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, becomes boring and ceases to fascinate. The rabbit pulled out of the hat, even if it shoots HD video and prints a plastic carrot, turns into a regular rabbit and goes to dusty toys under the bed, where you probably had a pager, the first phone from Siemens and a stack of scratched CDs.

“ Modern smartphones are quickly becoming obsolete and no longer satisfying the owner? "The question is not only to manufacturers. If you tried to explain to a passer-by in 1914 that the average person would spend the whole day looking at portals of unlimited information in a hundred years, he probably would have presented 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 becoming a memorable focus.
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We decided to go into the reality of today and find things that can be safely attributed to the world of the future - futurorelict tumors. Habrachiteli because of age there is one or the other exception, technology, still giving a sense of presence in the world of the future. If you do not find it in the text, write in the comments.



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

In 2014, you can buy three top smartphones for $ 3,000, but not experience any emotions. Let's conduct a mental experiment. We want to tell you about one thing. The choice is a new smartphone or tape recorder “ Jupiter-203-stereo ”. Inquisitive, but relatively young consciousness will be interested in "Jupiter", because the entire functionality of a piece of plastic, stuffed with advanced technologies, goes out before the novelty of a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

With marred fingers all over the world fill new press releases, but we are not surprised by the clarity of the camera, the color rendition, the amount of internal memory. The iPhone of Steve Jobs, the “first gigahertz” in the phone, the emergence of the 4G network and a number of other events stirred up, but outside the meager list there is a space and time in which the world is no more difficult than the opener.

The future of the inhabitant of 2014 is associated with permanent manned space flights, genetic modifications, teleportation, robots, and so on. And now ... Let's take a look at the global technological trends and see why the evolution of hardwar evokes less and less emotions.

Video chat

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

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



The idea of ​​a video link has long celebrated its centenary. The picture shows a 500 View Phone, a Toshiba videophone model, 1968. And before that there were numerous mentions of videophones in the works of science fiction writers. Here's a video call from the movie “Metropolis” 1927 year of release:



The detailed history of videophones is set forth here http://habrahabr.ru/post/235981/ . All were ready for mass market introduction for a long time.

Carrier capacity

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



The history of memory cards began around 1989, and storage media much earlier. Now you can easily get tens of gigabytes for a hundred dollars. Thirty years ago, 15 megabytes would 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 with which the femtosecond laser, when recording information, changes the structure of quartz glass, allowing you to record 360 terabytes of data on a fragment of less than 10 cm in diameter. Data recorded in this way can be stored for an unlimited amount of time. After such news, any Blu-ray Disc will be as important to you as a piece of laundry soap.

Flat and thin

A thin TV, an even thinner smartphone, a wearable device as thick as a sheet of paper - this is where dreams lead to making everything smaller and lighter. The futurists began to predict flat-screen TVs in the 50s, when they themselves were still 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-panel TVs, but phones are getting out of their pockets more and more, losing weight and thickness.

In fact, flat (thin) - does not mean the best. Manufacturers begin experiments with the curved shape of the devices, and the natural barrier associated with the ease of use of ultrathin 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 easy to conveniently or remove the gadget out of sight, leaving only the output of information directly to the retina.

Tablets and computers

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



1440p screen on the smartphone pleases, but not impressive. Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, Advanced Film Device and Sharp have already demonstrated a prototype of a 13.3-inch display with a resolution of 8K. Sharp also showed an 85-inch 8K standard display capable of displaying a three-dimensional image that does not require special glasses to view. The price issue is acute, but experience suggests that such technologies are becoming more affordable for the average consumer.

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 appearance of the future, impressive not only for your fathers and mothers. Just imagine, in the world there exists and applies the technology of using glass microspheres, labeled with yttrium-90 for the treatment of liver cancer; IBM Watson supercomputer has learned how to create its own recipes; the Voyager 1 spacecraft flew 11 billion kilometers away from the Earth ... Each such news is pure children's delight and awareness that we live in a truly amazing time of the future. Do you agree?

Prepared based on http://gizmodo.com/what-current-technology-still-feels-futuristic-to-you-1618809965 .