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The future. Do we want to live in it?


Ssnake

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Just think about it,

in thirty years time when gamers will be sitting in there holographic machines there be laughing at what we know consider cutting edge Graphics. LoL.

 

I'm not entirely convinced about that, to be honest. From when I started with personal computing in the Spectrum ZX age until about now it's all been about increasing colors (from black and white -> 4 colors, then 16, 128, 256, ... 16M, now HDR and extended RGB); it was about increasing resolution (from 160x240 > 640x48 > 1920x1080, now 4K, and growing), improving sounds (we kinda reached high fidelity standards a while ago), and polycount. Now, granted, there's Oculus. I'm just not convinced that VR helmets really are the wave of the future simply because of the lack of convenience. I'm not sure how much room there is for further miniaturization while improving tracking quality and reducing latencies. First and foremost however it's a bad idea to isolate the player from his surroundings; you occasionally want to grab your glass of cola (or other carbonated sugar water) --- which is a terrible, terrible idea to do in the presence of pricey electronics while you are effectively blind and disoriented.

 

What we'd really need are autostereoscopic monitors. Possible, I've seen them 30 years ago on a computer fair already, but they are rather costly to produce and, by necessity, cut the horizontal resolution in half. Also you need to keep your head level. So we'd really need a true 3D image projection, but the prototypes that were demonstrated so far (laser projection into aerosolic cloud, laser projection on fast rotating worm gear) do not promise the large, brilliant, high resolution screens to which we have become accustomed; unless some breakthrough comes along I expect nothing but economic failure. You don't only need a technology that can do something new, it also needs to be leaps and bounds better to justify the investment on the consumer side (which is why PhysX largely failed).

 

Looking at the graphics since DirectX 9 came along, the looks of top of the line game titles used to be massive improvements over titles two years older up until about 2005. Over the last ten years the noticeable growth in visual quality has slowed down to ever smaller improvements. I mean improvements that are clearly recognizable by an ignorant layman. Looking at Deus Ex Human Revolution from five years ago, it's still looking reasonably good except that the locations are relatively small - and the plastic faces straight from the uncanny valley. So, I'm not sure if we should expect massive improvements in the visual field. Richer worlds, bigger worlds, all right. But if you just look at a low-end Windows 95 PC from the mid 90s with its tiny 14" monitor and basic soundblaster card - in essence, it's all there what we're still using today. If the concept has held up well for 20 years (or even 30 years, if we go back to the original Apple computers (and their cheaper Atari rip-offs)), chances are that the concept will still be valid in 2035 ... even if we may all have hybrid tablets/mobile devices with some sort of a desk interface/docking station for "real work" by then.

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4 hours ago, Ssnake said:

First and foremost however it's a bad idea to isolate the player from his surroundings; you occasionally want to grab your glass of cola (or other carbonated sugar water) --- which is a terrible, terrible idea to do in the presence of pricey electronics while you are effectively blind and disoriented.

 

283858439_8e1ff9159a31.jpg

 

4 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 

What we'd really need are autostereoscopic monitors. Possible, I've seen them 30 years ago on a computer fair already, but they are rather costly to produce and, by necessity, cut the horizontal resolution in half. Also you need to keep your head level. So we'd really need a true 3D image projection, but the prototypes that were demonstrated so far (laser projection into aerosolic cloud, laser projection on fast rotating worm gear) do not promise the large, brilliant, high resolution screens to which we have become accustomed; unless some breakthrough comes along I expect nothing but economic failure. You don't only need a technology that can do something new, it also needs to be leaps and bounds better to justify the investment on the consumer side (which is why PhysX largely failed).

 

Anybody remember this?

 

fqndgtz.jpg

 

I remember when I first saw it in the local arcade. I was amazed. I thought for sure this would be the future of gaming. I always died within about 30 seconds, though. :(

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It was released in 1991. I think it was only in my local arcade for a year or two, though.

 

It was a lot like Dragon's Lair (both games were designed by the same guy) in the sense that you only controlled the action at certain times with just a button press or a flick of the joystick. The graphics were pre-recorded video scenes. The game picked which scene to playback based on whether or not you hit the right button at the right time.

 

But, the simulated "holograms" looked amazing (to me, anyway) at the time.

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Pure speculation on my part but I think holographic games will be the future.

there's a few start ups out there already the pic below is a demo concept from one its a holographic table .

Looks like it would last about a day in my house. LoL

 

 

 

holocube-hc40-40-inch-holographic-display-5-600x404.jpg

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One piece of new gaming technology I thought would revolutionise gaming was the

Xbox kenict it had a host of uses voice commands motion sensor.

 But failed to take off I think Microsoft have dropped it due to poor sales

 I only used it a few times playing just dance with my kids. Lol

But it seemed to work  well  

Edited by Marko
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9 hours ago, Marko said:

Pure speculation on my part but I think holographic games will be the future.

there's a few start ups out there already the pic below is a demo concept from one its a holographic table .

 

Well, the question really is, what "killer advantage" does a holographic display offer over a flat display?

You could walk around the image and look at it from different angles. In how many games will that actually be seen as an advantage?

Certainly none that are best enjoyed from the comfy couch.

A flat sceen takes up very little space. A holographic table, by necessity, would require a comparatively huge volume in your living room. That is a very serious disadvantage, even if you could watch normal TV with it.

 

It's like the video phone. Everybody saw it in "2001" in the late 1960s and thought it would be the next big thing ten years later. Except that nobody was willing to pay for such a gadget. There's still some demand for it (video chat in Skype comes to mind), but it really doesn't offer a "killer advantage" that would everybody want it so much that it would eliminate "non-picture" phone calls. Again, video chats also have their disadvantages (taking a phone call at five in the morning, the endless potential for mooning prank calls, ...)

 

There are tons of ideas and concepts that sound cool until you really start thinking about them. Like jetpacks and flying cars. They sound like an awesome concept until you think about redundancies (none in a jetpack), efficiency (none at all in either concept), or what it means if not only you have a flying car but everybody (flight security without automation, pre-flight checks before take-off, what velocities are required, what about collision avoidance, traffic control, ...)

 

 

So, if the majority of people doesn't move around while watching a holographic display, a holo display offers zero comparative advantage over a flat screen but takes up more space, so it's a net negative. Which is why I am skeptical that it will become a big thing. I won't debate that it may be technically feasible, but I can immediately see a number of disadvantages and no clear advantage that would matter in daily life.

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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

 

Well, the question really is, what "killer advantage" does a holographic display offer over a flat display?

You could walk around the image and look at it from different angles. In how many games will that actually be seen as an advantage?

Certainly none that are best enjoyed from the comfy couch.

A flat sceen takes up very little space. A holographic table, by necessity, would require a comparatively huge volume in your living room. That is a very serious disadvantage, even if you could watch normal TV with it.

 

It's like the video phone. Everybody saw it in "2001" in the late 1960s and thought it would be the next big thing ten years later. Except that nobody was willing to pay for such a gadget. There's still some demand for it (video chat in Skype comes to mind), but it really doesn't offer a "killer advantage" that would everybody want it so much that it would eliminate "non-picture" phone calls. Again, video chats also have their disadvantages (taking a phone call at five in the morning, the endless potential for mooning prank calls, ...)

 

There are tons of ideas and concepts that sound cool until you really start thinking about them. Like jetpacks and flying cars. They sound like an awesome concept until you think about redundancies (none in a jetpack), efficiency (none at all in either concept), or what it means if not only you have a flying car but everybody (flight security without automation, pre-flight checks before take-off, what velocities are required, what about collision avoidance, traffic control, ...)

 

 

So, if the majority of people doesn't move around while watching a holographic display, a holo display offers zero comparative advantage over a flat screen but takes up more space, so it's a net negative. Which is why I am skeptical that it will become a big thing. I won't debate that it may be technically feasible, but I can immediately see a number of disadvantages and no clear advantage that would matter in daily life.

You may well have a point Ssnake.

As an example.

I thought 3D TV,s were going to be the next big thing when they were first released despite all the hype and money the manufactures and vested interests Spent on promoting them.

I don't think they have been as nearly successful as I first thought 3D TV would be.

Not sure though I haven't checked the sales figures but it would seem they have failed to ignite peoples imaginations.

I know a few guys who own them they seem to rarely use its 3D capabilities.

May be 3D TV games may start to appear who knows. 

I think the glasses were a major turn off, If I were to have a 3D TV  in my home. I would need seven pairs of glasses for a start.

The unit I seriously considered purchasing came with two pairs. Five more pairs would have cost a couple of hundred euro and that was for cheap ones

I also noticed the SKY 3D movie channel was showing a very limited supply of new releases.

 As far as I know there's no dedicated channel showing a wide range of TV programs.

So I thought if I really wanted to see a 3d movie that badly I would go to the movies to see so i scrapped the idea of buying 3D TV.

I used to follow new home entertainment Kit with great interest at one time used to buy the magazines etc.

 T3 was a good one. IMO there hasn't been a really big innovation in the home entertainment for a very long time.

It will be interesting to see what the boffins  come up with  for the next big thing.

But maybe the younger generation will accept 3D glasses and helmet displays who knows my kids seem to spend all there on there phones /IPods

They even seem to prefer them to my home entrainment devices.

PS. forgot to mention 4K something Intend to look in to next year.

 

Edited by Marko
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I had a 3D TV, more or less by accident, and I used the 3D option once, for the first 20 minutes of Avatar. Granted, I'm somewhat of a gizmo skeptic and therefore harder to win over than your average technophile, neomanic gizmo guru. But aside from the need for shutter glasses (which is stupid if you're wearing glasses already), I had to sit literally just two dozen inches away from the TV set (not the largest, but at 47" not exactly small either) to really appreciate the 3D effect. At which point I'm breaking the hypnosis and say to myself, WTF do you on the floor here, as if you were a six year-old kid again? This is the future of TV? No way!

For 3D to really work, it needs to fill your field of view. That means a wall sized TV. With OLED tapestry that might work out, one day, but then you can't put anything in front of the wall. Like a book shelf. Whenever the thing isn't turned "on" you have a naked, black wall there. Ask your significant other what they think of having the large wall in your living room painted solid black.

 

So the alternative would be to have it always on, maybe showing a static picture or a slide show. Maybe people will accept that. Who knows. But then we're still talking about the extension of the current trend for larger flat screens with an ever increasing resolution, not a fundamentally new display technology. Also, if that happens, I foresee that industry will make it affordable by bombarding our homes with more advertising, this time in wall size. Just great.

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The wave of the future simply plugs experiences into the mind. Robotic limbs have already been demonstrated-the user subconsciously 'thinks' (and I use the term loosely, the user thinks no more than I think about moving my natural body, and it does), and the robotic extremities work.

 

The move already is underway and has been underway- replace humans in the workforce, or automate what were once human tasks- computers, machines, robots; in time they will probably just merge if humans will have any place at all.

 

Dystopian? Perhaps.

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I'm not a visionary, and I would have been skeptical of something like that idea about ten years ago. The public and I have generally not kept up with what's going in neuro science, perhaps people's gaze are up at the stars and tend to be more in tune to the idea of inter stellar space travel and this sort of thing. Sure. But the things going on recently in our understanding of the brain is profound because it really explains our species as nothing special but a more complex evolution of more primitive, antecedent organisms. It really is starting to look like and turns out that the wetware is just a computer, and it may just be a matter of time before its mechanisms are mapped out to the point where thoughts or experiences can be artificially inserted like Total Recall. Already the mind can interact with machines to make them work, I don't see it anymore as impossible. I don't say it's a good thing per se, but may be inevitable nevertheless.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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FMRI

 

http://fmri.ucsd.edu/Research/whatisfmri.html

 

Machines apparently now have the ability to actually reconstruct images of what a human subject is looking at- for instance, a human subject looks at a picture of a car parked next to a tree, and the technology is sophisticated enough to reconstruct an image very close  of what the human is looking at. This is a radical step to develop in our species, and it's already been underway for years.

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7 hours ago, Captain_Colossus said:

I'm not a visionary, and I would have been skeptical of something like that idea about ten years ago.

I'm not so much skeptical about the feasibility of it. Too many examples suggest that there is, indeed, the very real possibility of a direct machine-to-nerve interface. I'm skeptical about what happens once that the technology is no longer applied to prothetics, and the commercial world takes over. Commerce has largely ruined the internet. Of course, it could grow to its current size only because there was commercial interest behind the internet. Connecting commercially developed software, for example, to the human brain is IMO a terrible idea because it opens the door to all kinds of direct manipulation of our information processing. If there was an interface to inject images into your natural sight, then how do you know that what you're seeing (or NOT seeing) is real?

You could, literally, no longer trust your own eyes.

 

The idea of Cyborgs sounds cool as long as we think about how technology makes us faster, stronger, better. In theory the internet makes us smarter. The reality is that Facebook filter bubbles make us dumber. The reality is that a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping the population dumb and uncritical (didn't I just read an email to Mr. Podesta that the efforts to keep the American population uninformed were highly successful, it's just that the dumb masses refuse to be docile?). Corporations want people to spend their money on their product. The whole web is based on advertisement-driven economy. Consider the irony that the only places on the web that are free of any kind of banner ads are corporate websites (like this one), and only because the companies don't want competing advertisement.

Now, imagine a world where you have ad-sponsored visual augmentation. EyeSight 2.0, this week brought to you by McDonald's, You're Loving It!

Would you get a golden arches overlay over what you see? Would they blend out all logos of competing fast food joints? Oh, and then it turns out that the AdInjector API of your cyber eyes has a critical vulnerability to a certain kind of malware attack where bzzzt... Do you want to see again? Pay $200 to Western Union account xxx... etc.

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I'm glad the Google Glass technology was more or less rebuffed- for now. It may take a generation or two where people who never knew life without mobile technology and social media of some kind will have no frame of reference without it and will feel awkward without interfacing with technology to the delight of advertisers- after all, not being plugged in 24/7 is time and money wasted not monetizing ad links and so forth.

 

As to the topic header, no, I don't see any of this actually making people happier, it doesn't. It makes them more dependent. Furthermore, my friends who have kids say that kids can't really go off and play on their own and meet other kids without a piece of technology between them, they get anxiety without it. Like any habit, the brain wires itself to become addicted to it and simply feels life is missing something if it's taken away again, not that they are necessarily happier that they have it.

 

For my part I try and participate as little as a I can, but as they said in No Country For Old Men: "You can't stop what's coming."

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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 "You can't stop what's coming."

Well if we don't buy it, the business will not produce for long and loose the cash. So don't buy whats coming if its not in our best interest..

 

And if we take this a bit further, and this is not really a well hidden secret, the arms industry-has to have conflict the sell there wares, they have been found to be supporting the business interest.

 

We can control the future, but we need to wein our selves off the TV, sports, reality shows, and start looking at what our elective representatives are reallying doing. Most can tell you the latest sports scores, however can't tell what bill was passed in their government in the last month, keep the masses dumb down, it's time to take our future back. :)

 

AS always , opinion may vary.

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If you look back at the Romantic period in Europe and America, it was a reaction against modernity: people saw the rise of factories and the cities and the disconnect the Industrial Revolution had brought- uprooting longstanding cultural traditions, separating people from their communities, from nature and from their identities. Just as an example, the poem by Wordsworth: The World is Too Much With Us. Yet you see what what happens, there's no stopping it, it keeps coming, and generally it's the same kind of thing.

 

The way the disruption is brought makes it all but inevitable, and life itself may be inevitable in its progression, perhaps not so much a ship crossing an open sea but as a record needle following the groove patterns in the record.

 

The way it works is that you are bombarded with advertisements from birth, the coming generations would find the nigh impossible challenge to literally deprogram, which becomes increasingly more difficult the more the technology becomes relied upon. To illustrate an example in my own case, while at first I wasn't really excited about the Internet in the mid 1990s, in time I gradually accepted it and now it would be difficult to live without it- I may as well not exist if I want to participate in society, otherwise I'd have to ghost, go off the grid and become invisible to the world. Never mind entertainment, I couldn't do my job without it, transacting business or submitting applications or basic needs become that much more difficult, it's the proverbial genie once it's already out. It's much easier to do without something that you never had to begin with, but take something away once it's given, that's a different kettle of fish.

 

 

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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While the Romantics may not have succeeded in their immediate goals, they did however have a profound long-term effect on what kind of a life we want to live. They succeeded in shifting the development goalposts to something transcending mere economical gain. Quality of life, a reconnect to society - these still are ideals that people follow to an extent (if they are sufficiently well off so they can afford a post-materialistic attitude; not everybody has that luxury). Environmental concerns, aside from being somewhat reasonable (what good is all money if the price is the destruction of the ecosphere that keeps us alive), are also fueled by Romantic ideals.

 

Anyway, I guess I made my point. For the coming 30 years I would, as far as displays are concerned, rather count on the continuation of the last 30 years' trend - bigger (2D) screens, higher resolutions, an increase in the dynamic range of synthetic imagery, better/smoother and more varied animations. At the same time I see a fair bit of a plateau effect (or at least a reduction in incremental advancement of synthetic imaging quality), just like we see a bit of a plateau effect of CPU speeds.

What we may see more/may not fully appreciate yet are the potentials of cloud based computing services including, possibly, game streaming rather than local processing. But that won't happen over night.

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