I've wanted to write on this topic for a long time. I'm a firm believer that the world changes very rapidly, and what we see today is vastly different than what we'll see 10, 20 years from today (not just "kind of different", I'm talking about VERY DIFFERENT). The world's progress in technology is picking up pace too as the world improves its technology and processes in how those technologies are created.
You see, people working on things aren't only interested in finding out what's new, or how to change something, there are entire efforts being made in finding out how to find out what's new, and how to improve the process of improvement. Ultimately, this evolution of how we revolutionalize things leads to altogether new discoveries at ever amazing rates. Just think, 20 years ago our online interactions were so vastly different that to someone who hasn't experienced that world it is incomprehensible to have such limited access to information and friends. Just how different was that world?
20 Years Ago... (1990)
- large CRT monitors with small screens that had the equivalent resolution of today's netbooks or small LCD monitors were the norm, they were heavy, hot, and took up gobs of space
- Cell phones were the domain of business users (they were also the size of water bottles), and texting was not even available (SMS texting was available in 1992-1993). Teens and young adults had PAGERS and called friends back using payphones!
- There was no such thing as a consumer wide screen TV!
- CD's and radio were the main distribution channels of music and people who wanted to play mixes bought tape players (and later, CD changers) to do so.
- DVD's had yet to be invented (they would show up 5 years later in 1995, and would take another few years to really penetrate the market) and video rental stores rented out VHS tapes! ("be kind, rewind" was a staple of many rental shops)
10 Years Ago... (2000)
- NeoHQ was using 17" CRT monitors (resolution 1024x768 to 1152x864 resolution)
- All of the NeoStaff used one monitor each, it took up so much space the desks had to be half a foot from the walls.
- There was no such thing as an "iPod". Only MP3 players with mediocre functionality.
- Cell phones had monochrome screens (yikes!). In 2002, Sony Erricson would release their first "colour" LCD phone that displayed 256 colours with a resolution of 101x80px.
Today... (2010)
- The 2010 Winter Olympics were streamed as online video to the world.
- Youtube has every imaginable video possible, and there are localised equivalents all over the world for different cultures (Youku in Asia for example)
- Everyone is connected all the time - whether by texting, public computers with Internet access or (more and more commonly) smartphones
- TV's are bigger than ever before, yet their "price per inc" is cheaper than ever before
- We're on the verge of electric cars becoming a mainstream reality.
- Researchers in Japan have demonstrated many humanoid robots capable of complex actions like walking, picking up items, and tracking the motion of other objects with their heads
- We're developing very advanced robotics and related areas of research, including artificial "skin" with pressure sensitivity, and more and more sophisticated software AI routines.
So what about the future? What does it hold? Here are my guesses, and also my hopes (or fears)
Next 5 Years:
- Smartphones will start to replace credit cards and debit cards as a method of paying for purchases at stores and vending machines (the latter already possible in Japan)
- Touch computing will be prevalent in industries requiring collaboration, this means touch capable laptops will evolve to be the norm, rather than the exception
- Book reading will continue to move towards digital media. Brick and Mortar stores like Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo will start to feel the pinch.
- Games, even console titles, will primarily be distributed online as downloads. Discs will wane or completely disappear within the next 5-7years. This is good for convenience, not so good for lending games to friends.
Next ~10-15 years:
- Streaming Movies and TV will be the mainstream way of consuming television shows and movies. This would happen sooner, but there are alot of vested interests which will resist things going this way.
- Battery technologies currently demonstrated as feasible will become reality, to the point where smartphones can run a week or more without charging and a tablet or laptop can run 24hrs straight on a single charge.
- 3D movies and games, without glasses, will be a common reality. I think 3D is the future, the immersion adds possibilities that we may not have thought of yet.
- Software will be either completely in the cloud, or distributed digitally. Optical devices will be completely absent from ALL devices.
- As a result of the above, brick and mortar stores can downsize and focus completely in hardware, ignoring software altogether. Or, if software becomes cumbersomely large, download stations may be made available.
20 Years from Today
I think 20 years from today the world will have changed so much I hesitate to even guess what would happen. I've read articles where people in 1990 predicted all sorts of weird and cool futuristic things would be happening in 2010 (such as AI's that could talk to you?!), but none of that has come true.
Here are my ideas for what might be possible. Use your imagination :D
- Parking meters, toll lanes, and downtown tolls will charge you based on devices that communicate with your vehicle or smartphone wirelessly
- Smart phones should be powerful enough to allow real time speech translation as well as full speech recognition capabilities like dictation, and interactive hands free controls
- Smart phones will react to touch, voice commands, gestures, and anticipate need based on environmental and proximity conditions (eg in a noisy restaurant your phone may ring louder, but it won't do so at your office or when it can tell a meeting is in progress. If your phone rings out of place you can wave your hand in a negating gesture to silence it).
- Many vehicles will be electric or use alternative fuels, and will be recharged by solar panels and/or hydrogen fuels
- Most homes built in 2030 will feature water capture and recycling systems that leverage natural (solar or geothermal) heating to offset a rise in water usage costs
- Personal home power will be partly supplied by solar panels
- Home automation will be a common reality. Homes will react to the presence of people and adjust lighting and heating appropriately.
- TVs will be intelligent and aware of who is present and what they prefer. Volume, brightness settings, channel settings and optimum audio algorithms will kick in depending on who is watching TV and what they wish to watch. Gestures will control certain functionality like browsing TV shows, pause/play and mute (eg you stand up to go to the washroom and the TV will pause, lights will turn on for you to find your way out. You come back and sit down and you flick a wrist to re-engage the show, which will dim the lights while unpausing the movie).
- Cars will have the same capabilities, and adjust seating position, radio preferences, radio volume, mirrors, and even car temperature based on who is driving, without the need to press any buttons. This type of sensor can already kick in when the car is aware you are walking towards it, so there's no need to sit down before all the settings are in place.
- Smartphones as we know them may be completely replaced with devices integrated with other things, such as your wallet.
Redemption blogged
There are too many people who want to actually want to keep them with them, and not have them digital. I'm like that with books.
The rise of "App Stores" from major players will mean that most software is installed digitally. Out of all the software you currently use in your PC for example, how much of it is installed from a disk? For me it's only MS Office and Adobe Products. Other than that, every other software is downloaded online. I don't know about you, but most people I know use the optical drive on their laptop maybe twice per year, if that.
For PC games I've been a long time diehard of boxed sets, but Digital distribution is now my preferred method of getting PC games due to convenience.
Don't forget also that younger generations of future consumers, eg people under 10 yrs of age today, are being raised in environments where CDs and DVDs are less prevalent. Think of the 16 million Netflix subscribers and their children, or the hordes of people growing up with Youtube as a standard medium. 20 years ago a friday night movie at home involved renting a VHS tape, and later, a DVD from a rental store like Blockbuster. Well Blockbuster is bankrupt, and all the rental stores in my old neighbourhood are gone, with a few stragglers left. Today with PPV, movie channels, Netflix, Hulu, and many others I doubt the same percentage of families is renting discs anymore.
For them the attachment to physical media is not being ingrained from a young age, and as we slowly move towards digital distribution future generations of users will be exposed to less and less physical media, to the point where they will consider physical media a hindrance rather than as a "collectible" as you and I might see them today.
PS. I installed Windows 7 and MS Office both from discs, but those dics were made by myself (legally) - I bought them digitally and burnt them myself. The disc portion was actually a hassle, a middle man for the ulterior goal - getting the software installed.
This is honestly the only one I don't agree with. Are we not already headed there? Look at the 3DS for example. We're able to turn 3D on and off with just a switch, and it's glasses-free (which is wonderful for people with glasses like me), so I don't see why this is 10-15 years away. I'd be surprised if others aren't trying it about a year after the 3DS is released in Japan, maybe even before that. Look how fast Motion Control caught on...almost everything uses it now in some way.
I'd like it if books and games became digital, yes, but I highly doubt it'll happen in the timeframe you estimated. It's possible I guess, but the consoles would need a hell of a lot more memory if everything was digital. If you go to Amazon, you'll see their Kindle. It's basically an E-Reader. Barnes & Noble also uses this technology, with their Nook. Those books are already digital, and it can store up to 3,400 books (Kindle can at least). I assume this will take over very soon. My mom's got one of these, and she loves it. So far, I know 8 or so people who have something like a Kindle (Kindle or Nook one), and they just got it this Christmas. I know a few who have had it before then.
But yes, I'd love it if games went digital. It'd make life a lot easier.
It's just a thought, but the information is out there. How will it be used in the future?
When it comes to content you have to have everything "in the chain" sync up before it becomes truly mainstream.
Take DVD for example, they were introduced in 1995 but I didn't buy my first DVD player until ~2001, and I'm a fairly early adopter. Even 4-5 years after their introduction, my midrange quality DVD player costed me $299. 3-4 years after that, DVD players were going for $99 or less. So from introduction to acceptance was something like 8 years. That's also how long it takes content producers to not only produce using the format, but for prices of the media to become affordable (eg $9.99 DVDs on sale, vs $34.99 for a brand new DVD when the format is "young").
For something to become truly mainstream you need all the elements to come together:
- Studios have to be using a standardized procedure for producing the content
- Equipment manufacturers have to use a standard for playing back the content
- The price of the equipment (in this case the TV, source player, cables, Hometheater receivers, cables) needs to break through certain price barriers (I'd guess $59-99 for the player, and $399-699 for a 32"-40"TV)
- You need to give it time before people are willing to buy into the technology, especially since people may have already invested in the "last big thing". I think most people are only willing, or able, to absorb big ticket TV purchases around once every 5-10 years, and many will hold out even longer. If someone bought their non-3D HDTV today, short of equipment failure you won't see them buy a 3D HDTV until 2020.
It may seem like standard HDTVs are everywhere, but that is simply not true. There were alot of "HDTV Ready" TVs sold in the earlier days and none of these are actually capable of receiving HD signal without additional equipment. Some of them are 720P only, or 1080i. Others might even use weirder standards. According to a recent study in 2010 only 61% of US households have HDTVs. If HDTVs aren't ubiquitous today after 12 years (they were introduced in 1998), why will 3D TV's without glasses (of which a production model has never even made it to stores) become standard even 10years from today?Not only do you have to take into consideration how long it takes for the mainstream to adopt something, you also have to remember that the old format or concepts last decades even after they are no longer mainstream. DVDs are still a very popular format for movies, and CDs are not quite dead yet. What this means is that even when 3D TVs are all that get sold anymore in stores, you can bet there are plenty of people who are using regular HDTVs and even pre-HDTV boxes.
Anyway, I'm not talking about "some people" will be using 3D content, I'm talking about 3D content becoming the norm. The same with digital books, movies, and games. The Kindle is an amazing device, but I know someone who just got one as a gift, and their response was they can't be bothered to use one since they prefer real books. 20 years ago the EXCEPTION was to have a cellphone, today it is the norm. When you think about the future, don't think about fringe cases, early adopters, and amazing technologies used by a tiny fraction of people. It's all about entire shifts in what most people consider to be "normal". When there's a time where you tell your future nephew you just bought a good book and he asks you to beam it over to his reading device to check out, and when you answer "Oh I bought it in paperback format" he looks at you like you just ate a cat, then the time I'm speaking of has become a reality - in that time, the digital stuff will be the "real books", and what you and I call "real books" today would be a fancy collector's item.
What exactly do you mean when you said that it was an exception? An exception to what?
and a carphone looked like this:
$1400 for a cellphone, $1/min talk time (a 15 minute call would cost you $15 USD). You can't text on it, and you can't fit the things in your pocket. Having a cellphone was a LUXURY for business people who needed them for communications, so having one was very rare, and thus the exception to the norm.
So yeah, what do you think?
As for Discs disappearing in the next 5-7 years making way for Digital distribution. I really hope it's longer as I am not fond of the idea even-though it's convenient and cheaper. When I buy something I really like having the actual physical goods in my hands. It gives me the feel of real ownership as opposed to Digitally downloaded to my hard-drive. Which is why I still preferred to buy my movies, musics and games through the stores.
Here's one prediction I'll make: more and more sites will rely on outside services to provide lower registration barriers. Like we did last year (we'll take it further this year) with our registrations allowing you to connect via Twitter and Facebook to prefill info and bypass email validation.
Naked Snak3: I personally prefer physical books, but even so, I'm reading the classics on my Android phone (they're all free downloads since they are in the public domain, but you'd have to buy a copy to be able to read the ) and I can take that anywhere with me.