Helen Keller quote by lemasney
Many of my clients will ask me…
‘where is technology going?’
I had someone ask me yesterday, and I took a moment to think about my answer. I said that technology was moving towards individualized experiences that are more immersive, connected, and transporting.
Immersive
For example, we are starting to see more reasonable, affordable, and comfortable virtual reality gear. It’s still large and clunky, but the prototypes show that we could eventually just have these functions present in the form of our glasses. When you can pick up and put on a normal pair of glasses and not have battery or nausea or connectivity issues, people might spend their entire day in augmented or virtual reality. Ernest Kline‘s Ready Player One predicts this in very interesting ways, and Microsoft’s Hololens is a pretty promising way to think about first steps. The Oculus Rift and Samsung offerings are amazing, but I don;t see anyone walking around with them on anytime soon. This is an adoption factor.
Connected
Some of us spend some time in social networks, like Facebook. I spend a lot of time there. I often find myself defending social media against the claim that it is not social. In other words, many critics of social media see it as dividing people, and not a gathering place, and I simply disagree. Further, I believe that my online, social network based conversations and posts strengthen and enhance my in-person meetings with people. When I greet someone, we might spend 5 minutes talking about the various things we had shared and seen from each other recently. I feel far more connected with people who are on social media with me than not. We stay connected in the interim between meetings. I suspect that this will not decrease, but increase, and that it might not be in a form that we recognize, like Facebook, but maybe the virtual reality systems described above. Maybe a less pixellated form of Second Life, but hopefully, something far more grand.
Transporting
Before those things happen, we are already starting to see visual media taking on new importance in our browsing habits. Further, video is becoming the prominent media. This is in part because technologies like bandwidth and storage are at the point that they can more readily handle video without hiccups. Video is interesting as medium because it offers the most senses to be interpreted by the watcher. More than still photos or audio alone. Therefore you get more of a sense of what happened in the captured scene. Tools like Periscope allow for real-time capture and broadcast, and their philosophy is that they are offering teleportation services, which is kind of amazing. I believe this heralds a shift towards technology as superpower or science non-fiction. So perhaps in the future, technology will give you the power of flight, invisibility, or x-ray vision, but instead of you doing these with your natural senses, your body would just be sensually informed (by sensors, actuators, signals) that you were doing these things.
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