I’ve Seen the Future, and It’s In 3D (b)

In the first part of this report on Consumer Electronics Week in New York, June 20-25, 2011, as a press attendee at what are called the CEA Line Shows, I noted among the 72 exhibitors the increasingly dominant presence of 3D devices and tablets, from which I hypothesized the following:

• we’re heading quickly toward a 3D-everywhere world in film, video, and gaming;
• 3D still-imaging systems likely lurk just around the corner, and will redefine still photography as we’ve known it;
• the computer environment is moving away from keyboards and mice and toward touchscreens and a generally more tactile, immersive relationship to binary techn0logy, in ways that will likely also affect profoundly our relationship to the still image.

I consider these reasonable extrapolations from the evidence at hand: massive investment by the consumer electronics industry in 3D systems, the film industry’s revived interest in 3D movies, the stunning success of the iPad and other tablets, the spread of the touchpad/touchscreen approach to interaction with computers and digital data. Yet these prospects so horrified one reader of this blog that he compared me to fanatical end-of-the-world prophets like David Koresh of the Waco tragedy and Charles Manson of “Helter Skelter.” My goodness; even the thought of these developments strikes terror into some hearts.

At the risk of evoking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for my chum J. P., herewith a few more observations and predictions.

A. D. Coleman with micro flash drive, July 1, 2011.

First, everything digital demonstrably gets smaller in size and bigger in capacity. Nowadays, as a rule, at media events the press-kit-on-a-thumb-drive — packed with  jpegs, PDFs, Word documents, and such — has replaced the classic printed press kit that was still the norm just a few years ago. One leaves CE Week, therefore, jingling a pocketful of flash drives. These come in a variety of designs, most of them standard — the “twister” style seems the hands-down favorite — but some distinctive. (I’m particularly taken with one housed in renewable-resource bamboo.)

Another USB flash drive I acquired this time out, a micro twister, is the smallest I’ve ever seen, about the size and shape of a piece of Dentyne gum. This one holds 2GB of data. Safe to assume that, a year hence, they’ll have even smaller ones with vastly more storage capacity. But if they get any smaller you won’t be able to find one if you drop it — or your cat will think it’s a toy and chew it up and then bat it under the sofa, or your two-year-old will think it’s a Pez candy and swallow it.

In conversation at the expo with a rep from the hard-drive manufacturer Seagate — one of whose hybrid solid-state drives I recently installed myself in my MacBook Pro — I proposed that the steadily shrinking size of all electronic gizmos, with the consequent vulnerability to theft, loss, and misplacement, would lead to implantation thereof in the foreseeable future. Subcutaneous microchips have been around for awhile. The nanotech breakthrough that has enabled the use of living cells — including human cells — as data storage and transmission units certainly places this possibility visibly on the event horizon. (See Michael Berger’s March 15, 2010 report at NanoWerk, “Future bio-nanotechnology will use computer chips inside living cells.”) The term “photographic memory” may thus take on literal significance.

Inferring of the number of transistors that fit on the area of a typical cell (10 µm2) versus year. (Image: J. A. Plaza, IMB-CNM. (CSIC))

Way back in January 1994 I published a column in the New York Observer titled “Fotofutures: Ten Possibilities in No Particular Order.” The last prophecy therein read like this:

By 2025, the storage of a thousand digitized color images on a microchip no larger than the head of a pin will be commonplace; most people will carry inexpensive “picture pens” — digital cameras shaped like ballpoints — for everyday visual note-taking. The rage that fall season will be a new version marketed as “InSights”: subcutaneously implanted microchips connected to the optic nerves and capable of recording anything registered on the retina via a thought-activated process. Downloading, transmitting, erasing and otherwise interacting with stored images will be accomplished via a simple device connected to any home infotainment center. The implantation will be a simple operation performed on an outpatient basis. Demand will be enormous, leading to the establishment of an international chain of “InSights” clinics staffed largely by doctors and computer experts from the nation whose researchers devised this innovation, the new global leader in computer innovation: India.

Seems to me we’re ahead of schedule on this.

My several days at CE Week and at concurrent events such as The Digital Experience — a similar showcase for new tech, crammed into a single evening and organized by a different outfit, Pepcom Inc. — led me to what I hope you’ll acknowledge as an inarguable (and hardly millennarian) conclusion: gadgets breed gadgets. I don’t just mean something high-end, along the lines of SRS CircleCinema 3D, which is basically surround-sound audio enhancement for the home flatscreen 3D environment. Nor am I referring to the umpteen-and-counting apps for every platform for every cellphone and tablet. I’m talking about actual physical stuff, add-ons that hundreds of companies — most but not all of them small and new — make to augment devices you already have or may acquire.

Scosche freeKEY flexible keyboard

Accessories for your accessories, so to speak. A bewildering range of headphones and speakers and keyboards, cases and covers and protective sleeves and carrying bags, cleaning and decontamination equipment and materials, stands and holders and clamps and tripods, things to plug into your cellphone or mp3 player or tablet and things to plug them into. Someone (Loksak, to give them credit where it’s due) has even reinvented and repurposed the Ziploc bag so you can take your iPhone and iPad or their equivalents to the beach, the marina, or the swimming pool without fear of sand, mayonnaise, or immersion in water. It’s not enough anymore to choose your smartphone or tablet, weighing the complex factors involved; you then have to shop for their accoutrements. Think of it as the Barbie/G. I. Joe approach: you buy a basic unit, and then you create its wardrobe.

It’s paralyzing. The options already have a Big Bang quality to them, seemingly infinite yet exponentially expanding at the same time. “Freedom of choice is what you’ve got, freedom from choice is what you want,” Devo proposed in 1980, and I heard that assessment in the back of my mind as I wandered those booths and tables. Helps me understand why, three years after acquiring it, I still haven’t activated my 16GB iPhone. (Ponder that, ye who think I’m a mindless technophile.)

I’ve become the only person I know without a working cellphone. I was made keenly aware of that fact when the limo that took a clump of us journalists to The Digital Experience on Wednesday, June 22, had a built-in wifi system on its dashboard enabling passengers to use their cellphones to conduct a conference call with people anywhere in the world. Not that I had any need to initiate or participate in a conference call at that moment. But if one had started, I’d have been odd man out. With no regrets, I might add.

The Digital Experience combines more consumer-electronics showcasing (70-plus brands) with all-you-can-eat buffet and an open bar. The event was Motown-themed this year, with classic Motown vinyl frozen into a block of ice that served as the main Absolut-sponsored bar, classic Motown covers used as table decorations, platinum soul playing in the background, and a lissome Diana Ross stand-in wandering about in a red-sequined dress, giving out little boxes of mints and guitar-shaped chocolates.

Someone had some fun planning all that and putting it together, though I never figured out the Motown connection to innovative digital gadgets. Perhaps it’s simply a nostalgic appeal aimed at geezer geeks like myself; I noted a surprising amount of gray hair among the journalists at an event dedicated to cutting-edge consumer tech. So I didn’t feel out of place, but what’s up with that? Has anyone done a study of the demographics of the consumer-electronics press corps?

(More to come.)