I’ve written and talked about “wearable computers” for more than a decade now, and they are continuing to emerge, although not quite the way I expected. What is happening is that while the original “grey brick” cellphone has morphed into the miniscule smartphone, it is, in fact, a computer that you carry on your person most of your waking hours (if you carry one at all). And this year is going to see this trend extended, with new functionality, including more video capacity, more Internet capacity, impromptu social networks emerging, plus the ability to use a smartphone instead of a laptop for things like running PowerPoint slide presentations.Beyond that is personal theatre (as opposed to home theatre), where you don a set of goggles, called near-eye displays, that are the lineal descendents of a fighter pilot’s heads-up display. This makes the postage-stamp images of, say, a video iPod much more visible by bringing it much closer to the eye, and will eventually transform the way we interact with our smartphones/ computers, as well as bringing 3D to video. It will also facilitate the emergence of “augmented reality,” in which computer annotations add to your knowledge or experience of the real world, as currently happens with photos posted to specific locations on Google Earth, for instance. Currently, such near-eye displays cost about $600 apiece, and aren’t quite ready for prime-time, but they’re getting close enough in both cost and quality that we should see some early adopters and applications this year, probably first in computer gaming, which typically stretches the boundaries of the possible. [Update: On January 13th, a pair of near-eye display goggles were presented by a company called MyVu for $200 for use with an iPod. Clearly, this technology seems about to launch, and faster than I anticipated. -RW]Meanwhile, the entire field of augmented reality will continue to explode. The term basically means combining the information available in cyberspace with experiences in the real world, both for fun and utility. This has been touted for retailers for some time in the ability to target ads or offers to receptive smartphones that are in close proximity to their stores (“Walk into the store on your left right now and get 15% off!”), but is also being used for what amount to scavenger hunt-type games, where people seek clues at specific geographic locations in a race against others. Eventually, with new gaming interfaces, like Wii and near-eye displays, augmented reality will do a lot to blur the line between cyberworlds and real worlds. There’s a lot of opportunity here for organizations and individuals interested in innovating by taking one idea or application, and mixing it with others.Apple Inc. will continue to upset (excuse me) the apple cart in electronic devices. They seem to be one of the very few companies that is capable of designing an electronic device that is both powerful, and easy to use, mainly because Steve Jobs demands that Apple devices be designed for users, not engineers. Little noticed in the hoopla surrounding the release of the iPhone (which has been remarkably successful given how badly Apple has managed the marketing) is that Apple has introduced a new user interface that has been talked about, but had not previously been as successfully exploited: gesture technology. When you are doing “cover flow” on an iPhone, which means you rub your finger lightly over a screen display of music album covers, they rotate past as if they had momentum, just as if they were on a physical wheel. Gesturing (with or without actually touching anything) has been talked about as the Next Big Thing in computer interfaces, and it may now be tip-toeing into the marketplace. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple became the leader in the field. In fact, I can think of only one other company that may share the lead: Nintendo.Wii, the astonishingly successful gaming interface from Nintendo, amounts to a form of gesture input device. And as the Gesture User Interface (we’ll have to come up with a new term because “GUI” is already taken) becomes more widespread, and finds its way into users’ repertoires, the line between what’s cyber-real, and what’s really-real will continue to blur. Imagine pointing your finger as if it were a gun at your TV screen and shooting it to turn the sound down or skip a commercial, for instance. Gesture is a technology just finding its way, but we’ll see more of it emerging in 2008.One of the most visible changes coming in the world of technology will be the continuing development, and spreading popularity, or social software. Unlike search engines, though, there seem to be two sets of social software that will both dominate and coexist: Facebook for social networking, and LinkedIn for professional networking. There will be professionals who use Facebook, and there may be a few people who use LinkedIn for social networks, but generally the two domains are mutually exclusive. Indeed, blogging itself may be replaced by social software, with blogs becoming merely a subset of the things that such software can do, and do more conveniently.A long-established trend that people continue to underestimate is made clear by the rapid emergence of self-driving cars. The ability of computers to solve real-world problems improves not linearly, which is what we emotionally expect, but exponentially. That’s evident from the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “Grand Challenge” to create a driverless car. In 2004, when DARPA first staged the challenge, no car was able to travel more than seven miles, and it was thought it would be years before any car could get much further. By the next year, five cars made it to the finish line, more than 132 miles away over an empty, but difficult, desert course. Last year, six cars finished a course that simulated city traffic, complete with stop signs, traffic lights, and pedestrians, on a closed military base, driving more than 60 miles in the process. A big part of this is human ingenuity, but the rest of it is the dramatic increase in computing power, and the tools emerging to exploit it. This year, we will see many more reports of driverless cars, plus other examples of robots approaching the marketplace, slowly at first, but then apparently exploding onto the scene. That’s a characteristic of exponential growth, and one that will surprise us repeatedly in 2008 and beyond. The age of robots is almost upon us, but the real unknown is how comfortable people will be with them, and whether they will buy them.One part of this uncertainty is that some aspects of robot and automation development will run into human and social resistance that will slow their emergence to a snail’s crawl. Let’s go back to driverless cars, for instance. If they make it to the highway, and one of them gets into a crash, who’s at fault, and who gets sued? The driver, the car manufacturer, the software vendor, or all three? How will insurers feel about this? And given the amount of ego many of us invest in our cars, do people really want driverless cars in the first place, enough to pay for them? Moreover, will such cars be allowed to break speed limits, for example, if their owners want them to? There are no clear answers to such questions, and that, and similar problems, are eventually going to be a bigger hurdle for computers, robots, and automation than the technology involved.
