X Ray Specs

We probably all remember sci fi films with X-Ray Specs and bionic men and thought these were about a future we would never actually see off the big screen but things are changing at speed. We have seen the intuitive vision of Pranav Mistry start to appear and can start to see the end of our interface with technology as we know it today.

Our good friend and Fururoligist Ray Hammond wrote this month about two subjects which caught our eye.

First was about optical Research and Development (R&D) being undertaken by US military body DARPA. Their mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S.and over the years, DARPA has funded R&D that not only has improved US military capabilities but has impacted the wiser community. They are currently working with Innovega researchers in the development of iOptiks. Traditional video eyewear blocks the wearer’s view of their surroundings. A loss of peripheral vision with non-transparent eyewear for mobile applications is impractical and unsafe.

iOptiks contact lenses enhance normal vision, allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky headgear such as virtual reality helmets. Digital images are projected onto tiny full-colour displays that are very near the eye. This could give soldiers better situational awareness in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) activities.

The second piece of news came from the New York Times and was with respect to claims that Google is to launch data glasses by the end of the year. The data glasses are expected to cost around the price of current smartphones, or $250 to $600, be based on Andriod and include a small screen that will sit a few inches from the wearer’s eyes. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.

Eyewear is described as a “natural technology interface” and one which is consistent with today’s mobile lifestyle. Sounds far fetched and distracting but it is coming soon once it finds its initial application it will no doubt impact how we look at things and interact with technology moving forward. The thought alone starts to make our current displays look like those early mobile ‘brick’ phones!

The Digital Future: Copying Files Made Simple

Remember some 15 months ago we told you about Pranav Mistry of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his quest to make our interface with technology more intuitive? The video is still amazing to watch but is now becoming reality.

Our good friend a furturist Ray Hammond has now alerted us to Mistry's latest step along this exciting path where you can transfer images or text from one screen and device to another with just your fingertips? A new program called Sparsh lets you do just that and its no surprise to find Mistry behind it.

SPARSH (स्पर्श) lets you conceptually transfer media from one digital device to your body and pass it to the other digital device by simple touch gestures

The trick is the data is actually transferred via the cloud, but your finger becomes the 'cursor' and to the user the body becomes to conduit.

Will Kinect Be Bigger Than Tablets?

Speaking at a lunch held in Sydney by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), Microsoft ‘s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie, has predicted the death of tablets and claims that their existence will be short lived as they get squeezed by the ever decreasing gap between smartphones and laptops. He said, "I think there's an important distinction - and frankly one we didn't jump on at Microsoft fast enough - between mobile and portable,"

So is he right or wrong and is it merely a push to get PR or a genuine vision of change?

What we do know is that the tablet is consumer market’s hot device today, but that means little as technology can change so fast. We know Miscrosoft is working to get their own tablet OS out this year but that they pulled the plug on their own Courier tablet last year.

Mundie admitted Microsoft’s failings but that they are determined to go after the smartphone market and even envisages a phone that beams light directly into your retina so you can view HDTV.

As for desktops, Mundie predicted, " the successor to the desktop is the room, that instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, (in the) future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it."

Mundie discussed the Xbox 360 Kinect motion-sensing accessory will be be soon offered for the PC. This could be very interesting as it starts to free the computer interface and make in more intuitive using gestures and voice commands, or what Mundie calls this the "natural user interface". This could revolutionise many aspects of technology and human interface such as teaching, healthcare etc. This by itself could change the way we look at and interface with technology and even support some of the thinking expressed by Mundie re tablets.

Mundie predicts that within five years computers and televisions would be sold with Kinect sensors built in.

Brave New World: 2020 Vision in Digital Book World (Part 3)

Presentation to the Seoul International Book Fair, Seoul, South Korea, May 2010

Part 4 A Leap into the Future

What about the longer term?

What will the third decade of the millennium look like? Technology will increasingly impact everything and the technology divide across the globe will become a big challenge. Technology will enable us to move into a virtual world, get instant communication, create new communities, explore and even see what we could never imagine possible before. But what will this mean to our access to and interface to information, media and storytelling?

1. Greater choice

Today our views, interests and cultural awareness is restricted by what we can find and access, how we access it, what we can do with it and how we use it.Interestingly, we are shaped more by what we don’t know, than by what we do know.

Media is a classic example of where the technology and cultural restriction to information and content can narrow our perspective and thereby who we are.Someone who grew up in the 50s did not have the capability or access to the rich variety of music that existed then. Their taste was dictated by what and who they knew and could hear. Today, we all have access to just about every conceivable genre, taste and also every manifestation of any work every produced. This opportunity has been created by technology.

However, the way in which we discover, access, experience and form opinions on music is varied and often haphazard. As a result everyone’s taste is more eclectic and the music industry now has to support a rich variety of taste. Genre and sub genre are still important but people expect access to a width and depth of range of music.
So does the biggest aggregator of information and media win the future by simply ‘slicing and dicing’ it into verticals?

Some will suggest that the publisher should own vertical spaces. We would suggest that we first have to define the term ‘publisher’ and second, we have to accept collaboration and cooperation is now a given.

Aggregation is not about content as we knew it yesterday, but about referential links, contextual information and about virtual aggregation. Google doesn’t hold or own every piece of information, just the indexes and links to every piece of information. Do you only need one Google? No, as Google indexes it one way, there will be others who will index and provide and present value differently.

2. Ownership will be redefined

Do we all have to own our media and have libraries of CDs, DVDs and books? Do physical bookshelves still define who we are, or are they mere decorative features?

Cloud computing and high speed mobile bandwidth will break the old ownership paradigm. People will still collect media but the majority of media will be on demand, in real time and be shared.

3. The User Interface

Our interaction with the simplest of technology is not natural.
If voice recognition apps work on a mobile phone today, why do I have to key in instructions to my PC?

We would urge all who have not watched Pranav Mistry on his views on our technology future, to watch it. It shows what is possible and what he is developing today in the MIT labs and what will be mainstream tomorrow.

His technology:

takes pictures using fingers to form the lens





enables the naked wrist to be used as a watch





the hand to become a keypad







project interactive information over an image





play interactive games on a piece of paper and to project images onto any surface





manipulates data and control other devices, wirelessly in real time






Mistry redefines the user interface in ways which are compelling and that frees us from; the screen, the keypad and even the touch screen. In doing so, he will enable humans to interact intuitively with technology in the future.

We already have the Bluetooth earpiece for the mobile. Why not the chip in the ear? Will we bypass the screen and read direct via imposed images on the retina of the eye?

We often think of huge leaps forward as impossible. When we see the sci fi programs such as Dr Who where he reads a printed book by flicking the pages, we think that would be impossible. However when we watch a video of the technology actually scanning a book at great speed today in a Japanese labs in the University of Tokyo we have to wonder just how long before we can do it for ourselves?

Those who believe that we are going to interface with technology in the same way as we do today are in for some surprises. In the very near future intuitive human interfaces will become mainstream. We don’t advocate that we will all become ‘Six Million Dollar’ bionic men but recognise that the technology will exist and its adaptation is inevitable.

4. We will connect the dots

We are now entering an era where bandwith and connectivity become ubiquitous. This removes the network as a constraint and opens up the potential to do anything, anywhere, anytime. We will connect and integrate anything in real time, which changes how we will develop business systems and applications, how we will store and access data and how we will consume media.

Knowing every click and every detail about who and when it occurred gives us both opportunities and many social challenges. The greatest challenge facing us is ‘privacy’ and how we will marry knowing everything against the temptation to exploit it in ways that go too far and are not in the public interest.

5. There is Copyright

Today we have a Rights business with no registry and we express rights as we have for many years. The problem is that technology is now fundamentally changing how we interact with intellectual property (content).

US legal professor Larry Lessig explains that the rights conflict we now face is far more fundamental than the enforcement of yesterday’s rights. He claims that we now have a user generated content culture that is being accelerated by new technology. This culture embraced by the younger generation encourages them to remix, repurpose content and represent if differently. He asks whether this fair use, or piracy.
Lessig believes that it is the democratisation of creation. He finds that the older generation ‘watched’ TV and ‘listened’ to music, the younger generation ‘makes’ or ‘remixes’ TV and music. As this generation grows older, common sense needs to prevail and common licensing needs to be adopted.

We expect that ‘common sense’ will prevail and digital content will be better licensed and controlled. The impact on the media industry and digital content will be significant and may well start to redefine publishing as we know it today. It will also impact on creator royalties and reward structure.

6. Publishers

Will publisher size still matter in the new world and will the economies of scale and scope still dictate? Will there be 6 major publishing trade houses or 600?

Today’s big publishers are relative trainees in the wider media and technology markets. As media merges, publishers will increasingly be measured not by the size of yesterday’s market, but by the wider and much larger market.

This would automatically suggest that multi media conglomerates such as HarperCollins and Bertelsmann could succeed if they organised themselves appropriately. However, turning round a battleship in a storm may not be as easy as turning a dinghy.
We believe that the number of ‘publishers’ will explode with more authors choosing to self publish.

What will be the role of the publisher in the new world?
The market will always value selection, review, validation and aggregation but general trade genre such as fiction may be less interested in valuing quality and more about presentation.

Everyone could be a publisher but the skills now need to be cross media. We believe that tomorrow publishers will pool resources and skills such as technology and the size of the organisation will shrink dramatically. The publisher will become the packager, the agent, the sponsor, the producer, the ‘manager’.

What we envisage in the future is a move from the corporate to the passion and veracity of the past. It will be a new age of publishing, driven by those with the taste, passion and enthusiasm to spot and nurture talent and the conviction and belief to publish in a more ‘hands on’ and entrepreneurial manner.

They will know what will work digitally and what will work physically. They will be able to see the media opportunities and have the social and technical infrastructure to support them. They will not need the corporate support infrastructure of today. This shift will ensure we arrest the dumbing down of literature by the corporate and technology businesses of today.

Once again we find ourselves drawn the the words of Arthur C. Clarke, ‘In the short term, we tend to overestimate technology and in the long term, we tend to underestimate technology.’


To read the full revised Brave New World report online