Recent conversations about completely unrelated technologies with my friend Alden had me coming back to the blog so I can share with you some of my visions of what I really expect the future to bring one day in terms of technology. Some of these ideas will seem far fetched, but hey, dreaming is free.
I’ll be writing about these visions in posts to come, some of them I think I could even be part of right now to start changing the lives of millions, others I know are completely out of my reach. VCs and Entrepreneurs start taking notes and steal the ideas.
The End of Computer and TV Screens
I want to live in a world where I don’t need a computer screen to use an operating system or watch tv or movies.
I want to live in a world where there’s no limit in screen resolution, where I’ll be only limited by the capacity of my brain to process images.
I think the solutions will be implemented somehow (we’re thinking very high level here) in the following stages:
The Visual Stream will be “projected” first onto my retina, it’ll be part of a pair of sun glasses, or glasses. In the same device there’s also a camera and microphone that exists to read my arms/hands gestures and to interpret voice commands.
Months later they’ll come up with smaller, better technology that can be embedded in contact lenses.
You could achieve this stages, at first using an external device for processing the data, namely your smartphone connects to the Retina Projector Wirelessly. As technology gets better (maybe truly powerful nano-computing happens) all the processing could be done in the the glasses or contact lenses themselves.
Years go by and then it happens the way it should. The user interface and video streams are projected directly into our Brain’s Visual Cortex, all input from you (arms, fingers, facial gestures and maybe even thoughts) is read directly from different sections of the brain.
The applications would be amazing, content could be delivered directly to us, no need for computers or even a workplace. This would kill huge part of the electronics industry and would create a replacing technological field (brain processing units -> BPUs) so we get a better experience year after year.
If you’re currently working with a computer in an office 24/7, you could be doing that laying by a pool with your eyes closed not moving an inch of your body, yet being extremely productive or entertained. How many times I’m extremely busy but I feel bad that I haven’t gone to the gym or for a walk to get a little workout, I wouldn’t have to hold my smartphone and read that tiny ass screen, I could be walking and reading news, a book, or watching tv in a translucent screen the size of the sky if I wanted to.
There is be no IMAX theater screen that can match the size of a screen that’s as big as your imagination.
Stay tuned for more tangible visions on Brain Computer Interaction, and ideas for Smartphone software that we could be building today (had I the resources to do so)