Saturday 11 February 2012

Past, present and future

It's been a while since I have posted, my muse seems to have abandoned me again - there has been lots going on (mainly good!) but I just have not been able to write about it for some reason...  But here is something a bit random that came into my head today...

This morning I was working out using the Kinect and Xbox when suddenly I realised that what I was doing would have been something from a SciFi movie just 20 years ago.

There was me working out, with a virtual instructor - being able to see myself and with the virtual instructor being able to tell me when I am doing something wrong.  I thought back to Sharon Stone getting instructions about her tennis swing in Total Recall (fine we don't have holograms just yet, but way more interaction!)

OK it's not perfect yet - the Kinect still has some lag and it doesn't always manage to get it right all of the time when trying to figure out if I am doing the routine correctly.  But still, I find it fairly impressive for something that is basically just a toy.

I was going to end with: What will we be doing in 20 years time?

But...  At present we seem to be starting a period of limited creativity.  Companies are spending too much time patenting idea's so that no one else can do the hard work of figuring out how to do something cool, or suing other companies for doing the same.  I have read more about Samsung, Motorola, Apple and HTC suing each other than I have about new products with new, amazing features.

Imagine just how impressive new technology could be if these companies concentrated on that rather than the lawyers!