RealityPrime

I wrote the following essay to help us get going crafting a review paper for a major comp-sci journal. ‘Us’ in this case was Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of the founders of PhotoSynth and Virtual Earfth’s new architect, and Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of VR, who thought of pretty much everything before I became conscious of the world.

Now, I should caution that Blaise didn’t ultimately want to use this text and Jaron equally had issues with it. The tone is all wrong for an academic journal, plus Jaron disputes some of the dates I recorded from my research (he may well know better). But I felt it might at least be entertaining to RP readers, so I’m posting it for you to enjoy. Still, don’t take any of it as official, just me being a smart-ass.

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Remember those AT&T "You Will" ads? If not, watch this and you will…

The question was: how right were they? Amazingly good, except for the part about "and the company that’ll bring it to you." AT&T has consistently been late to the game, except when they buy other companies or disrupt markets. And even in the ads, they notoriously got the phone bits wrong and/or didn’t deliver. No video phone, for the most part. There aren’t even very many phone booths left.

So what does that show?

Well, for one thing, it’s the companies that don’t spend tens of millions of dollars telling you what they’ll do that can actually spend that money doing it. For another thing, it’s not always wise to telegraph (so to speak) your moves, as it mainly inspires people to go out and do it first. Of course, AT&T didn’t care. They just wanted you to believe they were really technologically advanced, so you’d sign up for their long distance plan.

This, I think, is the danger of Microsoft’s "2019" video, cool as it is.

Well, at least it isn’t Minority Report. But maybe we can forget about pushing pixels to every glass or paper surface and think about putting pixels everywhere you look. I mean it’s 10 years out. Let’s live a little.

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