[extropy-chat] Cute video about the future

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Hal Finney <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> NTT DoCoMo has a cute 10-minute video showing the
> world of 201X,
> at http://www.docomo-usa.com/vision2010/.  It
> includes widespread use
> of video phones, wireless electronic wallets and
> payments, and haptic
> (remote touch) technology.  Oh, yeah, the
> self-driving car.

Worth a watch, IMO.  Better than the average
corp-futurist drabble.

> I had a few quibbles; one was the use of apparent
> "holographic" displays,
> which aren't physically possible AFAIK.

They are, but not reach-in like the doc had.  Although
that may have been an easier-to-digest standin for
augmented reality: we saw what the doc saw, although
not through his eyes.

> The other
> was the wrist video
> phone concept, which I would think would make the
> camera wiggle around
> too much (but maybe a wide field of view combined
> with video stabilizing
> software would work).

Agreed.  Those are just about achievable now, though.
I'm not sure if it'd work in Japan; there's a good
non-technical reason it never caught on in the States
despite being pushed.

> I also thought the haptic
> thing wasn't quite right,
> you couldn't reach out and touch something unless
> you had someone at
> the other end moving their gloves in synchrony with
> yours.

Or something - which is kind of what haptics are
about: forces upon the gloves other than the user's.
It requires a good amount of trust to use gloves that
would move your hands that far, though: a mailcious
user could do tele-martial arts until you got your
hands out of that thing, and a skilled one could keep
that from happening long enough to do some damage.
Which is the main reason why haptics that powerful are
probably a ways off.