The Future Is Now

The future is now, the present is past, and the past is...well...damn you got me. Perusing teh intarwebs today I came across this story (and videos YAY!) of a tour that Microsoft is doing on college campuses across the nation. Not your usual boring lectures on how Microsoft got started and all students should look to the company as proof positive to NOT stay in school, they (the company) decided to showcase some prototypes they have been working on.



Prepare yourself, this is the coolest thing I've seen, um, today I guess. But it could be the coolest thing I've seen for months (with the exception of the dinosaur puppets).

http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/collegetour1.f4v

and...

http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/collegetour2.f4v

The first video shows some of the really cool ways you can interact with your PC using a variety of sensory controls. Voice activation, motion, and eye tracking all to find a webpage without that nasty carpel tunnel crap. But what I like best is the way the "internet browser" (if you can call it that) works.

You give the computer a voice command like, "Computer, search 'toilet stall tapping' " and then a billion tiny web pages fly up on your screen, like some kind of mosaic art piece.

Looking at the billion web pages that are 2x2 pixels in size you exclaim, "Computer, this is incredibly useless to me. Organize." And then the web browser throws arbitrary categories on the newly rearranged web page dots.

Now that you have something resembling a path to surf the web by, you can tell your PC, "Computer-ji...oh, sorry we're not in India...Computer, go to US Senators." Then you can use your eye tracking skills to pick out all the fun web pages in that category talking about closet homosexual senators and the wonderfully hypocritical lives they lead.

The coolest stuff is of course the clear display and being able to pretend you are Tony Stark, even though you would probably just look at stuff on FaceBook instead of designing an armored robot suit for fighting crime.

Can't wait for that!! Of course it's probably going to take five years till they bring it to us, and another 10 before it's actually affordable, but we'll all be millonaires by then right? (of course by then a millonaire is minimum wage due to inflation)