grown an ear on his arm, and the ultimate plan of his is to connect it to the internet.
Wait, why? The idea is so that the internet can connect to his “ear” and listen to everything that he’s listening to on a daily basis. According to professor Stelarc, who is also a performance artist, “This ear is not for me, I’ve got two good ears to hear with. This ear is a remote listening device for people in other places. They’ll be able to follow a conversation or hear the sounds of a concert, wherever I am, wherever you are. People will be able to track, through a GPS as well, where the ear is.”
For those wondering how he achieved it, it involves inserting a scaffold underneath his skin, and over the course of six months tissue and blood vessels had formed around the structure, making the ear part of his arm. The next step involves making it more three dimensional and growing an earlobe in which a miniature microphone can be attached.
This is actually a project that Stelarc has been dreaming about for decades. The idea was conceived back in 1996, but it took him about 10 years before he found a medical team willing to perform the modification. Without doubt this will definitely be considered to be freaky/creepy by many, but at the same time it is a fascinating concept.