Now that the oldest baby boomers are turning 65, he says, their sheer numbers may attract industries that had earlier shied away. “If you are a Fortune 100 company, or an inventor in a garage, where are you going to find another demographic that is that large, that robust in spending power, that open to new possibilities, and that underserved?” he asks. “There’s nothing to rival it.”

In 2009, for example, baby-boomer households in the United States spent about $2.6 trillion, according to estimates from AgeWave based on a consumer expenditure survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But so far, he says, very few companies have applied creative intelligence to understanding older adults and developing game-changing technologies, services, experiences and even new careers for them.

Imagine a new real estate sector, he says, that caters to the former hippies among baby boomers who want to form retirement communities with friends by buying six-bedroom communal penthouses in Chicago or farms in Vermont. Or Internet cemeteries, he says, that would preserve video libraries of people’s lives for their descendants to enjoy.

“Rather than viewing maturity as an opportunity to sell people a golf membership or an arthritis medicine,” he says, “since a person who turns 60 has another 20 years, why not create educational programs whereby people can be motivated to go out, learn new skills and have an encore?”

AGNES, the age empathy suit developed by the M.I.T. AgeLab, is calibrated to simulate the dexterity, mobility, strength and balance of a 74-year-old. My empathy has clearly deepened after a few hours of road-testing it. But, sheepishly, I still want to shed the suit and its instant add-on decades.

Professor Coughlin started AgeLab in 1999 to address what he calls “the longevity paradox”  the idea that, while people in many developed countries now live several decades longer than those born a century ago, very few policy makers, institutions and industries are dedicated to helping people make those extra decades healthy and productive.

More than a decade later, with boomers starting to turn 65, experts like Professor Coughlin hope to make gray the new green. Their job would be easier if it were fun to wear Agnes.