DIIA Blog

Amid the panels and talks of what is hot now and what new social networking tools or techniques will help you get even more connected, there are a few panels tucked into the lineup that do nothing more than peer into the future and ask the audience to imagine just what sort of tech world will we be living in in the future. Craig Moorehead of Razorfish and David Polinchock of Brand Experience Lab presented on ubiquitous computing and the future of mobile technology. It had the group’s attention throughout their thoughtful presentation. The upshot of their talk is expect to see this… Screens as we know them will go away. Essentially, the world will become the computing interface. The network will get faster, more pervasive and ubiquitous. Eventually, things will be communicating with things, broadening the concept of the world wide web into a literal metaphor beyond what lives in cyberspace alone. RFID, wearable computers and non-dedicated devices that can shift their function based on the context you use them will emerge. The cloud will become well, even cloudier with more computing done on the network, in data centers and server farms. Such computing is the opposite of virtual reality and technologies like Second Life. What we will be dealing with is an augmented reality of the real world and space we literally inhabit.

But this promise of the future also holds lots of challenges, namely privacy, who controls information and who can access the information (is it only those with money?). These are thorny issues that go well beyond the technology into the realm of politics, morality and philosophy. Aside from these “little” concerns the promise of ubiquitous computing will be realized one way or another.

To get a glimpse of this today, consider these technologies that already exist in some form today: smart appliances such as refrigerators that know the expiration date of food, Sync from Microsoft that uses bluetooth to communicate with your car via smartphones and other devices, the appearance of “smart” stores such as RadioShack’s StoreOne here in Texas that offers a truly immersive technology shopping experience. Smart devices such as Tivo and Microsoft’s Surface, the former which can begin to see patterns in your TV habits and make suggestions, while Surface recognizes enable objects placed on its surface pulling and pushing data to them. The Bill Gates manison has unique ID badges for inhabitants and visitors that can recognize who you are among other things. And in Korea, developers are literally building from the ground up an entire city that will be have embedded, ubiquitous computing. It is called New Songdo. Be sure to ask your real estate agent… This will be a future that is coming and will be reality in some form. Who gets there first will have awesome power over information while those who lag behind may be playing catch up for a lifetime. There is a lot a stake here. It is exciting and also a bit scary. We humans are not so good at controlling ourselves when given lots of power. It seem clear that power over information will be the 21st centuries nuclear power offering promise and fear for its effects on society. What we need to ask ourselves over and over again with these technologies, is just because we can does not always mean we should. Meanwhile, I am going to RadioShack to get some batteries….

Tags: interactive, sxswi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Cloud Computing, mobile, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.