Your Future, Today
To keep up with the phenomenal rate of technological innovation, you must be hip to what’s coming tomorrow.
By Ryan Singel
At one time, predicting the future of technology was a game best left to imaginative children and sci-fi authors and thought leaders such as Philip K. Dick (Minority Report) and Vernor Vinge (father of the term “singularity”). But these days innovation happens so quickly it’s not hard to see the big stories of the next few years bubbling up in today’s start-ups and product demos.
We’ll have new ways to get at the data that we need or the data will find us. The separation between the physical and online worlds will get thinner and at times disappear. Meanwhile, we’ll be left to figure out how much we really want to contribute to that global data stream—and live with the consequences. It’ll be fast, overwhelming, confusing and, one hopes, a lot of fun.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) is a fancy term for technology that is like the Terminator’s vision, it puts new layers on reality—a blending of dimensions. Try this on for size. Point your smartphone’s camera down the street in San Francisco in search of a caffeine fix, and on the screen you’ll see not only the live reality before you, but also pop-up bubbles indicating that the best Italian-style cappuccino in the neighborhood is at Caffe Trieste. Click on the “W” in the corner of the screen and Wikipedia informs you that Jack Kerouac used to hang out there and that Frances Ford Coppola penned The Godfather inside.
Then you launch a facial recognition app that provides a detailed list of current café occupants. You notice a fellow in the corner buried in an old-fashioned paper copy of The New Yorker, and the app reveals that he works for a company you’re about to land as a client—a slight but important intellectual advantage for that meeting next week.
The ability to overlay a filter on a map isn’t new, but when that filter is incredibly sharp and constantly updated it becomes incredibly powerful. Right now the best map is created by earthmine, whose cars drive around the world’s major cities snapping photos of streets, homes and alleys—all in 3-D. The depth perception lets the company assign each pixel a three-dimensional location.
What that means in practice is that an earthmine-powered smartphone app can align its overlay exactly with the real world, placing labels and objects in exactly the right place. (With GPS, the best you can expect in a city canyon is somewhere within 50 to 100 meters.)
“That [quality] creates a seamless relationship between what is in the field and what is in a database,” earthmine co-founder John Ristevski said.
For those new to AR, Ristevski recommends Junaio (available via smartphone app and standard computer), which lets users place 3-D objects into the AR world for the value or amusement of other users. Users of these types of apps literally experience a different, previously unknown, vision of reality.
Hobbyists have even fashioned virtual reality goggles from smartphones with such location intelligence and AR capable of transporting a user’s vision to much of the world. With these goggles, you can walk the streets of Paris turn by turn—just beware, without walking in something akin to a human-sized hamster ball, the virtual sidewalk upon which you chose to stroll may be interrupted by a wall or moving vehicle in the non-augmented world. But this is all just the beginning: Specialized digital mapping of event venues will one day free virtual event attendees from the confines of their office chairs and computers and provide immersive, mobile experiences.
As for AR picking out and naming people in a live camera view, that technology already exists in rough form. Companies such as Google are leaving it out of their early AR offerings, such as Google Goggles (snap a photo and the app identifies the subject), for privacy reasons.
Consider the more in-depth applications of AR and the future of a developing reality.
At Columbia University, in the lab of AR pioneer Professor Steven Feiner, Maj. Steve Henderson is creating a system that helps frontline soldiers make guided repairs to armored vehicles, rather than sending them to the rear for repair.
Soldiers with mechanical abilities strap the Android-based Droid smartphone to their forearms and put on special goggles that replace their normal eyesight with enhanced camera views that are sent over WiFi from a nearby laptop. The video projection in the goggles guides the soldier, illuminating which nut to loosen and even imposing a fake wrench in the vision to illustrate the operation. The Droid acts as a remote control for the system.
AR could also be used to create training modules and to keep people from skipping steps in routine but critical tasks such as airplane maintenance.
“We think the power is in the training potential,” Henderson said.
He imagines AR-driven training “videos” that gradually remove the instructions from an overlay as a student progresses.
Training via AR at your next event? Perhaps, but now your event has gone hybrid at the very least, if not altogether virtual.
Very Social Media
If you think Facebook reveals too much public information, you’re in for a surprise.
You’re all LinkedIn, with a humming presence on Facebook, and you’ve grown comfortable knowing that a large chunk of the world can find you and judge you online, if it so desires. Perhaps you’re even on Twitter, which takes sharing to another level—turning 140-character messages into notes for the eyes of the entire world.
That’s led to the explosion of location reporting tools such as Loopt and foursquare, a location-based service in which you “check-in,” usually with a message, when you go somewhere, allowing friends to find you—and ooze jealousy as you take on the title of “mayor” for a spot where you frequently check in. Who will be the mayor of your next trade show booth/display?
Now comes Blippy, a service that lets you designate a credit card as your “public” card. So instead of typing out your activities, your purchases are automatically broadcast, be they opening night movie tickets or hotel charges. The service, which opened to the public in late January, is backed by an A-list of venture capital, including Charles River Ventures, Sequoia Capital and king of Web 2.0 investors Ron Conway.
Co-founder Philip Kaplan says the world is now truly realizing the power of self-publishing services like Twitter. That micro-blogging system hit its tipping point at the 2007 SXSW tech and music conference in Austin, Texas, and now “Twitter runs the conference,” according to Kaplan. (See “A Virtual Mess” in the August 2008 issue of One+ to learn more about this infamous event that forever changed event-attendee dynamics.)
So, what of these auto-publish tools? Enthralled by the possibilities, Kaplan wonders if companies will take note of this newly available data stream and apply it to better compete for business. He was just in Phoenix for a business meeting, and got messages from locals who saw his Blippy purchases at area stores and asked to meet up.
“They know what movies I watch and what music I’ve been buying,” Kaplan said. “It prevents awkward conversation and it turns a cold lead into a warm lead.”
Think of Blippy as just the start of another revolution in self-publishing. The oft-confounding question of how to monetize these tools is suddenly becoming clearer.
Like it or not, it’s increasingly necessary to constantly market yourself and your company. It might seem like all too much noise, but that’s where the conversation and the business is found. It’s easy to dismiss the idea that you need to broadcast the fact that you’re stuck in the airport with a half-hour delay—which seems like unseemly self-aggrandization—but a new contract, job or even spouse may be just a “check-in” or Blippy purchase away.
For those unsure, there’s also middle ground, where self-publishing isn’t about a world audience—it can be your digital scale reporting your weight to Google Health, which passes it along to your doctor, or Blippy passing along trip purchases to your assistant to streamline expense reporting, or feed a micromanaging boss, client or CFO.
New Interfaces and Gestures
Computers used to have a cord that led to a device called a mouse that was best used on a specialized piece of plastic called a mouse pad. There have been many variations of the mouse, but the real trick is transforming the user’s hand into a mouse, or whole body into a remote control.
Our devices are already beginning to train us. We now know the pinch, the swipe and the scroll. So when do we get to start e-mailing photos to friends with the sweep of an arm, trash e-mails with a dismissive flick of the wrist or sift through data by twisting our hands—Minority Report-style?
Well, we’ll likely start late this year with Microsoft’s Natal, a 3-D camera for the Xbox 360 that uses your body as the game controller—a significant step beyond controls on the Wii gaming system. Want to kick the ball into the goal? Pull your leg back and swing. Microsoft promises Natal late this year, but it has yet to announce a delivery date for its research into bands on your forearms that turn muscle movements into commands.
The iPad, Mac’s newly announced tablet computer, will also teach us a new array of motions when it’s released this month. The designer who helped create the Hollywood special-effects-only interface in the Minority Report film is working to make it real—gloves and all. And in Germany, researchers have created the iPoint 3D, which uses cameras to determine your spatial position in the air.
Currently, you can use the iPoint to play pong with your bare hands in space, but you may eventually be using it to find sales leads from gigabytes of Twitter posts and other social media data or guiding a multimedia conference presentation.
Automated Information Sifters
As we move into the era of the real-time Web in which news moves in seconds and minutes—and everyone is just one Tweet from being out of the loop—it’s becoming harder to find the information you need amid the chatter.
Just ask Anand Rajaraman, who co-founded Kosmix, a search engine that focuses on presenting and classifying results.
“Today, not only is data volume going through another order of magnitude increase, driven by social media and user-generated content, this new data is also arriving at unprecedented, real-time rates,” Rajaraman said. “We very definitely need new ways of filtering the data deluge in the social Web.”
Consider the revolutionary data-mining work pioneered by IBM’s Dr. Ching-Yung Lin. (See “Social Currency” in the January 2010 issue of One+.) His massive SmallBlue project has the challenge of finding specific, relevant information from within its social network dataset—the largest publicly known to exist.
This is a longstanding problem. Google has tried to figure it out with its algorithmic-powered news site. RSS feeds became too overwhelming to handle, so readers turned to user-voting sites such as Digg and Reddit to find top stories. Many now just use their friends on Twitter and Facebook to tell them what to read—turning those acquaintances into personal front-page editors.
Techmeme is one of the most successful of such sites to date, billing itself as Page A1 of the tech press. But it’s bolstered its algorithms with an editorial staff that relies on tips submitted via Twitter to make sure it gets hot stories fast. Then there’s the upstart TwitterTim.es, which makes a personalized “online newspaper” of the hottest stories—based on the recommendations of the people you follow. And since Twitter feeds are public, you can subscribe to the TwitterTim.es editions of other Twitter users—such as competitors and your boss.
Rajaraman says that’s a good step.
“We need to move beyond 10 blue links to categorizing and organizing results to make them easy to explore,” he said. “And to deal with real-time, we need to move from a pull model where users search data to a push model where the right data finds the interested user.”
There are other attempts out there as well, such as iCurrent and Rajamaran’s MeeHive. Each of these feeds you stories it thinks you should read based on your self-identified interests—and then fine-tunes by studying what you read on the site.
None has yet cracked the code of always getting you the full panolopy of information you need, but they are getting better and are definitely at the point of being too useful to ignore. Until one hits the magic formula, combine a few of them and you’ve got a way to keep a grip, if only a precarious one, on the zeitgeist. One+
RYAN SINGEL is San Francisco-based tech writer and frequent contributor to Wired News.