Now I guess we’ve all encountered people who, rather than looking where they’re going, are more intent on concentrating on whatever they’re being shown by their mobile phone, but now a South Korean industrial designer Paeng Min-wook, 28 has come up with a robotic eyeball that can be strapped to a person’s forehead, allowing them to browse injury-free.

Called THE THIRD EYE, the device senses when the user’s head has been lowered to look at the phone and it then opens its translucent eyelid so that when they get within one or two metres of an obstacle, the third eye beeps to warn them of danger.

Bit like the collision warnings now fitted to some new cars.

Mr Paeng said: “This is the look of future mankind with three eyes. As apparently we can’t take our eyes off our smartphones, the extra eye will be needed in future.”

Mr Paeng, a postgraduate student in innovation design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, has trialled the device around Seoul.

Among those who saw it was resident Lee Ok-jo, who said: “I thought he looked like an alien with an eye on his forehead.”

The Third Eye uses a gyro sensor to measure the angle of the user’s neck and an ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance between the robotic eye and obstacles.

The sensors are both linked to an open-source single-board micro-controller with a battery pack.

Oh for goodness sake, whatever next!

In the second hour I was joined by Margaret Mills who was looking at a man who during the last war, was busy designing means of defending the Essex coast and our islands nationally against the threat of German invasion.

Pretty much forgotten and overlooked today, his name was William Edmund Ironside.

Listen here to what Margaret had to say about this man: –

I’ll see you again next week,
Scott