The Illusion of Impressions: Symbols of the Future

High technologies at a certain stage of development become indistinguishable from magic, but the magic trick, repeated several times, palls and ceases to fascinate. A rabbit pulled out of a hat, even if it shoots HD video and prints carrots made of plastic, turns into a regular rabbit and goes to dusty toys under the bed, where you probably have a messenger, the first Siemens phone and a pile of scratched CDs.

“ Do modern smartphones become outdated very quickly and cease to satisfy the owner?”»A question not only for manufacturers. If you tried to explain to a passerby in 1914 that in a hundred years the average person would spend all day looking at the portals of unlimited information, he would probably have imagined something much more exciting than the news site and Gmail. Rows of spreadsheets and letters appearing on a bright display are not the most effective trick to become a memorable focus.

We decided to go into the reality of today and find things that can safely be reckoned with the world of the future - futurorelic neoplasms. Owing to age, habrachitniki will have one or the other exception, a technology that still gives a feeling of being in the world of the future. If you do not find it in the text, write in the comments.



John Hollingworth gives an entertaining comparison. In 1991, you could spend more than $ 3,000 in an American electronics store for the following items: AM / FM clock radio, headphones, calculator, VHS camcorder, mobile phone, portable CD player, and so on . The smartphone began to perform all these functions, which led people to complete delight.

In 2014, you can buy three top-end smartphones for $ 3,000, but not experience any emotion. Let's do a thought experiment. We want to tell you about one thing. You can choose a new smartphone or tape recorder Jupiter-203-stereo". An inquisitive, but relatively young consciousness will be of interest to Jupiter, since all the functionality of a piece of plastic, stuffed with advanced technology, goes out before the novelty of the reel tape recorder.

Marketers all over the world are stuffing their fingers with blood with new press releases, but we are not surprised by the clarity of the camera, color reproduction, and the amount of internal memory. Steve Jobs’s iPhone, the “first gigahertz” in the phone, the appearance of the 4G network and a number of other events were exciting, but outside the meager list is space and time in which the world is no more complicated than an opener.

The resident of 2014 is associated with constant manned space flights, genetic modifications, teleportation, robots, and so on. And now ... Let's look at world technological trends and see why the evolution of hardwar evokes less and less emotion.

Video calling

Using Skype, FaceTime, GoToMeeting or any other service for video communication, you should feel like a sci-fi movie hero. Webcams installed around the world, cameras on smartphones, tablets and laptops allow you to chat with hundreds of people around the world as if they are in the same room with you.

You wanted a butler robot, but you got the technology that forced you to walk around the apartment in clothes? The future sucks.



The idea of ​​video communication has long celebrated its centenary. In the picture there is a 500 View Phone model of a videophone from Toshiba, 1968. And before that there were numerous references to videophones in the works of science fiction writers. Here is a video call from the movie “Metropolis” from 1927 onwards:



A detailed history of videophones is described here http://habrahabr.ru/post/235981/ . Everyone was ready for mass introduction on the market for a long time.

Media capacity

A small piece of plastic holds more books than you can read in your life. Such information is not ashamed to share with a person from the past.



The history of memory cards began around 1989, and information storage devices are much earlier. Now you can easily get tens of gigabytes for a hundred dollars. Thirty years ago, 15 megabytes would have cost you two and a half thousand dollars.

However, even this memory card is not surprising. Specialists from the Netherlands and England have developed a technology by which a femtosecond laser changes the structure of quartz glass when recording information, allowing you to record 360 terabytes of data on a fragment with a diameter of less than 10 cm. Data recorded in this way can be stored for an unlimited amount of time. After such news, any Blu-ray Disc will become for you as significant as a piece of laundry soap.

Flat and thin

A thin TV, an even thinner smartphone, a wearable device the thickness of a sheet of paper - this is where dreams lead to making everything more compact and easier. Futurists began to predict flat-screen TVs in the 50s, when they themselves were watching the news on 12-inch black and white screens. In the same years, the first concepts of handheld portable phones appeared. Now we finally have flat-screen TVs, but the phones are more and more coming out of our pockets, losing all the same in weight and thickness.

Actually flat (thin) - does not mean the best. Manufacturers begin experiments with the curved shape of the devices, and the natural barrier associated with the convenience of using ultra-thin and ultra-light devices leads to the creation of new form factors. In some cases, it turns out that a thin smartphone, devoid of a normal battery, causes only irritation. It turns out that thinner is no longer needed. Make it just convenient or take the gadget out of sight, leaving only the output of information directly to the retina.

Tablets and computers

Just imagine: holding a sheet of magic glass in your hand, functioning like a computer, created from various chemical elements, and opening up access to information from around the world - this is amazing. Although whom we are deceiving. People don’t think about things like children don’t think about the fate of plush animals made by Chinese workers for food (Michael Wolf: “The Real Toy Story”). And ... why do we need so many tablets? Where are flying cars or at least a board on which you can soar above the ground?



The 1440p screen on the smartphone is pleasing, but not impressive. Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, Advanced Film Device and Sharp have already demonstrated a prototype 13.3-inch display with 8K resolution. Sharp also showed a 85-inch 8K display capable of displaying a three-dimensional image, which does not require special glasses to view. The issue of price is acute, but experience suggests that such technologies become more accessible to the ordinary consumer every year.

Future in the past

We can be reproached with a pessimistic view of the world. Indeed, there is Google Now or a 3D printer - this is the face of the future, impressive not only for your fathers and mothers. Just imagine, in the world there is a technology for using glass microspheres labeled with yttrium-90 for the treatment of liver cancer; IBM Watson supercomputer learned how to create its own recipes; the Voyager 1 spacecraft flew 11 billion kilometers from Earth ... Each such news is pure childish delight and the realization that we live in a truly amazing time of the future. Do you agree?

Prepared from the materials http://gizmodo.com/what-current-technology-still-feels-futuristic-to-you-1618809965 .