Is it possible for an empire to stupid itself to death?
Unbefuckinglievable. Still, there it is. The touch-screen interface is much nicer and more together looking than the 1980s style version that the real “Iraqi Freedom Fighters” use, safe in their offices in Nevada.
It’d be like shooting thunderbolts out of your fingers. Everything’s a simulation. Nothing is real.
WAAI – Waving Arms About Interface, as popularized by Minority Report with Tom Cruise (who is a bit ferrety if you ask me) was taken to a whole new level before Minority Report even came out by this little gem from Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas (who’s also fairly annoying).
Someone has <airquotes>imagineered</airquotes> the most hasslesome file-retrieval system in the (reasonable) universe – where you don’t only have to wave your arms around, you actually have to walk about, just like you’d have to do if computers weren’t actually invented and everything was still on bits of paper, and you were a filing clerk from the 70s.
There should be a word for this – Morphological-Mud-Stickery… where the design of a new system is based upon the design of the system it replaced… like designing a vacuum cleaner so it looks a bit like a broom… or a horseless carriage, so it looks like a horseless carriage.
WAAI will be good for games (in fact it already is). Wandering about inside a virtual environment will be great for games. Anything else? Forget it. Pain in the arse.
From Opera etc, who are one of my browsers of choice. They’re the Ferrari of browsers.
Face gestures are a variant on the WAAI (waving arms around interface) as popularised by Minority Report, with Tom Cruise in it, who is a bit of a ferret-face.
I wonder if you could use this for some sort of sex thing. I wonder what would happen if you sneezed. I expect it would have a conniption. So many things could go wrong. What if you yawned etc? Would your entire computer go into hibernation mode? Our faces are (on occasion) a bit ungovernable. I know mine is. I wonder what it would make of the cat.
Which is actually pretty neat in some respects, though I expect it will make you look even more of a dickhead than someone with one of those bluetooth headsets where they wander along talking to themselves.
This won’t be it though – augmented reality will either happen with sunglasses or contact lenses or… (don’t laugh) direct brain interfaces… we’re making our first steps in that direction.
And I don’t think that the driver for augmented reality will be as a shopping aid – it will be as a tourism aid, and it will probably push tourism into places where tourism possibly ought not go. If you can rig a system where someone’s sensory input is beamed up to the web (and to a limited degree, we can do that now) then you can have someone vicariously seeing through someone else’s eyes. It’s not entirely impossible that this will create an entirely new genre of sex (or violence) tourism.
Right now though… there are all these places in the world that I miss… and though I can now find photos on the web… sometimes web-cams, it would be so much better to have something like this
and actually feel the breeze and smell the… err… smells… etc.
I’m guessing that at some point you’ll be able to hire tour-guides who will show you round without you having to get out of your chair. They put on a pair of glasses, you put on a pair of glasses, you pay them via SMS and you get to be a kid in the slums of Rio for a day. You get to see your favourite band, you get to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel… you could have a 747 where everyone feels like they’re flying the plane.
You could swap glasses with your girlfriend. It could get well weird actually.
So obviously the other thing that I find really irritating about Minority Report is the way that everyone else seems to love the Waving Arms About Interface (Waai) that they use at the police station.
I don’t want to wave my arms about. If you don’t have to stand, sit, if you don’t have to sit, go and have a nice lie down. My trackpad allows corner to corner movement of the mouse with the most minuscule of muscular movements of a single finger. It’s almost thought control. That’s what I want.
So anyway, here are some videos from the future… the first from the same people that brought you, IE6, Vista, The Blue Screen of Death and that fucking talking paperclip thing… a web 2.0 version of a spotless Gattica-like utopia. Nobody has fingerprints.
(from where there are more of them, once this one’s finished etc)
Everything’s a smart-surface. The whole world is one massive curvy-cornered flash interface.
The there’s this, which is tres charmant etc – and they do at least have the honesty to insert a blue-wall-of-death, albeit in the shape of a badly rendered building.
Which has a bloke designing a European Olde-Towne using a rather impressive Waai that someone commented looks a bit like Google’s Sketchup… pretty impressive if it can do that.
All of this was at least partly inspired by this 1993 predictive video from Sun Microsystems which also uses Waai s quite a lot.
Which as Joel Johnson points out, is a far more accurate prediction predictor than any sort of actual reality predictor.
1993 was a long time ago. I didn’t see my first email until 1994. Everyone was using Mosaic browsers… and unless I’m very much mistaken, Auckland University where I worked, used to download and locally cache the entire Internet. Something like that anyway.
