Black Oceans

On October 15th, 2010 I delivered a talk at TEDxKrakow, sharing my vision of the future of mobile communications. The recorded video is available on YouTube, or here with subtitles, thanks to perfect work of volunteers supporting the TED conferences. And if some of you are interested in the slides too, you can go to the Slideshare page for the full content.

Looking back at what I said, from a perspective of three months, I am convinced more than ever glasses will be the universal form factor of a communications device of the future. Why glasses? There are multiple reasons for that. Today, when using mobile Internet devices (and by mobile I mean smartphones and teleputers, not laptops with wireless usb modems!), we are constrained by input and output. Screens are too small and so are keyboards. There are two opposed needs. One is to make the device as small as possible to carry it everywhere. And this can be done pretty easily, as we continue to follow the Moore's Law of shrinking geometries in electronics. The other is to make the screen and keyboard, the primary human / machine interface, as comfortable as possible. Today majority of us use 20 inch monitors on our desks and we will be soon using 30 inch.

But LCD monitors do not scale. I mean you cannot have a large desktop on a physically tiny screen. Or can you? What really matters is not the size of the screen, but the angle of view it gives you. A 2-inch screen held right in front of an eye can give a very broad field of view. Hence glasses. Mount two ultra-high-resolution screens in your sunglasses and you can have an iMax - like experience. As there will be two screens, the stereoscopic 3D is given instantly. So instead of having special glasses (with shutters or polarizers) to look at a 3D TV, you can have special glasses to look through. Period. The 3D TV or desktop monitor is gone.

The look-through aspect is important. We are talking about mobile scenarios here. So apart from looking at what is displayed on the glasses you wear, you have to see the real world too. This can possibly be done equipping the glasses with cameras and superimposing the two images on on another. But the better approach is to use the traditional glasses as transparent projection screens. Laser projectors can be built into the frame, throwing images on the see - through lenses. The laser beam is reflected off the glass and goes directly into the retinas. Systems like that have been in use by military for several years and the technology is nearing the point when it will make economic sense to offer it to consumers. There are a number of companies working on such on-retina projection systems, among them are Microvision, Lemoptix and Brother.



Glasses potentially are well suited to solve the problem of input interface. Wearing a 3D display you will obviously not be using a tiny QWERTY keyboard. It is high time to drop this 150-years old invention. We need something more direct, ultimately a direct link between a brain and the wearable computer. But as not many of us will opt for a hardwired implant, brainwave sensing electrodes are the solution we have today. While it still requires some concentration and training to master devices like the OCZ Nia neural USB headband or the Emotiv Headset, there are already applications utilizing brainwaves picked by electrodes to operate small electronic gadgets, like music players.

And of course once the entire input and output is fit inside glasses, there is no reason to make the wearable computer / phone a separate device. The glasses can house microphone arrays for voice communications and all other necessary pieces of electronics.

Having such glasses, a number of interesting scenarios come into play. Glasses with earphones deliver privacy. So of course you may be connecting to various on-line resources and have them available for your eyes only. But you will also be able to connect (think a multimedia call) to your friend's glasses and see what they see (image from the remote cameras will be projected on your eyes, ditto sound). Your cameras and microphones will continuously stream GPS-enhanced information to The Cloud and your personal assistant sitting in the lower right corner of your eye will be providing you continuous context - related aid. Either explaining what you see and hear or translating what the strangers talk or whatever else you need based on the context (have I said advertisements?).

And here we arrive at the Black Oceans. A phenomenal science fiction book painting the world using the very devices I envisioned in my TEDx talk. I have to admit I had not been aware of this book before my talk and the first time I learned about it was from the Twitter stream commenting live what I was presenting. Unfortunately at the moment the book is only in Polish, so only a small part of the audience here will be able to read it. But I truly recommend doing that. It happens the vision of Jacek Dukaj fits the technology we have today and the usage scenarios, although scary, are what we are getting to.