There are currently some very cool technologies out there.
When I was young we had a computer without a hard drive. You put the OS disk in one drive (the big floppy disks) and the program disk in the other drive. The only way you had a colour screen was if it was green and black, or orange and black, instead of white and black. Colour monitors were cool. CD-Roms were even cooler. And I remember when we bought a second hard drive and it pushed us up to over 100 mb. And of course the move to four mb of ram from our previous two.
We got a modem and that was cool. I could play on the local BBS’s. Then came the Internet. I got my first e-mail address back when Hotmail was not owned by Microsoft. I learned about HTML and made some crappy web pages. Then I learned more and made better ones. Then I learned about CSS and XHTML and made even better ones. And finally I learned about WordPress and for the first time ever I started using an editor other than Notepad.
I now sit here in my room, writing on my laptop. My laptop which is more advanced than I could ever imagine when I was young.
But what is coming is the stuff of science fiction. Everyone’s heard of the Microsoft Surface by now if you haven’t click HERE. It will likely have very little use beyond casinos, but that’s not the important point. The important part is what they’re promising:
- a multi-touch screen that’s bigger than a handheld
- another commercial use for multi-touch technology
- fast and easy wireless connectivity
But there’s other up and coming technology that’s going to be important. Projected multi-touch is going to be very cool, along with the new multi-projectors. Imagine sitting down to a desk, and having a screen projected both onto the wall in front of you, and also onto the desk in front of you. You reach up and move things around the “screen” by touching it on your desk with your hand and dragging. Whatever you do on the “screen” on the desk happens on the “screen” on the wall. You open up a word processor and a keyboard appears on your desk but not on the wall.
In Japan laptop sales are being impacted by cellphones. Cellphones can be used as a web browser, for e-mail, for word processing, music, and who knows what’s next. There’s a new product nearly on the market, the cellphone projector. There are already ones with very few colours designed to be part of the cellphone, but there are also full colour projectors that are external, but are the same size as a phone. Perhaps in a few years having movies on a cell phone won’t seem like a useless undertaking.
Now imagine the multi-touch multi-projector I discussed earlier mixed with the cellphone projectors. Imagine taking out your cellphone, putting it on the desk and having your computer appear.
The future is coming, and it looks cool.