Augmented reality will objectify women

Microsoft Hololens 2 Visor

The excitement around augmented reality continues to build, and I am normally  enthusiastic about its potential, looking forward to enjoying virtual architecture, playing immersive computer games, or enjoying visual and performance artworks transposed into my view of the high street while I shop.

But it won’t all be wonderful. While a few PR and marketing types may worry a little about people overlaying or modifying their hard-won logos and ads, a bigger issue will be some people choosing to overlay people in the high street with ones that are a different age or gender or race, or simply prettier. Identity politics will be fought on yet another frontier.

In spite of waves of marketing hype and misrepresentation, AR is really only here in primitive form outside the lab. Visors fall very far short of what we’d hoped for by now even a decade ago, even the Hololens 2 shown above. But soon AR visors and eventually active contact lenses will enable fully 3D hi-res overlays on the real world. Then, in principle at least, you can make things look how you want, with a few basic limits. You could certainly transform a dull shop, cheap hotel room or an office into an elaborate palace or make it look like a spaceship. But even if you change what things look like, you still have to represent nearby physical structures and obstacles in your fantasy overlay world, or you may bump into them, and that includes all the walls and furniture, lamp posts, bollards, vehicles, and of course other people. Augmented reality allows you to change their appearance thoroughly but they still need to be there somehow.

When it comes to people, there will be some battles. You may spend ages creating a wide variety of avatars, or may invest a great deal of time and money making or buying them. You may have a digital aura, hoping to present different avatars to different passers-by according to their profiles. You may want to look younger or thinner or as a character you enjoy playing in a computer game. You may present a selection of options to the AIs controlling the passer person’s view and the avatar they see overlaid could be any one of the images you have on offer. Perhaps some privileged people get to pick from a selection you offer, while others you wish to privilege less are restricted to just one that you have set for their profile. Maybe you’d have a particularly ugly or offensive one to present to those with opposing political views.

Except that you can’t assume you will be in control. In fact, you probably won’t.

Other people may choose not to see your avatar, but instead to superimpose one of their own choosing. The question of who decides what the viewer sees is perhaps the first and most important battle in AR. Various parties would like to control it – visor manufacturers, O/S providers, UX designers, service providers, app creators, AI providers, governments, local councils, police and other emergency services, advertisers and of course individual users. Given market dynamics, most of these ultimately come down to user choice most of the time, albeit sometimes after paying for the privilege. So it probably won’t be you who gets to choose how others see you, via assorted paid intermediary services, apps and AI, it will be the other person deciding how they want to see you, regardless of your preferences.

So you can spend all the time you want designing your avatar and tweaking your virtual make-up to perfection, but if someone wants to see their favorite celebrity walking past instead of you, they will. You and your body become no more than an object on which to display any avatar or image someone else chooses. You are quite literally reduced to an object in the AR world. Augmented reality will literally objectify women, reducing them to no more than a moving display space onto which their own selected images are overlaid. A few options become obvious.

Firstly they may just take your actual physical appearance (via a video camera built into their visor for example) and digitally change it,  so it is still definitely you, but now dressed more nicely, or dressed in sexy lingerie, or how you might look naked, using the latest AI to body-fit fantasy images from a porn database. This could easily be done automatically in real time using some app or other. You’ve probably already seen recent AI video fakery demos that can present any celebrity saying anything at all, almost indistinguishable from reality. That will soon be pretty routine tech for AR apps. They could even use your actual face as input to image-matching search engines to find the most plausible naked lookalikes. So anyone could digitally dress or undress you, not just with their eyes, but with a hi-res visor using sophisticated AI-enabled image processing software. They could put you in any kind of outfit, change your skin color or make-up or age or figure, and make you look as pretty and glamorous or as slutty as they want. And you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. You simply won’t know whether they are respectfully celebrating your inherent beauty, or flattering you by making you look even prettier, which you might not mind at all, or might object to strongly in the absence of explicit consent, or worse still, stripping or degrading you to whatever depths they wish, with no consent or notification, which you probably will mind a lot.

Or they can treat you as just an object on which to superimpose some other avatar, which could be anything or anyone – a zombie, favorite actress or supermodel. They won’t need your consent and again you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. The avatar may make the same gestures and movements and even talk plausibly, saying whatever their AI thinks they might like, but it won’t be you. In some ways this might not be so bad. You’d still be reduced to an object but at least it wouldn’t be you that they’re looking at naked. To most strangers on a high street most of the time, you’re just a moving obstacle to avoid bumping into, so being digitally transformed into a walking display board may worry you. Most people will cope with that bit. It is when you stop being just a passing stranger and start to interact in some way that it really starts to matter. You probably won’t like it if someone is chatting to you but they are actually looking at someone else entirely, especially if the viewer is one of your friends or your partner. And if your partner is kissing or cuddling you but seeing someone else, that would be a strong breach of trust, but how would you know? This sort of thing could and probably will damage a lot of relationships.

Most of the software to do most of this is already in development and much is already demonstrable. The rest will develop quickly once AR visors become commonplace.

In the office, in the home, when you’re shopping or at a party, you soon won’t have any idea what or who someone else is seeing when they look at you. Imagine how that would clash with rules that are supposed to be protection from sexual harassment  in the office. Whole new levels of harassment will be enabled, much invisible. How can we police behaviors we can’t even detect? Will hardware manufacturers be forced to build in transparency and continuous experience recording

The main casualty will be trust.  It will make us question how much we trust each of our friends and colleagues and acquaintances. It will build walls. People will often become suspicious of others, not just strangers but friends and colleagues. Some people will become fearful. You may dress as primly or modestly as you like, but if the viewer chooses to see you wearing a sexy outfit, perhaps their behavior and attitude towards you will be governed by that rather than reality. Increased digital objectification might lead to increase physical sexual assault or rape. We may see more people more often objectifying women in more circumstances.

The tech applies equally to men of course. You could make a man look like a silverback gorilla or a zombie or fake-naked. Some men will care more than others, but the vast majority of real victims will undoubtedly be women. Many men objectify women already. In the future AR world , they’ll be able to do so far more effectively, more easily.

 

New book: Fashion Tomorrow

I finally finished the book I started 2 years ago on future fashion, or rather future technologies relevant to the fashion industry.

It is a very short book, more of a quick guide at 40k words, less than half as long as my other books and covers women’s fashion mostly, though some applies to men too. I would never have finished writing a full-sized book on this topic and I’d rather put out something now, short and packed full of ideas that are (mostly) still novel than delay until they are commonplace. It is aimed at students and people working in fashion design, who have loads of artistic and design talent, but want to know what technology opportunities are coming that they could soon exploit, but anyone interested in fashion who isn’t technophobic should find it interesting. Some sections discussing intimate apparel contain adult comments so the book is unsuitable for minors.

It started as a blog, then I realised I had quite a bit more stuff I could link together, so I made a start, then go sidetracked, for 20 months! I threw away 75% of the original contents list and tidied it up to release a short guide instead. I wanted to put it out for free but 99p or 99c seems to be the lowest price you can start at, but I doubt that would put anyone off except the least interested readers. As with my other books, I’ll occasionally make it free.

Huge areas I left out include swathes of topics on social, political, environmental and psychological fashions, impacts of AI and robots, manufacturing, marketing, distribution and sales. These are all big topics, but I just didn’t have time to write them all up so I just stuck to the core areas with passing mentions of the others. In any case, much has been written on these areas by others, and my book focuses on things that are unique, embryonic or not well covered elsewhere. It fills a large hole in fashion industry thinking.

 

Colour changing cars, everyday objects and makeup

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/24/13740946/dutch-scientists-use-color-changing-graphene-bubbles-to-create-mechanical-pixels shows how graphene can be used to make displays with each pixel changing colour according to mechanical deformation.

Meanwhile, Lexus have just created a car with a shell covered in LEDs so it can act as a massive display.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13846396/lexus-led-lit-is-colors-dua-lipa-vevo

In 2014 I wrote about using polymer LED displays for future Minis so it’s nice to see another prediction come true.

Looking at the mechanical pixels though, it is clear that mechanical pixels could respond directly to sound, or to turbulence of passing air, plus other vibration that arises from motion on a road surface, or the engine. Car panel colours could change all the time powered by ambient energy. Coatings on any solid objects could follow, so people might have plenty of shimmering colours in their everyday environment. Could. Not sure I want it, but they could.

With sound as a control system, sound wave generators at the edges or underneath such surfaces could produce a wide variety of pleasing patterns. We could soon have furniture that does a good impression of being a cuttlefish.

I often get asked about smart makeup, on which I’ve often spoken since the late 90s. Thin film makeup displays could use this same tech. So er, we could have people with makeup pretending to be cuttlefish too. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

Future Augmented Reality

AR has been hot on the list of future IT tech for 25 years. It has been used for various things since smartphones and tablets appeared but really hit the big time with the recent Pokemon craze.

To get an idea of the full potential of augmented reality, recognize that the web and all its impacts on modern life came from the convergence of two medium sized industries – telecoms and computing. Augmented reality will involve the convergence of everything in the real world with everything in the virtual world, including games, media, the web, art, data, visualization, architecture, fashion and even imagination. That convergence will be enabled by ubiquitous mobile broadband, cloud, blockchain payments, IoT, positioning and sensor tech, image recognition, fast graphics chips, display and visor technology and voice and gesture recognition plus many other technologies.

Just as you can put a Pokemon on a lawn, so you could watch aliens flying around in spaceships or cartoon characters or your favorite celebs walking along the street among the other pedestrians. You could just as easily overlay alternative faces onto the strangers passing by.

People will often want to display an avatar to people looking at them, and that could be different for every viewer. That desire competes with the desire of the viewer to decide how to see other people, so there will be some battles over who controls what is seen. Feminists will certainly want to protect women from the obvious objectification that would follow if a woman can’t control how she is seen. In some cases, such objectification and abuse could even reach into hate crime territory, with racist, sexist or homophobic virtual overlays. All this demands control, but it is far from obvious where that control would come from.

As for buildings, they too can have a virtual appearance. Virtual architecture will show off architect visualization skills, but will also be hijacked by the marketing departments of the building residents. In fact, many stakeholders will want to control what you see when you look at a building. The architects, occupants, city authorities, government, mapping agencies, advertisers, software producers and games designers will all try to push appearances at the viewer, but the viewer might want instead to choose to impose one from their own offerings, created in real time by AI or from large existing libraries of online imagery, games or media. No two people walking together on a street would see the same thing.

Interior decor is even more attractive as an AR application. Someone living in a horrible tiny flat could enhance it using AR to give the feeling of far more space and far prettier decor and even local environment. Virtual windows onto Caribbean beaches may be more attractive than looking at mouldy walls and the office block wall that are physically there. Reality is often expensive but images can be free.

Even fashion offers a platform for AR enhancement. An outfit might look great on a celebrity but real life shapes might not measure up. Makeovers take time and money too. In augmented reality, every garment can look as it should, and that makeup can too. The hardest choice will be to choose a large number of virtual outfits and makeups to go with the smaller range of actual physical appearances available from that wardrobe.

Gaming is in pole position, because 3D world design, imagination, visualization and real time rendering technology are all games technology, so perhaps the biggest surprise in the Pokemon success is that it was the first to really grab attention. People could by now be virtually shooting aliens or zombies hoarding up escalators as they wait for their partners. They are a little late, but such widespread use of personal or social gaming on city streets and in malls will come soon.

AR Visors are on their way too, and though the first offerings will be too expensive to achieve widespread adoption, cheaper ones will quickly follow. The internet of things and sensor technology will create abundant ground-up data to make a strong platform. As visors fall in price, so too will the size and power requirements of the processing needed, though much can be cloud-based.

It is a fairly safe bet that marketers will try very hard to force images at us and if they can’t do that via blatant in-your-face advertising, then product placement will become a very fine art. We should expect strong alliances between the big marketing and advertising companies and top games creators.

As AI simultaneously develops, people will be able to generate a lot of their own overlays, explaining to AI what they’d like and having it produced for them in real time. That would undermine marketing use of AR so again there will be some battles for control. Just as we have already seen owners of landmarks try to trademark the image of their buildings to prevent people including them in photographs, so similar battles will fill the courts over AR. What is to stop someone superimposing the image of a nicer building on their own? Should they need to pay a license to do so? What about overlaying celebrity faces on strangers? What about adding multimedia overlays from the web to make dull and ordinary products do exciting things when you use them? A cocktail served in a bar could have a miniature Sydney fireworks display going on over it. That might make it more exciting, but should the media creator be paid and how should that be policed? We’ll need some sort of AR YouTube at the very least with added geolocation.

The whole arts and media industry will see city streets as galleries and stages on which to show off and sell their creations.

Public services will make more mundane use of AR. Simple everyday context-dependent signage is one application, but overlays would be valuable in emergencies too. If police or fire services could superimpose warning on everyone’s visors nearby, that may help save lives in emergencies. Health services will use AR to assist ordinary people to care for a patient until an ambulance arrives

Shopping provide more uses and more battles. AR will show you what a competing shop has on offer right beside the one in front of you. That will make it easy to digitally trespass on a competitor’s shop floor. People can already do that on their smartphone, but AR will put the full image large as life right in front of your eyes to make it very easy to compare two things. Shops won’t want to block comms completely because that would prevent people wanting to enter their shop at all, so they will either have to compete harder or find more elaborate ways of preventing people making direct visual comparisons in-store. Perhaps digital trespassing might become a legal issue.

There will inevitably be a lot of social media use of AR too. If people get together to demonstrate, it will be easier to coordinate them. If police insist they disperse, they could still congregate virtually. Dispersed flash mobs could be coordinated as much as ones in the same location. That makes AR a useful tool for grass-roots democracy, especially demonstrations and direct action, but it also provides a platform for negative uses such as terrorism. Social entrepreneurs will produce vast numbers of custom overlays for millions of different purposes and contexts. Today we have tens of millions of websites and apps. Tomorrow we will have even more AR overlays.

These are just a few of the near term uses of augmented reality and a few hints as issues arising. It will change every aspect of our lives in due course, just as the web has, but more so.

 

Pubic fashion and the Internet-of-genitalia

Not for the easily offended, or my parents, who do read my blog sometimes, but hopefully not this one. This is another extract from my forthcoming book on future fashion. No sector is immune to futurology.

The pubic area may not be talked about much in fashion articles, but it is suited to fashion as any other. Pubic hairstyles (including bald) vary from person to person and over time, but they certainly do get fashion consideration. Vajazzling, decorating the female pubic area with stick-on glitter, has also had its limelight as a fashion thing, Beautifying and styling the pubic area is here to stay for as long as casual sex remains common. If an area gets attention, people will want to make it look sexier or more interesting or enticing, so it is just another platform for personal expression, as much as choice of underwear.

Updating stick-on glitter to LEDs or lasers could make a whole light show down there. This could of course tap into data from sensors that pick up on sexual activity and arousal level. That would allow a direct feedback route on performance. Whoever is pleasuring her could see the results echoed in a visual response in local LEDs or flashing glitter or laser beams. That would be fun, but it could use audio too. Since the pubic region is fairly flat and firm, it also presents a potential surface for flat speakers to generate sound effects or music during sex, again linked to arousal sensor feedback. Of course, speakers are another form of vibration device too so they might also take an active role in stimulation.

Hair management already uses lasers to kill hair follicles, but some women regret having their pubic areas completely depilated, and are now having hair implanted back. As hair styles come and go, what is needed is a better trimming and shaving system. I am surprised the shaver industry has not already picked up on this possibility, (if it has I am not aware of it) but a design could be rendered much better if the shaver can access a local positioning system. If a person sticks on a few tiny transmitters, reflectors or transponders in specific places near the trimming zone, the shaver head would know its exact position and orientation and would be able to trim that specific area precisely as dictated by the chosen pattern. Automated precision hair styles would be feasible without taking too much time. Another cheap and easy way of doing this would be to spray a marker pattern through a stencil and have the shaver trim the areas marked.

Naturally, such shaver technology would also be useful for other areas such as the head or chest (for men anyway, I don’t expect female chest hair to be a significant fashion trend any time soon), or to replace waxing anywhere on the body with precision patterns and trims.

Many people are unhappy with their actual genitalia. Re-scuplting, trimming, tightening, or changing size is becoming common. Gender re-assignment surgery is also growing, but gender-change and gender-play fashion needs a whole section for itself, and I’ve written about it before anyway(my most popular post ever in fact) : https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/the-future-of-gender-2/

Not in the pubic area, but somewhat related  to this topic nonetheless, here is a quick consideration of smart breast implants:

[Smart breast implants

Smart breast implants are one of my best inventions – the only one for which I have ever received a prize. The idea was that if a woman is determined to expand her breasts by putting stuff into them, why not put electronics in? In fact, electronics can be made using silicone, one of the main breast implant materials. It won’t work as fast as silicon-based IT but it will do fine for things like MP3 players (MP4 now of course). A range of smartphone-style functions could be added as well as music playing. For example, navigation could link location and maps to vibrating nipples to indicate left or right. I suggested using nipples as control knobs for my MP3 implants, and that is perfectly feasible. Detectors in the implant could easily detect torsion and interpret the tweaks. Implants would be able to monitor some biological functions more precisely than wristbands. Heartbeat and breathing could be audio recorded far better for example.

Shape changing breast implants

I often cite polymer gel muscles in fashion, because they are so useful. Contracting when a voltage is applied across them, but made of electro-active polymer so they feel organic, they are ideal for many purposes in and on the body for extra strength of for changing shapes or orientation. Breast implants could contain strands of such gel, arranged so that the shape of the implant can be altered. They could be adjusted to change breast shape, improve lift or cleavage, and relaxed when no-one is looking.

Pectoral implants already give some men the appearance of being more muscular and fit. Adding actual strength using polymer gel muscles rather than simple padding would be a lot better.

Bras

Shape change materials could also be used in bras of course, allowing control to be varied by an app. A single bra could work for general and sports use for example. Similarly, hydraulic bras could give extra lift or control by inflating tubes with compressed air. Staying with inflation, of course the bra as a whole could be inflated to give the illusion of larger size.

Bras can incorporate energy harvesting for use while running. A suitable material could be plastic capacitors, which make electricity directly as they flex.

Nipple-tapes could be coupled to vibrators for a slightly more immersive sexual experience, and remote controlled for more kinky play.]

Now, back to the pubic area.

Rather along the same lines as smart breast implants, if someone is going to the lengths of having genital surgery and particularly if implants are involved, then electronic implants could be a useful consideration. Some devices use electrical stimulation, applying particular patterns of voltages and currents to create, magnify and sustain arousal. Devices could be implanted to do exactly this. They could be access restricted to the wearer, controlled by a dominant or even networked for remote control, by any chosen individual or group. MEMS or sensors could also be implanted to create vibration or to measure arousal.

Sensors can easily detect moisture levels, skin resistance, blood flow, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing and so on. These together can indicate a great deal about arousal state and that can be fed back into stimulation system to maximise pleasure. Stimulation devices could provide direct stimulation or work along with external devices such as vibrators, controlling their behavior according to location and sensor feedback. Vibrators shouldn’t need control knobs that distract their users, but should automatically adjust their behavior according to the region they are stimulating and the user’s  arousal profile, changing stimulation throughout the session according to programs and recorded routines stored in the cloud. Shared toys could use fingerprint recognition or implanted RFID chips, but I think that would usually be considered to be going too far. 

An important fashion consideration is that visual appearance can mostly be decoupled from function. Electronics can be shrunk to vanishingly small size and fit in the tiniest of sensors or actuators. Genital and pubic electronics can therefore be visually appealing at the same time as providing a full suite of functionality.

Shape change materials such as electro-active polymers can also be implanted. These could also be used to generate vibration by varying applied voltage patterns appropriately. Shape changing implants could be used to vary tightness during penetration, or to make features more appealing during foreplay.

As with the pubic area as a whole, genitals could also incorporate visual feedback using color change, LEDS or even music or other sound effects according to arousal state. Sound is better generated by pubic speakers though as surfaces are more cooperative to engineering.

Clearly, with a number of feedback and bio-sign monitoring sensors, MEMS, speaker systems, illumination, decoration and visual effects systems, the whole pubic and genital region is a potentially large electronics ecosystem, and we will need a whole branch of IoT technology, which could be termed ‘Internet of genitalia’.

The future of fashion: hair waves

I don’t do hair. I shave my head to 3mm every month or so, and never let it grow long., but I watch telly and observe that very many women use hair extensions and wigs, and I spot a high voltage technology opportunity.

Remember the Van der Graff generator in your school physics lab? It makes a high voltage than makes your hair stand up. When you finally touch something, the tiny charge involved dissipates and gives you a tiny shock.

So, suppose you are a wig manufacturer, making a wig with fine filaments, or hair I guess. You add a base layer of circuitry, ideally separated from your scalp by an insulating layer. You design the circuits so that you can apply specific voltages individually to any region of the hair, and you design a nice algorithm to move those voltages around in patterns, so that patches of hair stand up, fall down, and overall the effect is dynamic patterns such as waves all over your head. Hair will be mobile.

Total charge doesn’t need to change much, mainly just be moved around, so battery drain would be OK, and the power supply could be hidden in a collar or shoulder pad.

Hair patterns could even adopt fashion language, used for secret tribal signalling, and internet of hair will be needed. It is also capable of misuse and another potential signalling path to guard against in casinos.

It would also be trivially easy to monitor your emotional state, or even thought recognition, and have you hair respond and illustrate your emotions. So when you think “shock, horror”, you hair would actually stand on end 🙂

Well, you get the idea. Fun! And you read it here first.

Shoulder demons and angels

Remember the cartoons where a character would have a tiny angel on one shoulder telling them the right thing to do, and a little demon on the other telling them it would be far more cool to be nasty somehow, e.g. get their own back, be selfish, greedy. The two sides might be ‘eat your greens’ v ‘the chocolate is much nicer’, or ‘your mum would be upset if you arrive home late’ v ‘this party is really going to be fun soon’. There are a million possibilities.

Shoulder angels

Enter artificial intelligence, which is approaching conversation level, and knows the context of your situation, and your personal preferences etc, coupled to an earpiece in each ear, available from the cloud of course to minimise costs. If you really insisted, you could make cute little Bluetooth angels and demons to do the job properly.

In fact Sony have launched Xperia Ear, which does the basic admin assistant part of this, telling you diary events etc. All we need is an expansion of its domain, and of course an opposing view. ‘Sure, you have an appointment at 3, but that person you liked is in town, you could meet them for coffee.’

The little 3D miniatures could easily incorporate the electronics. Either you add an electronics module after manufacture into a small specially shaped recess or one is added internally during printing. You could have an avatar of a trusted friend as your shoulder angel, and maybe one of a more mischievous friend who is sometimes more fun as your shoulder demon. Of course you could have any kind of miniature pets or fictional entities instead.

With future materials, and of course AR, these little shoulder accessories could be great fun, and add a lot to your overall outfit, both in appearance and as conversation add-ons.

Digital Halos

I enjoyed watching a few seconds of the Lady Gaga video from the Grammy’s where Intel used a projection system to display a spider crawling around her face along with Bowie images. State of the art today is dirt cheap tomorrow. So soon everyone will be doing that, projecting images and videos onto their faces. They will do that to look like other people too, as Gaga hinted. I do like Gaga. She may not have the advantage of being born the prettiest singer ever but she makes up for that 100-fold by her creativity and pushing boundaries in every way she can and making good use of tech. I love her music too.

I’ve written about digital or smart makeup lots of times so i won’t do that here. But another idea that springs to mind is the digital halo.

Some fog generators use water and ultrasonic transducers to create a fine mist, the sort of thing you see on indoor water features where fog tumbles down the ornament. Of course, some come with a bank of LEDs, because they can, and that makes pretty colors too. At least one trade show projection system uses a fine mist as a 3D projection medium too. Put these together, and you have the capability to make a fine mist around your head and project images onto it. I blogged that idea quite a while ago as a Star Wars projection in front of you, but imagine doing this as a sort of halo, a mist that surrounds your head and immerses it in visual effects. You could project a halo if you so desire, and it could be a single whitish color as tradition dictates, changing colors, patterns or images, or you could do the full thing and go for a full-blown video spectacular, and – haute to Family Guy –  you could accompany it with your personal theme too.

Taste seemingly has few boundaries, and it is frequently obvious that the lower echelons of bad taste often offer the greatest rewards. So I am confident that we will soon see people sporting the most hideously garish digital halos.

How to make a Star Wars light saber

A couple of years ago I explained how to make a free-floating combat drone: http://carbonweapons.com/2013/06/27/free-floating-combat-drones/ , like the ones in Halo or Mass Effect. They could realistically be made in the next couple of decades and are very likely to feature heavily in far future warfare, or indeed terrorism. I was chatting to a journalist this morning about light sabers, another sci-fi classic. They could also be made in the next few decades, using derivatives of the same principles. A prototype is feasible this side of 2050.

I’ll ignore the sci-fi wikis that explain how they are meant to work, which mostly approximate to fancy words for using magic or The Force and various fictional crystals. On the other hand, we still want something that will look and sound and behave like the light saber.

The handle bit is pretty obvious. It has to look good and contain a power source and either a powerful laser or plasma generator. The traditional problem with using a laser-based saber is that the saber is only meant to be a metre long but laser beams don’t generally stop until they hit something. Plasma on the other hand is difficult to contain and needs a lot of energy even when it isn’t being used to strike your opponent. A laser can be switched on and off and is therefore better. But we can have some nice glowy plasma too, just for fun.

The idea is pretty simple then. The blade would be made of graphene flakes coated with carbon nanotube electron pipes, suspended using the same technique I outlined in the blog above. These could easily be made to form a long cylinder and when you want the traditional Star Wars look, they would move about a bit, giving the nice shimmery blurry edge we all like so that the tube looks just right with blurry glowy edges. Anyway, with the electron pipe surface facing inwards, these flakes would generate the internal plasma and its nice glow. They would self-organize their cylinder continuously to follow the path of the saber. Easy-peasy. If they strike something, they would just re-organize themselves into the cylinder again once they are free.

For later models, a Katana shaped blade will obviously be preferred. As we know, all ultimate weapons end up looking like a Katana, so we might as well go straight to it, and have the traditional cylindrical light saber blade as an optional cosmetic envelope for show fights. The Katana is a universal physics result in all possible universes.

The hum could be generated by a speaker in the handle if you have absolutely no sense of style, but for everyone else, you could simply activate pulsed magnetic fields between the flakes so that they resonate at the required band to give your particular tone. Graphene flakes can be magnetized so again this is perfectly consistent with physics. You could download and customize hums from the cloud.

Now the fun bit. When the blade gets close to an object, such as your opponent’s arm, or your loaf of bread in need of being sliced, the capacitance of the outer flakes would change, and anyway, they could easily transmit infrared light in every direction and pick up reflections. It doesn’t really matter which method you pick to detect the right moment to activate the laser, the point is that this bit would be easy engineering and with lots of techniques to pick from, there could be a range of light sabers on offer. Importantly, at least a few techniques could work that don’t violate any physics. Next, some of those self-organizing graphene flakes would have reflective surface backings (metals bond well with graphene so this is also a doddle allowed by physics), and would therefore form a nice reflecting surface to deflect the laser beam at the object about to be struck. If a few flakes are vaporized, others would be right behind them to reflect the beam.

So just as the blade strikes the surface of the target, the powerful laser switches on and the beam is bounced off the reflecting flakes onto the target, vaporizing it and cauterizing the ends of the severed blood vessels to avoid unnecessary mess that might cause a risk of slipping. The shape of the beam depends on the locations and angles of the reflecting surface flakes, and they could be in pretty much any shape to create any shape of beam needed, which could be anything from a sharp knife to a single point, severing an arm or drilling a nice neat hole through the heart. Obviously, style dictates that the point of the saber is used for a narrow beam and the edge is used as a knife, also useful for cutting bread or making toast (the latter uses transverse laser deflection at lower aggregate power density to char rather than vaporize the bread particles, and toast is an option selectable by a dial on the handle).

What about fights? When two of these blades hit each other there would be a variety of possible effects. Again, it would come down to personal style. There is no need to have any feel at all, the beams could simple go through each other, but where’s the fun in that? Far better that the flakes also carry high electric currents so they could create a nice flurry of sparks and the magnetic interactions between the sabers could also be very powerful. Again, self organisation would allow circuits to form to carry the currents at the right locations to deflect or disrupt the opponent’s saber. A galactic treaty would be needed to ensure that everyone fights by the rules and doesn’t cheat by having an ethereal saber that just goes right through the other one without any nice show. War without glory is nothing, and there can be no glory without a strong emotional investment and physical struggle mediated by magnetic interactions in the sabers.

This saber would have a very nice glow in any color you like, but not have a solid blade, so would look and feel very like the Star Wars saber (when you just want to touch it, the lasers would not activate to slice your fingers off, provided you have read the safety instructions and have the safety lock engaged). The blade could also grow elegantly from the hilt when it is activated, over a second or so, it would not just suddenly appear at full length. We need an on/off button for that bit, but that could simply be emotion or thought recognition so it turns on when you concentrate on The Force, or just feel it.

The power supply could be a battery or graphene capacitor bank of a couple of containers of nice chemicals if you want to build it before we can harness The Force and magic crystals.

A light saber that looks, feels and behaves just like the ones on Star Wars is therefore entirely feasible, consistent with physics, and could be built before 2050. It might use different techniques than I have described, but if no better techniques are invented, we could still do it the way I describe above. One way or another, we will have light sabers.

 

The future of nylon: ladder-free hosiery

Last week I outlined the design for a 3D printer that can print and project graphene filaments at 100m/s. That was designed to be worn on the wrist like Spiderman’s, but an industrial version could print faster. When I checked a few of the figures, I discovered that the spinnerets for making nylon stockings run at around the same speed. That means that graphene stockings could be made at around the same speed. My print head produced 140 denier graphene yarn but it made that from many finer filaments so basically any yarn thickness from a dozen carbon atoms right up to 140 denier would be feasible.

The huge difference is that a 140 denier graphene thread is strong enough to support a man at 2g acceleration. 10 denier stockings are made from yarn that breaks quite easily, but unless I’ve gone badly wrong on the back of my envelope, 10 denier graphene would have roughly 10kg (22lb)breaking strain. That’s 150 times stronger than nylon yarn of the same thickness.

If so, then that would mean that a graphene stocking would have incredible strength. A pair of 10 denier graphene stockings or tights (pantyhose) might last for years without laddering. That might not be good news for the nylon stocking industry, but I feel confident they would adapt easily to such potential.

Alternatively, much finer yarns could be made that would still have reasonable ladder resistance, so that would also affect the visual appearance and texture. They could be made so fine that the fibers are invisible even up close. People might not always want that, but the key message is that wear-resistant, ladder free hosiery could be made that has any gauge from 0.1 denier to 140 denier.

There is also a bonus that graphene is a superb conductor. That means that graphene fibers could be woven into nylon hosiery to add circuits. Those circuits might be to harvest radio energy, act as an aerial, power LEDS in the hosiery or change its colors or patterns. So even if it isn’t used for the whole garment, it might still have important uses in the garment as an addition to the weave.

There is yet another bonus. Graphene circuits could allow electrical supply to shape changing polymers that act rather like muscles, contracting when a voltage is applied across them, so that a future pair of tights could shape a leg far better, with tensions and pressures electronically adjusted over the leg to create the perfect shape. Graphene can make electronic muscles directly too, but in a more complex mechanism (e.g. using magnetic field generation and interaction, or capacitors and electrical attraction/repulsion).

How to make a Spiderman-style graphene silk thrower for emergency services

I quite like Spiderman movies, and having the ability to fire a web at a distant object or villain has its appeal. Since he fires web from his forearm, it must be lightweight to withstand the recoil, and to fire enough to hold his weight while he swings, it would need to have extremely strong fibers. It is therefore pretty obvious that the material of choice when we build such a thing will be graphene, which is even stronger than spider silk (though I suppose a chemical ejection device making spider silk might work too). A thin graphene thread is sufficient to hold him as he swings so it could fit inside a manageable capsule.

So how to eject it?

One way I suggested for making graphene threads is to 3D print the graphene, using print nozzles made of carbon nanotubes and using a very high-speed modulation to spread the atoms at precise spacing so they emerge in the right physical patterns and attach appropriate positive or negative charge to each atom as they emerge from the nozzles so that they are thrown together to make them bond into graphene. This illustration tries to show the idea looking at the nozzles end on, but shows only a part of the array:It doesn’t show properly that the nozzles are at angles to each other and the atoms are ejected in precise phased patterns, but they need to be, since the atoms are too far apart to form graphene otherwise so they need to eject at the right speed in the right directions with the right charges at the right times and if all that is done correctly then a graphene filament would result. The nozzle arrangements, geometry and carbon atom sizes dictate that only narrow filaments of graphene can be produced by each nozzle, but as the threads from many nozzles are intertwined as they emerge from the spinneret, so a graphene thread would be produced made from many filaments. Nevertheless, it is possible to arrange carbon nanotubes in such a way and at the right angle, so provided we can get the high-speed modulation and spacing right, it ought to be feasible. Not easy, but possible. Then again, Spiderman isn’t real yet either.

The ejection device would therefore be a specially fabricated 3D print head maybe a square centimeter in area, backed by a capsule containing finely powdered graphite that could be vaporized to make the carbon atom stream through the nozzles. Some nice lasers might be good there, and some cool looking electronic add-ons to do the phasing and charging. You could make this into one heck of a cool gun.

How thick a thread do we need?

Assuming a 70kg (154lb) man and 2g acceleration during the swing, we need at least 150kg breaking strain to have a small safety margin, bearing in mind that if it breaks, you can fire a new thread. Steel can achieve that with 1.5mm thick wire, but graphene’s tensile strength is 300 times better than steel so 0.06mm is thick enough. 60 microns, or to put it another way, roughly 140 denier, although that is a very quick guess. That means roughly the same sort of graphene thread thickness is needed to support our Spiderman as the nylon used to make your backpack. It also means you could eject well over 10km of thread from a 200g capsule, plenty. Happy to revise my numbers if you have better ones. Google can be a pain!

How fast could the thread be ejected?

Let’s face it. If it can only manage 5cm/s, it is as much use as a chocolate flamethrower. Each bond in graphene is 1.4 angstroms long, so a graphene hexagon is about 0.2nm wide. We would want our graphene filament to eject at around 100m/s, about the speed of a crossbow bolt. 100m/s = 5 x 10^11 carbon atoms ejected per second from each nozzle, in staggered phasing. So, half a terahertz. Easy! That’s well within everyday electronics domains. Phew! If we can do better, we can shoot even faster.

We could therefore soon have a graphene filament ejection device that behaves much like Spiderman’s silk throwers. It needs some better engineers than me to build it, but there are plenty of them around.

Having such a device would be fun for sports, allowing climbers to climb vertical rock faces and overhangs quickly, or to make daring leaps and hope the device works to save them from certain death. It would also have military and police uses. It might even have uses in road accident prevention, yanking pedestrians away from danger or tethering cars instantly to slow them extra quickly. In fact, all the emergency services would have uses for such devices and it could reduce accidents and deaths. I feel confident that Spiderman would think of many more exciting uses too.

Producing graphene silk at 100m/s might also be pretty useful in just about every other manufacturing industry. With ultra-fine yarns with high strength produced at those speeds, it could revolutionize the fashion industry too.

Ultrasound scan bodysuit

You’ve seen ultrasound scans of pregnant women that show grainy pictures of the foetus inside so I won’t bother pasting one here and the appropriate ones are all copyrighted anyway. Medical imaging focuses on checking whether Baby is OK and reassuring the mum, but have they never heard of Instagram and Facebook? Duh! Sure, a mum-to-be can get a printout and hold it in front of her tummy, but it’s 2015!

The idea is that a woman could wear a bodysuit that houses an array of very low power ultrasonic transducers and detectors which that would allow a scan over a long period, and the bodysuit would also house a cute OLED display window to have a look inside. The transducers would be low power because in spite of ultrasound scans being a normal part of pregnancy today, there have been a few concerns about safety in the past, so even if a single scan is safe, having many of them every day might not be, so the lower the power the better, and the more transducers and receivers that are available, the better that picture could be. A periodic low power pulse from each transducer is what I’d imagine and the sensors would use the data from each pulse to improve the image, which would only change slowly over time – we’re not after heartbeat monitoring here, we’re looking for Instagram pics of Baby. State of the art imaging technology should then allow a nice 3D picture of the foetus to be built up over time. There is no hurry if the woman is wearing it for hours. Having got such an image, of course the proud mum will want it on her Instagram and Facebook pages, so obviously a web link should be in the bodysuit too, or at least a bluetooth link to Mum’s mobile, but she might also want it on a display built into the bodysuit so she can show off her baby in situ so to speak. If she doesn’t want the OLED display in the suit because maternity bodysuits look crap, she could wear a smartphone pouch belt and use that.

OK, back to work.

The future of make-up

I was digging through some old 2002 powerpoint slides for an article on active skin and stumbled across probably the worst illustration I have ever done, though in my defense, I was documenting a great many ideas that day and spent only a few minutes on it:

If a woman ever looks like this, and isn’t impersonating a bald Frenchman, she has more problems to worry about than her make-up. The pic does however manage to convey the basic principle, and that’s all that is needed for a technical description. The idea is that her face can be electronically demarked into various makeup regions and the makeup on those regions can therefore adopt the appropriate colour for that region. In the pic ‘nanosomes’ wasn’t a serious name, but a sarcastic take on the cosmetics industry which loves to take scientific sounding words and invent new ones that make their products sound much more high tech than they actually are. Nanotech could certainly play a role, but since the eye can’t discern features smaller than 0.1mm, it isn’t essential. This is no longer just an idea, companies are now working on development of smart makeup, and we already have prototype electronic tattoos, one of the layers I used for my active skin but again based on an earlier vision.

The original idea didn’t use electronics, but simply used self-organisation tech I’d designed in 1993 on an electronic DNA project. Either way would work, but the makeup would be different for each.

The electronic layer, if required, would most likely be printed onto the skin at a beauty salon, would be totally painless, last weeks and could take only a few minutes to print. It extends IoT to the face.

Both mechanisms could use makeup containing flat plates that create colour by diffraction the same way the scales on a butterfly does. That would make an excellent colour pallet. Beetles produce colour a different way and that would work too. Or we could copy squids or cuttlefish. Nature has given us many excellent start points for biomimetics, and indeed the self-organisation principles were stolen from nature too. Nature used hormone gradients to help your cells differentiate when you were an embryo. If nature can arrange the rich microscopic detail of every part of your face, then similar techniques can certainly work for a simple surface layer of make-up. Having the electronic underlay makes self organisation easier but it isn’t essential. There are many ways to implement self organisation in makeup and only some of them require any electronics at all, and some of those would use electronic particles embedded in the make-up rather than an underlay.

An electronic underlay can be useful to provide the energy for a transition too, and that allows the makeup to change colour on command. That means in principle that a woman could slap the makeup all over her face and touch a button on her digital mirror (which might simply be a tablet or smart phone) and the make-up would instantly change to be like the picture she selected. With suitable power availability, the make-up could be a full refresh rate video display, and we might see teenagers walking future streets wearing kaleidoscopic make-up that shows garish cartoon video expressions and animates their emoticons. More mature women might choose different appearances for different situations and they could be selected manually via an app or gesture or automatically by predetermined location settings.

Obviously, make-up is mostly used on the face, but once it becomes the basis of a smear-on computer display, it could be used on any part of the body as a full touch sensitive display area, e.g. the forearm.

Although some men already wear makeup, many more might use smart make-up as its techie nature makes it more acceptable.

The future of holes

H already in my alphabetic series! I was going to write about happiness, or have/have nots, or hunger, or harassment, or hiding, or health. Far too many options for H. Holes is a topic I have never written about, not even a bit, whereas the others would just be updates on previous thoughts. So here goes, the future of holes.

Holes come in various shapes and sizes. At one extreme, we have great big holes from deep mining, drilling, fracking, and natural holes such as meteor craters, rifts and volcanoes. Some look nice and make good documentaries, but I have nothing to say about them.

At the other we have long thin holes in optical fibers that increase bandwidth or holes through carbon nanotubes to make them into electron pipes. And short fat ones that make nice passages through semi-permeable smart membranes.

Electron pipes are an idea I invented in 1992 to increase internet capacity by several orders of magnitude. I’ve written about them in this blog before: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/increasing-internet-capacity-electron-pipes/

Short fat holes are interesting. If you make a fabric using special polymers that can stretch when a voltage is applied across it, then round holes in it would become oval holes as long as you only stretch it in one direction.  Particles that may fit through round holes might be too thick to pass through them when they are elongated. If you can do that with a membrane on the skin surface, then you have an electronically controllable means of allowing the right mount of medication to be applied. A dispenser could hold medication and use the membrane to allow the right doses at the right time to be applied.

Long thin holes are interesting too. Hollow fiber polyester has served well as duvet and pillow filling for many years. Suppose more natural material fibers could be engineered to have holes, and those holes could be filled with chemicals that are highly distasteful to moths. As a moth larva starts to eat the fabric, it would very quickly be repelled, protecting the fabric from harm.

Conventional wisdom says when you are in a hole, stop digging. End.

The future of feminism and fashion

Perhaps it’s a bit presumptive of me to talk about what feminists want or don’t want, but I will make the simplifying assumption that they vary somewhat and don’t all want the same things. When it comes to makeup, many feminists want to look how they want to look for their own pleasure, not specifically to appeal to men, or they may want to attract some people and not others, or they may not want to bother with makeup at all, but still be able to look nice for the right people.

Augmented reality will allow those options. AR creates an extra layer of appearance that allows a woman to present herself any way she wants via an avatar, and also to vary presented appearance according to who is looking at her. So she may choose to be attractive to people she finds attractive, and plain to people she’d rather not get attention from. This is independent of any makeup she might be wearing, so she may choose not to wear any at all and rely entirely on the augmented reality layer to replace makeup, saving a lot of time, effort and expense. She could even use skin care products such as face masks that are purely functional, nourishing or protecting her face, but which don’t look very nice. Friends, colleagues and particular subsections of total strangers would still see her as she wants to be seen and she might not care about how she appears to others.

It may therefore be possible that feminism could use makeup as a future activist platform. It would allow women to seize back control over their appearance in a far more precise way, making it abundantly clear that their appearance belongs to them and is under their control and that they control who they look nice for. They would not have to give up looking good for themselves or their friends, but would be able to exclude any groups currently out of favour.

However, it doesn’t have to be just virtual appearance that they can control electronically. It is also possible to have actual physical makeup that changes according to time, location, emotional state or circumstances. Active makeup does just that, but I’ve written too often about that. Let’s look instead at other options:

Fashion has created many different clothing accessories over the years. It has taken far longer than it should, but we are now finally seeing flexible polymer displays being forged into wrist watch straps and health monitoring bands as well as bendy and curvy phones. As 1920s era fashion makes a small comeback, it can’t be long before headbands and hair-bands come back and they would be a perfect display platform too. Hair accessories can be pretty much any shape and size, and be a single display zone or multiple ones. Some could even use holographic displays, so that the accessory seems to change its form, or have optional remote components seemingly hanging free in the nearby air. Any of these could be electronically controllable or set to adjust automatically according to location and the people present.

Displays would also make good forehead jewellery, such as electronic eyebrows, holographic jewels, smart bindis, forehead tattoos and so on. They could change colour or pattern according to emotions for example. As long as displays are small, skin flexing doesn’t present too big an engineering barrier.

In fact, small display particles such as electronic glitter could group together to appear as a single display, even though each is attached to a different piece of skin. Thus, flexing of the skin is still possible with a collection of rigid small displays, which could be millimetre sized electronic glitter. Electronic glitter could contain small capacitors that store energy harvested from temperature difference between the skin and the environment, periodically allowing a colour change.

However, it won’t be just the forehead that is available once displays become totally flexible. That will make the whole visible face an electronic display platform instead of just a place for dumb makeup. Smart freckles and moles could make a fashion reappearance. Lips and cheeks could change colour according to mood and pre-decided protocols, rather than just at the whim of nature.

Other parts of the body would likely house displays too. Fingernails and toenails could be an early candidate since they are relatively rigid. The wrist and forearm are also often exposed. Much of the rest of the body is concealed by clothing most of the time, but seasonal displays are likely when it is more often bare. Beach displays could interact with swimwear, or even substitute for it.

In fact, enabling a multitude of tiny displays on the face and around the body will undoubtedly create a new fashion design language. Some dialects could be secret, only understood by certain groups, a tribal language. Fashion has always had an extensive symbology and adding electronic components to the various items will extend its potential range. It is impossible to predict what different things will mean to mainstream and sub-cultures, as meanings evolve chaotically from random beginnings. But there will certainly be many people and groups willing to capitalise on the opportunities presented. Feminism could use such devices and languages to good effect.

Clothing and accessories such as jewellery are also obvious potential display platforms. A good clue for the preferred location is the preferred location today for similar usage. For example, many people wear logos, messages and pictures on their T-shirts, whereas other items of clothing remain mostly free of them. The T-shirt is therefore by far the most likely electronic display area. Belts, boots, shoes and bag-straps offer a likely platform too, not because they are used so much today, but because they again present an easy and relatively rigid physical platform.

Timescales for this run from historical appearance of LED jewellery at Christmas (which I am very glad to say I also predicted well in advance) right through to holographic plates that appear to hover around the person as they walk around. I’ve explained in previous blogs how actual floating and mobile plates could be made using plasma and electro-magnetics. But the timescale of relevance in the next few years is that of the cheaper and flexible polymer display. As costs fall and size increases, in parallel with an ever improving wireless and cloud infrastructure, the potential revenue from a large new sector combining the fashion and display industries will make this not so much likely as  inevitable.

Morality inversion. You will be an outcast before you’re old

I did my religious studies exams in 1970s Ireland. We were asked us to consider euthanasia and abortion and how relevant attitudes and laws might change during our lifetimes. Looking back, I’d say we’ve seen a full inversion in both.

My point in this blog isn’t right or wrong but how quickly the random walk of acceptability in modern Western society can take someone from proper to pariah.

I believe it is dangerous for society if its views on morality swing fully and quickly between extremes, especially since technology ensures that people can access decades-old material and records and views easily. What you do today may be judged today by today’s morality, but will also be judged by the very different morality of 2050. You could well become a pariah for activities or views that are perfectly acceptable and normal today. Today’s photos, videos, selfies, tweets, chat records and blogs will all still be easily searchable and they might damn you. The worst thing is you can’t reliably predict which values will invert, so nobody is safe.

Let’s looks at some examples, starting with the two examples we did for Religious Studies – abortion and euthanasia. Remember, the point is not whether something is right or wrong, it is that the perception of it being right or wrong has changed. i.e what is the ‘correct’ fashionable view to hold?

Abortion was legal in 1970s Great Britain, but was far from socially accepted. A woman who had an abortion back then may well have felt a social outcast. Today, it is ‘a woman’s right to choose’ and anyone wanting to restrain that right would be the social outcast.

Euthanasia was universally accepted as wrong in the 1970s. Today the UK’s NHS already implements it via ‘The Liverpool Care Pathway’, almost 1984’s Doublespeak in its level of inversion. Recently some regions have rolled euthanasia out still further, asking patients over 75 years old whether they want to be resuscitated. Euthanasia is not only accepted but encouraged.

Meanwhile, assisted suicide has also become accepted. Very clearly wrong in the 1970s, perfectly fine and understandable today.

Homosexuality in the 1970s forced people to hide deep in a closet. Today, it’s a job requirement for reality TV, chat show hosting and singing in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Gay marriage would have been utterly unimaginable in 1970s Ireland but it would be very brave indeed to admit being in the No camp in today’s referendum campaign there.

Casual sex had its inversion decades earlier of course, but a single person still a virgin at 20 feels ashamed today, whereas anyone having sex outside of marriage before the 1960s would be the one made to feel ashamed.

A committed Christian in the 1970s was the gold standard of morality. Today, being a Christian labels someone as a bigoted dinosaur who should be denied a career. By contrast, being Muslim generates many competing moral inversions that currently results in a net social approval.

The West in the 1970s was the accepted definition of civilization. Now, the West is responsible for all the World’s troubles. Even history is not immune, and the morality of old wars is often up for renewed debate.

Even humor isn’t immune. Some TV comedies of the 1970s are seen as totally unacceptable today. Comedians have to be very careful about topics in their jokes, with today’s restrictions very different from and often even opposite to 1970s restrictions.

These areas have all seen total inversions of social acceptability. Many others, such as drugs, smoking, drinking, gambling, hunting and vegetarianism, see more frequent swings, though not usually full inversion. Still more practices are simultaneously acceptable for some social groups but not for others, such as oppression of women, mutilation, violence, sexualization of children, and even pedophilia.

In every case, attitude change has been gradual. In most, there have been some successful pressure groups that have successfully managed to change the direction of shame, one case at a time. Orwell’s 1984 has proven superbly insightful, realizing how social interaction, the need to feel accepted and the desire for status, and even language can be manipulated to achieve a goal. So successful has that been that shame and doublespeak have become the weapons of choice in left-wing politics, though the right haven’t quite worked out how to use them yet.

With these forces of inversion proven to be highly effective, we must question where they might be used in the future. What do you do or say today that will make future generations despise you? What things are wrong that will become right? What things that are right will become wrong? And what will be the arguments?

In case, you haven’t read the preceding text, I am not condoning any of the following, merely listing them as campaigns we may well see in the next few decades that might completely invert morality and social acceptance by the 2050s.

Drugs in sport – not taking them once adverse health effects have been conquered could be seen as lack of commitment. It is your duty to achieve the best performance you can.

Genetic modification and selection for babies – If you don’t approve, you are forcing people to live a life less than they could, to be less than they should. If you don’t give your kids the best possible genetic start in life, you are an irresponsible parent.

Owning a larger house or car than you need – You are not successful and high status, you are a greedy, utterly selfish, environment destroyer denying poorer people a decent life and home.

Resisting theft – the thief obviously was deprived, almost certainly by an oppressive society. It is you who are stealing from them by preventing social disadvantage from being addressed. Your property should be confiscated and given to them.

Pedophilia – Based on the failed 1970s PIE campaign which may find the field is soon ready for a rematch, if you don’t support reducing the age of consent to 9 or even less, you may soon be portrayed as a bigot trying to prevent young people from experiencing love.

Eating meat – you are utterly without compassion for other lives that are just as valuable as yours. What makes you think nature gives you the right to torture another creature?

Making jokes – all humor comes from taking pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. Laughing is violence. Take that smile off your face. You are a contemptible Neanderthal!

Managing a company – employment is exploitation. All decent people work with others as equals. What makes you think you have the right to exploit other people? Shame on you!

Having a full-time job – don’t you know some people don’t have any work? Why can’t you share your job with someone else? Why should you get paid loads when some people hardly get anything? Why are you so special? You disgust me!

Polygamy – who made you God? If these people want to be together, who the hell are you to say they shouldn’t be? Geez! Go take your Dodo for a walk!

Getting old – you seem to think you are entitled to respect just because you haven’t died yet. Don’t you realize millions of babies are having to be aborted just because people like you so selfishly cling on to another few years of your worthless life? The sooner we get this new limit enforced at 50 the sooner we can get rid of nasty people like you.

Patriotism – all people are equal. You want to favor your country over others, protect your borders, defend your people, uphold your way of life? That is no more than thinly veiled excuse for oppression and racism. Your views have no place in a civilized society.

Well, by now I think you get the point. A free run of values with no anchor other than current fashion can take us anywhere, and in time such a free-wandering society may eventually encounter a cliff.

In modern atheistic Western society, right and wrong is decided, it is no longer absolute. Moral relativism is a highly effective lubricant for moral change. The debate will start from whatever is the existing state and then steered by anyone in an influential position highlighting or putting a new spin on any arbitrary cherry-picked case or situation to further any agenda they wish. Future culture is governed by the mathematics of chaos and though there are attractors, there are also regions of very high instability. As chaos dictates that a butterfly wing-beat can lead to a hurricane, so feeble attention seeking by any celebrity could set a chain of events in motion that inverts yet another pillar of acceptability.

A related question – for which I don’t have any useful insight – is how long moral stability can exist before another inversion becomes possible. If and when the pendulum does start to swing back, will it go as far, as fast, or further and faster?

 

 

 

 

 

Forehead 3D mist projector

Another simple idea. I was watching the 1920s period drama Downton Abbey and Lady Mary was wearing a headband with a large jewel in it. I had an idea based on linking mist projection systems to headbands. I couldn’t find a pic of Lady Mary’s band on Google but many other designs would work just as well and the one from ASOS would be just as feasible. The idea is that a forehead band (I’m sure there is a proper fashion name for them) would have a central ‘jewel’ which is actually just an ornamental IT capsule containing a misting device and a projector as well as the obvious power supply, comms, processing, direction detectors etc. A 3D image would be projected onto water mist emitted from the reservoir in the device. A simple illustration might help:

 

Many fashion items make comebacks and a lot of 1920s things seem to be in fashion again now. This could be a nice electronic update to a very old fashion concept. With a bit more miniaturisation, smart bindis would also be feasible. It could be used with direction sensing to enable augmented reality use, or simply to display the same image regardless of gaze direction. Unlike visor based augmented reality, others would be able to see the same scene visualised for the wearer.

OLED fashion contact lenses

Self explanatory concept, but not connected to my original active contact lens direct retinal projection concept. This one is just fashion stuff and could be done easily tomorrow. I allowed a small blank central area so that you aren’t blinded if you wear them. This version doesn’t project onto the retina, though future versions could also house and power devices to do so.

OK, the illustration is crap, but I’m an engineer, not a fashion designer. Additional functionality could be to display a high res one time code into iris recognition systems for high security access.

More future fashion fun

A nice light hearted shorty again. It started as one on smart makeup, but I deleted that and will do it soon. This one is easier and in line with today’s news.

I am the best dressed and most fashion conscious futurologist in my office. Mind you, the population is 1. I liked an article in the papers this morning about Amazon starting to offer 3D printed bobble-heads that look like you.

See: http://t.co/iFBtEaRfBd.

I am especially pleased since I suggested it over 2 years ago  in a paper I wrote on 3D printing.

More uses for 3d printing

In the news article, you see the chappy with a bobble-head of him wearing the same shirt. It is obvious that since Amazon sells shirts too, that it won’t be long at all before they send you cute little avatars of you wearing the outfits you buy from them. It starts with bobble-heads but all the doll manufacturers will bring out versions based on their dolls, as well as character merchandise from films, games, TV shows. Kids will populate doll houses with minis of them and their friends.

You could even give one of a friend to them for a birthday present instead of a gift voucher, so that they can see the outfit you are offering them before they decide whether they want that or something different. Over time, you’d have a collection of minis of you and your friends in various outfits.

3D cameras are coming to phones too, so you’ll be able to immortalize embarrassing office party antics in 3D office ornaments. When you can’t afford to buy an outfit or accessory sported by your favorite celeb, you could get a miniature wearing it. Clothing manufacturers may well appreciate the extra revenue from selling miniatures of their best kit.

Sports manufacturers will make replicas of you wearing their kit, doing sporting activities. Car manufacturers will have ones of you driving the car they want you to buy, or you could buy a fleet of miniatures. Holiday companies could put you in a resort hotspot. Or in a bedroom ….with your chosen celeb.

OK, enough.

 

 

Future materials: Variable grip

 

Another simple idea for the future. Variable grip under electronic control.

Shape changing materials are springing up regularly now. There are shape memory metal alloys, proteins, polymer gel muscle fibers and even string (changes shape when it gets wet or dries again). It occurred to me that if you make a triangle out of carbon fibre or indeed anything hard, with a polymer gel base, and pull the base together, either the base moves down or the tip will move up. If tiny components this shape are embedded throughout a 3D structure such as a tire (tyre is the English spelling, the rest of this text just uses tire because most of the blog readers are Americans), then tiny spikes could be made to poke through the surface by contracting the polymer gel that forms the base. All you have to do is apply an electric field across it, and that makes the tire surface just another part of the car electronics along with the engine management system and suspension.

Tires that can vary their grip and wear according to road surface conditions might be attractive, especially in car racing, but also on the street. Emergency braking improvement would save lives, as would reduce skidding in rain or ice, and allowing the components to retract when not in use would greatly reduce their rate of wear. In racing, grip could be optimized for cornering and braking and wear could be optimized for the straights.

Fashion

Although I haven’t bothered yet to draw pretty pictures to illustrate, clothes could use variable grip too. Shoes and gloves would both benefit. Since both can have easy contact with skin (shoes can use socks as a relay), the active components could pick up electrical signals associated with muscle control or even thinking. Even stress is detectable via skin resistance measurement. Having gloves or shoes that change grip just by you thinking it would be like a cat with claws that push out when it wants to climb a fence or attack something. You could even be a micro-scale version of Wolverine. Climbers might want to vary the grip for different kinds of rock, extruding different spikes for different conditions.

Other clothes could use different materials for the components and still use the same basic techniques to push them out, creating a wide variety of electronically controllable fabric textures. Anything from smooth and shiny through to soft and fluffy could be made with a single adaptable fabric garment. Shoes, hosiery, underwear and outerwear can all benefit. Fun!

Future fashion fun – digital eyebrows

I woke in the middle of the night with another idea not worth patenting, and I’m too lazy to do it, so any entrepreneur who’s too lazy to think of ideas can have it, unless someone already has.

If you make an app that puts a picture of an eyebrow on a phone screen and moves it according to some input (e.g voice, touch, or networked control by your friends or venue), you could use phones to do fun eyebrowy type things at parties, concerts, night clubs etc. You need two phones or a midi-sized tablet unless your eyes are very close together. The phones have accelerometers that know which way up they are and can therefore balance the eyebrows in the right positions. So you can make lots of funny expression on people’s faces using your phones.

Not a Facebook-level idea you’ll agree, but I can imagine some people doing it at parties, especially if they are all controlled by a single app, so that everyone’s eyebrows make the same expression.

You could do it for the whole eye/eyebrow, but then of course you can’t see the your friends laughing, since you’re holding a screen in front of your eyes.

You could have actual physical eyebrows that attach to the tops of your glasses, also controlled remotely.

You could use e-ink/e-paper and make small patches to stick on the skin that do the same function, or a headband. Since they don’t need much power, you won’t need big batteries.

You could do the same for your nose or mouth, so that you have a digitally modifiable face controlled by your friends.

I’m already bored.

The future of biometric identification and authentication

If you work in IT security, the first part of this will not be news to you, skip to the section on the future. Otherwise, the first sections look at the current state of biometrics and some of what we already know about their security limitations.

Introduction

I just read an article on fingerprint recognition. Biometrics has been hailed by some as a wonderful way of determining someone’s identity, and by others as a security mechanism that is far too easy to spoof. I generally fall in the second category. I don’t mind using it for simple unimportant things like turning on my tablet, on which I keep nothing sensitive, but so far I would never trust it as part of any system that gives access to my money or sensitive files.

My own history is that voice recognition still doesn’t work for me, fingerprints don’t work for me, and face recognition doesn’t work for me. Iris scan recognition does, but I don’t trust that either. Let’s take a quick look at conventional biometrics today and the near future.

Conventional biometrics

Fingerprint recognition.

I use a Google Nexus, made by Samsung. Samsung is in the news today because their Galaxy S5 fingerprint sensor was hacked by SRLabs minutes after release, not the most promising endorsement of their security competence.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/samsung/10769478/Galaxy-S5-fingerprint-scanner-hacked.html

This article says the sensor is used in the user authentication to access Paypal. That is really not good. I expect quite a few engineers at Samsung are working very hard indeed today. I expect they thought they had tested it thoroughly, and their engineers know a thing or two about security. Every engineer knows you can photograph a fingerprint and print a replica in silicone or glue or whatever. It’s the first topic of discussion at any Biometrics 101 meeting. I would assume they tested for that. I assume they would not release something they expected to bring instant embarrassment on their company, especially something failing by that classic mechanism. Yet according to this article, that seems to be the case. Given that Samsung is one of the most advanced technology companies out there, and that they can be assumed to have made reasonable effort to get it right, that doesn’t offer much hope for fingerprint recognition. If they don’t do it right, who will?

My own experience with fingerprint recognition history is having to join a special queue every day at Universal Studios because their fingerprint recognition entry system never once recognised me or my child. So I have never liked it because of false negatives. For those people for whom it does work, their fingerprints are all over the place, some in high quality, and can easily be obtained and replicated.

As just one token in multi-factor authentication, it may yet have some potential, but as a primary access key, not a chance. It will probably remain be a weak authenticator.

Face recognition

There are many ways of recognizing faces – visible light, infrared or UV, bone structure, face shapes, skin texture patterns, lip-prints, facial gesture sequences… These could be combined in simultaneous multi-factor authentication. The technology isn’t there yet, but it offers more hope than fingerprint recognition. Using the face alone is no good though. You can make masks from high-resolution photographs of people, and photos could be made using the same spectrum known to be used in recognition systems. Adding gestures is a nice idea, but in a world where cameras are becoming ubiquitous, it wouldn’t be too hard to capture the sequence you use. Pretending that a mask is alive by adding sensing and then using video to detect any inspection for pulse or blood flows or gesture requests and then to provide appropriate response is entirely feasible, though it would deter casual entry. So I am not encouraged to believe it would be secure unless and until some cleverer innovation occurs.

What I do know is that I set my tablet up to recognize me and it works about one time in five. The rest of the time I have to wait till it fails and then type in a PIN. So on average, it actually slows entry down. False negative again. Giving lots of false negatives without the reward of avoiding false positives is not a good combination.

Iris scans

I was a subject in one of the early trials for iris recognition. It seemed very promising. It always recognized me and never confused me with someone else. That was a very small scale trial though so I’d need a lot more convincing before I let it near my bank account. I saw the problem of replication an iris using a high quality printer and was assured that that couldn’t work because the system checks for the eye being alive by watching for jitter and shining a light and watching for pupil contraction. Call me too suspicious but I didn’t and don’t find that at all reassuring. It won’t be too long before we can make a thin sheet high-res polymer display layered onto a polymer gel underlayer that contracts under electric field, with light sensors built in and some software analysis for real time response. You could even do it as part of a mask with the rest of the face also faithfully mimicking all the textures, real-time responses, blood flow mimicking, gesture sequences and so on. If the prize is valuable enough to justify the effort, every aspect of the eyes, face and fingerprints could be mimicked. It may be more Mission Impossible than casual high street robbery but I can’t yet have any confidence that any part of the face or gestures would offer good security.

DNA

We hear frequently that DNA is a superbly secure authenticator. Every one of your cells can identify you. You almost certainly leave a few cells at the scene of a crime so can be caught, and because your DNA is unique, it must have been you that did it. Perfect, yes? And because it is such a perfect authenticator, it could be used confidently to police entry to secure systems.

No! First, even for a criminal trial, only a few parts of your DNA are checked, they don’t do an entire genome match. That already brings the chances of a match down to millions rather than billions. A chance of millions to one sounds impressive to a jury until you look at the figure from the other direction. If you have 1 in 70 million chance of a match, a prosecution barrister might try to present that as a 70 million to 1 chance that you’re guilty and a juror may well be taken in. The other side of that is that 100 people of the 7 billion would have that same 1 in 70 million match. So your competent defense barrister should  present that as only a 1 in 100 chance that it was you. Not quite so impressive.

I doubt a DNA system used commercially for security systems would be as sophisticated as one used in forensic labs. It will be many years before an instant response using large parts of your genome could be made economic. But what then? Still no. You leave DNA everywhere you go, all day, every day. I find it amazing that it is permitted as evidence in trials, because it is so easy to get hold of someone’s hairs or skin flakes. You could gather hairs or skin flakes from any bus seat or hotel bathroom or bed. Any maid in a big hotel or any airline cabin attendant could gather packets of tissue and hair samples and in many cases could even attach a name to them.  Your DNA could be found at the scene of any crime having been planted there by someone who simply wanted to deflect attention from themselves and get someone else convicted instead of them. They don’t even need to know who you are. And the police can tick the crime solved box as long as someone gets convicted. It doesn’t have to be the culprit. Think you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong? Think again.

If someone wants to get access to an account, but doesn’t mind whose, perhaps a DNA-based entry system would offer good potential, because people perceive it as secure, whereas it simply isn’t. So it might not be paired with other secure factors. Going back to the maid or cabin attendant. Both are low paid. A few might welcome some black market bonuses if they can collect good quality samples with a name attached, especially a name of someone staying in a posh suite, probably with a nice account or two, or privy to valuable information. Especially if they also gather their fingerprints at the same time. Knowing who they are, getting a high res pic of their face and eyes off the net, along with some voice samples from videos, then making a mask, iris replica, fingerprint and if you’re lucky also buying video of their gesture patterns from the black market, you could make an almost perfect multi-factor biometric spoof.

It also becomes quickly obvious that the people who are the most valuable or important are also the people who are most vulnerable to such high quality spoofing.

So I am not impressed with biometric authentication. It sounds good at first, but biometrics are too easy to access and mimic. Other security vulnerabilities apply in sequence too. If your biometric is being measured and sent across a network for authentication, all the other usual IT vulnerabilities still apply. The signal could be intercepted and stored, replicated another time, and you can’t change your body much, so once your iris has been photographed or your fingerprint stored and hacked, it is useless for ever. The same goes for the other biometrics.

Dynamic biometrics

Signatures, gestures and facial expressions offer at least the chance to change them. If you signature has been used, you could start using a new one. You could sign different phrases each time, as a personal one-time key. You could invent new gesture sequences. These are really just an equivalent to passwords. You have to remember them and which one you use for which system. You don’t want a street seller using your signature to verify a tiny transaction and then risk the seller using the same signature to get right into your account.

Summary of status quo

This all brings us back to the most basic of security practice. You can only use static biometrics safely as a small part of a multi-factor system, and you have to use different dynamic biometrics such as gestures or signatures on a one time basis for each system, just as you do with passwords. At best, they provide a simple alternative to a simple password. At worst, they pair low actual security with the illusion of high security, and that is a very bad combination indeed.

So without major progress, biometrics in its conventional meaning doesn’t seem to have much of a future. If it is not much more than a novelty or a toy, and can only be used safely in conjunction with some proper security system, why bother at all?

The future

You can’t easily change your eyes or your DNA or you skin, but you can add things to your body that are similar to biometrics or interact with it but offer the flexibility and replaceability of electronics.

I have written frequently about active skin, using the skin as a platform for electronics, and I believe the various layers of it offer the best potential for security technology.

Long ago, RFID chips implants became commonplace in pets and some people even had them inserted too. RFID variants could easily be printed on a membrane and stuck onto the skin surface. They could be used for one time keys too, changing each time they are used. Adding accelerometers, magnetometers, pressure sensors or even location sensors could all offer ways of enhancing security options. Active skin allows easy combination of fingerprints with other factors.

 

Ultra-thin and uninvasive security patches could be stuck onto the skin, and could not be removed without damaging them, so would offer a potentially valuable platform. Pretty much any kinds and combinations of electronics could be used in them. They could easily be made to have a certain lifetime. Very thin ones could wash off after a few days so could be useful for theme park entry during holidays or for short term contractors. Banks could offer stick on electronic patches that change fundamentally how they work every month, making it very hard to hack them.

Active skin can go inside the skin too, not just on the surface. You could for example have an electronic circuit or an array of micro-scale magnets embedded among the skin cells in your fingertip. Your fingerprint alone could easily be copied and spoofed, but not the accompanying electronic interactivity from the active skin that can be interrogated at the same time. Active skin could measure all sorts of properties of the body too, so personal body chemistry at a particular time could be used. In fact, medical monitoring is the first key development area for active skin, so we’re likely to have a lot of body data available that could make new biometrics. The key advantage here is that skin cells are very large compared to electronic feature sizes. A decent processor or memory can be made around the size of one skin cell and many could be combined using infrared optics within the skin. Temperature or chemical gradients between inner and outer skin layers could be used to power devices too.

If you are signing something, the signature could be accompanied by a signal from the fingertip, sufficiently close to the surface being signed to be useful. A ring on a finger could also offer a voluminous security electronics platform to house any number of sensors, memory and processors.

Skin itself offers a reasonable communications route, able to carry a few Mbit’s of data stream, so touching something could allow a lot of data transfer very quickly. A smart watch or any other piece of digital jewelry or active skin security patch could use your fingertip to send an authentication sequence. The watch would know who you are by constant proximity and via its own authentication tools. It could easily be unauthorized instantly when detached or via a remote command.

Active makeup offer a novel mechanism too. Makeup will soon exist that uses particles that can change color or alignment under electronic control, potentially allowing video rate pattern changes. While that makes for fun makeup, it also allows for sophisticated visual authentication sequences using one-time keys. Makeup doesn’t have to be confined only to the face of course, and security makeup could maybe be used on the forearm or hands. Combining with static biometrics, many-factor authentication could be implemented.

I believe active skin, using membranes added or printed onto and even within the skin, together with the use of capsules, electronic jewelry, and even active makeup offers the future potential to implement extremely secure personal authentication systems. This pseudo-biometric authentication offers infinitely more flexibility and changeability than the body itself, but because it is attached to the body, offers much the same ease of use and constant presence as other biometrics.

Biometrics may be pretty useless as it is, but the field does certainly have a future. We just need to add some bits. The endless potential variety of those bits and their combinations makes the available creativity space vast.

 

 

The future of ‘authenticity’

I recently watched an interesting documentary on the evolution of the British coffee shop market. I then had an idea for a new chain that is so sharp it would scratch your display if I wrote it here, so I’ll keep that secret. The documentary left me with another thought: what’s so special about authentic?

I’ll blog as I think and see where I get to, if anywhere.

Starbucks and Costa sell coffee (for my American readers, Costa is a British version of Starbucks that sells better coffee but seems to agree they should pay tax just like the rest of us – yes I know Starbucks has since reformed a bit, but Costa didn’t have to). Cafe Nero (or is it just Nero?) sells coffee with the ‘Authentic Italian’ experience. I never knew that until I watched the documentary. Such things fly way over my head. If Nero is closest when I want a coffee, I’ll go in, and I know the coffee is nice, just like Costa is nice, but authentic Italian? Why the hell would I care about my coffee being authentic Italian? I don’t go anywhere to get an authentic Danish pastry or an authentic Australian beer, or an authentic Swiss cheese, or an authentic Coke. What has coffee got to do with Italy anyway? It’s a drink. I don’t care how they treat it in any particular country, even if they used to make it nicer there. The basic recipes and techniques for making a decent coffee were spread worldwide decades ago, and it’s the coffee I want. Anyway, we use a Swiss coffee machine with Swiss coffee at home, not Italian, because the Swiss learned from their Italian sub-population and then added their usual high precision materials and engineering and science, they didn’t just take it as gospel that Mama somehow knew best. And because my wife is Swiss. My razor sharp idea isn’t a Swiss coffee chain by the way.

I therefore wonder how many other people who go into Cafe Nero care tuppence whether they are getting an authentic Italian experience, or whether like me they just want a decent coffee and it seems a nice enough place. I can understand the need to get the best atmosphere, ambiance, feel, whatever you want to call it. I can certainly understand that people might want a cake or snack to go with their coffee. I just don’t understand the desire to associate with another country. Italy is fine for a visit; I have nothing against Italians, but neither do I aspire in any way to be or behave Italian.

Let’s think it through a bit. An overall experience is made up of a large number of components: quality and taste of the coffee and snacks, natural or synthetic, healthy or naughty, the staff and the nature of the service, exterior and interior decor and color scheme, mixture of aromas, range of foods, size of cake portion, ages groups and tribal ranges of other customers, comfort of furnishings, lighting levels, wireless LAN access….. There are hundreds of factors. The potential range of combinations  is massive. People can’t handle all that information when they want a coffee, so they need an easy way to decide quickly. ‘Italian’ is really just a brand, reducing the choice stress and Cafe Nero is just adopting a set of typical brand values evolved by an entire nation over centuries. I guess that makes some sense.

But not all that much sense. The Italian bit is a nice shortcut, but once it’s taken out of Italy, whatever it might be, it isn’t in Italy any more. The customers are not expected to order in Italian apart beyond a few silly words to describe the size of the coffee. The customers mostly aren’t Italian, don’t look Italian, don’t chat in Italian and don’t behave Italian. The weather isn’t Italian. The views outside aren’t Italian. The architecture isn’t Italian. So only a few bits of the overall experience can be Italian, the overall experience just isn’t. If only a few bits are authentic, why bother? Why not just extract some insights of what things about ‘Italian’ customers find desirable and then adapt them to the local market? Perhaps what they have done, so if they just drop the pretense, everything would be fine. They can’t honestly say they offer an authentic Italian experience, just a few components of such. I never noticed their supposed Italianness anyway but I hate pretentiousness so now that I understand their offering, it adds up to a slight negative for me. Now that I know they are pretending to be Italian, I will think twice before using them again, but still will if it’s more than a few metres further to another coffee shop. Really, I just want a coffee and possibly a slice of cake, in a reasonably warm and welcoming coffee shop.

Given that it is impossible to provide an ‘authentic Italian experience’ outside of Italy without also simulating every aspect of being in Italy, how authentic could they be in the future? What is the future of authenticity? Could Cafe Nero offer a genuinely Italian experience if that’s what they really wanted? Bring on VR, AR, direct brain links, sensory recording and replay. Total Recall.  Yes they could, sort of. With a full sensory full immersion system, you could deliver an experience that is real and authentic in every sense except that it isn’t real. In 2050, you could sell a seemingly genuinely authentic Italian coffee and cake in a genuinely Italian atmosphere, anywhere. But when they do that, I’ll download that onto my home coffee machine or my digital jewelry. Come to think about it, I could just drink water and eat bread and do all the rest virtually. Full authenticity, zero cost.

This Total Recall style virtual holiday or virtual coffee is fine as far as it goes, but a key problem is knowing that it isn’t real. If you disable that by hypnosis or drugs or surgery or implants or Zombie tech, then your Matrix style world will have some other issues to worry about that are more important. If you don’t, and I’m pretty sure we won’t, then knowing the difference between real and virtual will be all-important. If you know it isn’t real, it pushes a different set of buttons in your brain.

In parallel, as AI gets more and more powerful, a lot of things will be taken over by machines. That adds to the total work pool of man + machine so the economy expands and we’re all better off, if we do it right. We can even restore and improve the environment at the same time. In that world, some roles will still be occupied by humans. People will focus more on human skills, human interaction, crafts, experiences, care, arts and entertainment, sports, and especially offering love and attention. I call it the Care Economy. If you take two absolutely identical items, one provided by a machine and one by another person, the one offered by the person will be more valued, and therefore more valuable – apart from a tiny geek market that specifically wants machines. Don’t believe me? Think of the high price glassware you keep for special occasions and dinner parties. Cut by hand by an expert with years of training. Each glass is slightly different from every other. In one sense it is shoddy workmanship compared to the mass-produced glass, precision made, all identical, that costs 1% as much. The human involvement is absolutely critical. The key human involvement is that you know you couldn’t possibly do it, that it took a highly skilled craftsman. You aren’t buying just the glass, but the skills and attention and dedication and time of the craftsman. In just the same way, you will happily pay a bigger proportion of your bigger future income for other people’s time. Virtual is fine and cheap, but you’ll happily pay far more for the real thing. That will greatly offset the forces pushing towards a totally virtual experience.

This won’t happen overnight, and that brings us to another force that plays out over the same time. When we use a phrase like ‘authentic Italian’, we don’t normally put a date on it. Do we mean contemporary Italy, 1960 Italy, or what? If 1960, then we’d have to use a lot of virtual tech to simulate it. If we mean contemporary, then that includes all the virtual stuff that goes on in Italy too, which is likely pretty much what happens virtually elsewhere. A large proportion of our everyday will be virtual. How can you have authentic virtual? When half of what everyone sees every day isn’t real, you could no more have an authentic Italian coffee bar than an authentic hobbit hole in Middle Earth.

Authenticity is a term that can already only be applied to a subset of properties of a particular component. A food item or a drink could be authentic in terms of its recipe and taste, origin and means of production of the ingredients, perhaps even served by an Italian, but the authenticity of the surrounding context is doomed to be more and more limited. Does it matter though? I don’t think so.

The more I think about it, the less I care if it is in any way authentic. I want a pleasing product served by pleasant human staff in a pleasant atmosphere. I care about the various properties and attributes in an absolute sense, and I also care whether they are provided by human or machine, but the degree to which they mimic some particular tradition really doesn’t add any value for me. I am very happy to set culture free to explore the infinite potential of imagination and make an experience as enjoyable as possible.  Authenticity is just a labelled cage, and we’re better if it is unlocked. I want real pleasure, not pretend pleasure, but authenticity is increasingly becoming a pretense.

Oh, my razor sharp idea? As I said, it’s secret.

 

 

The internet of things will soon be history

I’ve been a full time futurologist since 1991, and an engineer working on far future R&D stuff since I left uni in 1981. It is great seeing a lot of the 1980s dreams about connecting everything together finally starting to become real, although as I’ve blogged a bit recently, some of the grander claims we’re seeing for future home automation are rather unlikely. Yes you can, but you probably won’t, though some people will certainly adopt some stuff. Now that most people are starting to get the idea that you can connect things and add intelligence to them, we’re seeing a lot of overshoot too on the importance of the internet of things, which is the generalised form of the same thing.

It’s my job as a futurologist not only to understand that trend (and I’ve been yacking about putting chips in everything for decades) but then to look past it to see what is coming next. Or if it is here to stay, then that would also be an important conclusion too, but you know what, it just isn’t. The internet of things will be about as long lived as most other generations of technology, such as the mobile phone. Do you still have one? I don’t, well I do but they are all in a box in the garage somewhere. I have a general purpose mobile computer that happens to do be a phone as well as dozens of other things. So do you probably. The only reason you might still call it a smartphone or an iPhone is because it has to be called something and nobody in the IT marketing industry has any imagination. PDA was a rubbish name and that was the choice.

You can stick chips in everything, and you can connect them all together via the net. But that capability will disappear quickly into the background and the IT zeitgeist will move on. It really won’t be very long before a lot of the things we interact with are virtual, imaginary. To all intents and purposes they will be there, and will do wonderful things, but they won’t physically exist. So they won’t have chips in them. You can’t put a chip into a figment of imagination, even though you can make it appear in front of your eyes and interact with it. A good topical example of this is the smart watch, all set to make an imminent grand entrance. Smart watches are struggling to solve battery problems, they’ll be expensive too. They don’t need batteries if they are just images and a fully interactive image of a hugely sophisticated smart watch could also be made free, as one of a million things done by a free app. The smart watch’s demise is already inevitable. The energy it takes to produce an image on the retina is a great deal less than the energy needed to power a smart watch on your wrist and the cost of a few seconds of your time to explain to an AI how you’d like your wrist to be accessorised is a few seconds of your time, rather fewer seconds than you’d have spent on choosing something that costs a lot. In fact, the energy needed for direct retinal projection and associated comms is far less than can be harvested easily from your body or the environment, so there is no battery problem to solve.

If you can do that with a smart watch, making it just an imaginary item, you can do it to any kind of IT interface. You only need to see the interface, the rest can be put anywhere, on your belt, in your bag or in the IT ether that will evolve from today’s cloud. My pad, smartphone, TV and watch can all be recycled.

I can also do loads of things with imagination that I can’t do for real. I can have an imaginary wand. I can point it at you and turn you into a frog. Then in my eyes, the images of you change to those of a frog. Sure, it’s not real, you aren’t really a frog, but you are to me. I can wave it again and make the building walls vanish, so I can see the stuff on sale inside. A few of those images could be very real and come from cameras all over the place, the chips-in-everything stuff, but actually, I don’t have much interest in most of what the shop actually has, I am not interested in most of the local physical reality of a shop; what I am far more interested in is what I can buy, and I’ll be shown those things, in ways that appeal to me, whether they’re physically there or on Amazon Virtual. So 1% is chips-in-everything, 99% is imaginary, virtual, some sort of visual manifestation of my profile, Amazon Virtual’s AI systems, how my own AI knows I like to see things, and a fair bit of other people’s imagination to design the virtual decor, the nice presentation options, the virtual fauna and flora making it more fun, and countless other intermediaries and extramediaries, or whatever you call all those others that add value and fun to an experience without actually getting in the way. All just images directly projected onto my retinas. Not so much chips-in-everything as no chips at all except a few sensors, comms and an infinitesimal timeshare of a processor and storage somewhere.

A lot of people dismiss augmented reality as irrelevant passing fad. They say video visors and active contact lenses won’t catch on because of privacy concerns (and I’d agree that is a big issue that needs to be discussed and sorted, but it will be discussed and sorted). But when you realise that what we’re going to get isn’t just an internet of things, but a total convergence of physical and virtual, a coming together of real and imaginary, an explosion of human creativity,  a new renaissance, a realisation of yours and everyone else’s wildest dreams as part of your everyday reality; when you realise that, then the internet of things suddenly starts to look more than just a little bit boring, part of the old days when we actually had to make stuff and you had to have the same as everyone else and it all cost a fortune and needed charged up all the time.

The internet of things is only starting to arrive. But it won’t stay for long before it hides in the cupboard and disappears from memory. A far, far more exciting future is coming up close behind. The world of creativity and imagination. Bring it on!

Active Skin – an old idea whose time is coming

Active Skin

In May 2001, while working in BT research, I had an idea – how we could use the skin surface as a new platform for electronics. I grabbed a few of my colleagues – Robin Mannings, Dennis Johnston, Ian Neild, and Paul Bowman, and we shut ourselves in a room for a few hours to brainstorm it. We originally intended to patent some of the ideas, but they weren’t core business for a telecoms company like BT so that never happened.

Now, 12.5 years on, it is too late to extract any value from a patent, but some of the technologies are starting to appear around the world as prototypes by various labs and companies, so it’s time is drawing near. We never did publish the ideas, though a few did make it out via various routes and I talk about active skin in my writings more generally. So I thought I’d serialise some of the ideas list now – there are lots. This one will just be the intro.

Introduction

Today we have implants in the body, and wearable devices such as watches and cell-phones in regular proximity to our bodies, with a much looser affiliation to other forms of electronics such as palmtops and other computers. With recent advances in miniaturisation, print technology and polymer based circuits, a new domain is now apparent but as yet unexploited, and offers enormous potential business for a nimble first-mover. The domain is the skin itself, where the body meets the rest of the world. We have called it active skin, and it has a wide range of potential applications.

Active skin layers

Stimulated by MIT work in late 1990s that has shown that the skin can be used as a communications medium, a logical progression is to consider what other uses it might be put to. What we proposed is a multi-layer range of devices.

(actually, this original pic wasn’t drawn quite right. The transfer layer sits just on the skin, not in it.)

The innermost ‘tattoo layer’ is used for smart tattoos, which are permanently imprinted into the lower layers of the skin. These layers do not wear or wash away.

The next ‘mid-term’ layer is the upper layers of the skin, which wear away gradually over time.

Above this we move just outside to the ‘transfer layer’. Children frequently wear ‘tattoos’ that are actually just transfers that stick onto the skin surface, frequently on a thin polymer base. They are fairly robust against casual contact, but can be removed fairly easily.

The final ‘detachable layer’ is occupied by fully removable devices that are only worn on a temporary basis, but which interact with the layers below.

Above this is the ‘wearable layer; the domain of the normal everyday gadget such as a watch.

A big advantage for this field is that space is not especially limited, so devices can be large in one or two dimensions. However, they must be flexible and very thin to be of use in this domain and be more comfortable than the useful alternatives.

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Warning: rant, no futures insights enclosed.

Last night, we went for a very pleasant meal with friends. The restaurant was in a lovely location, the service was excellent, the food was excellent. The only irritating thing was a pesky fly. However, for some reason, the menu was written on nice paper in 6 point text with about 15mm line spacing. Each line went about 2/3 of the way across the page. I hadn’t brought my reading glasses so was forced to read small text at arm’s length where it was still blurred.

My poor vision is not the restaurant’s fault. But I do have to ask why there is such a desire across seemingly every organisation now to print everything possible with the tiniest font they can manage? Even when there is lots of space available, fonts are typically tiny. Serial numbers are the worst culprits. My desktop PC is normal tower size and has its serial number printed on a tiny label in 1mm font. Why? Even my hated dishwasher uses a 2mm font size and that stretches my vision to its limits.

Yes, I am ageing, but that isn’t a crime. When I was a school-kid, I took great pride in irritating my teachers by writing with the finest tipped ball-pen I could get (Bic extra-fine) in the smallest writing I could manage. I rarely submitted a homework without getting some comment back on my writing size. But then I grew up.

It makes me wonder whether increased printer capability is a problem rather than an asset. Yes, you can now print at 2000 dpi or more, and a character only needs a small grid  so you can print small enough that a magnifying glass is needed for anyone to be able to read the text. But being physically able to print that small doesn’t actually make it compulsory. So why does it make it irresistible to many people?

When I do conference presentations, if I use text at all, I make sure it is at least 16pt, preferably bigger. If it won’t fit, I re-do the wording until it does. Some conferences that employ ‘designers’ come up with slide designs that contain a massive conference logo, bars on the side and bottom, title half way down the page, and any actual material has to be shrunk to fit in a small region of the slide with eye-straining font sizes on any key data. I generally refuse to comply when a conference employs such an idiot, but they are breeding fast. If someone can’t easily read text from the back row, it is too small. It isn’t actually the pinnacle of cool design to make it illegible.

Mobiles have small displays and small type is sometimes unavoidable, but even so, why design a wireless access login page with a minuscule login box that takes up a tiny fraction of the page? If there is nothing else on the page of any consequence apart from that login details box, why not fill the display with it? Why make it a millimetre high, and have loads of empty space and some branding crap, so that a user has to spend ages stretching it to make it the important bit usable? What is the point?

To me, good design isn’t about making something that is pretty, that can eventually be used after a great deal of effort. It is about making something that does the job perfectly and simply and is pretty. A good designer can achieve form, simplicity of use and function. Only poor designers have to pick one and ignore the others.

The current trend to make text smaller and smaller is pointless and counter-productive. It will cause eye problems for younger people later in their lives. It certainly discriminates against a large proportion of the population that needs glasses. Worse, it does so without no clear benefit. Reading tiny text isn’t especially pleasurable compared to larger text. It reduces quality of life for many without increasing it for anyone else.

It is time to end this stupid trend and send designers back to school if they are somehow convinced that illegibility is some sort of artistic goal.

The primary purpose of text is to communicate. If people can’t easily read the text on your design, the communication is impeded, and your design is therefore crap. If you think you know better, and that tiny text is more attractive and that is what really counts, you should go back to school. Or find a better school and go to that one.

Casual displays

I had a new idea. If I was adventurous or an entrepreneur, I’d develop it, but I’m not, so I won’t. But you can, before Apple patents it. Or maybe they already have.

Many people own various brands of pads, but they are generally expensive, heavy, fragile and need far too much charging. That’s because they try to be high powered computers. Even e-book readers have too much functionality for some display purposes and that creates extra expense. I believe there is a large market for more casual displays that are cheap enough to throw around at all sorts of tasks that don’t need anything other than the ability to change and hold a display.

Several years ago, Texas Instruments invented memory spots, that let people add multimedia to everyday objects. The spots could hold a short video for example, and be stuck on any everyday object.These were a good idea, but one of very many good ideas competing for attention by development engineers. Other companies have also had similar ideas. However, turning the idea around, spots like this could be used to hold data for a  display, and could be programmed by a similar pen-like device or even a finger touch. Up to 2Mb/s can be transmitted through the skin surface.

Cheap displays that have little additional functionality could be made cheaply and use low power. If they are cheap enough, less than ten pounds say, they could be used for many everyday purposes where cards or paper are currently used. And since they are cheap, there could be many of them. With a pad, it has to do many tasks. A casual display would do only one. You could have them all over the place, as recipe cards, photos, pieces of art, maps, books, body adornment, playing cards, messages, birthday cards, instructions, medical advice, or anything. For example:

Friend cards could act as a pin-board reminder of a friend, or sit in a wallet or handbag. You might have one for each of several best friends. A touch of the spot would update the card with the latest photo or status from Facebook or another social site. Or it could be done via a smart phone jack. But since the card only has simple functionality  it would stay cheap. It does nothing that can’t also be done by a smartphone or pad, but the point is that it doesn’t have to. It is always the friend card. The image would stay. It doesn’t need anything to be clicked or charged up. It only needs power momentarily to change the picture.

There are displays that can hold pictures without power that are postcard sized, for less than £10. Adding a simple data storage chip and drivers shouldn’t add significantly to cost. So this idea should be perfectly feasible. We should be able to have lots of casual displays all over our houses and offices if they don’t have to do numerous other things. In the case of displays, less may mean more.

Flat lenses – oozing potential

Lenses used to be curved. Not in the future thanks to Harvard scientists: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/flat-lens-offers-perfect-image and http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl302516v.

Ht http://nextbigfuture.com/ for making me aware.

Flat antennas aren’t new per se, phased array radio antennas have been around decades, but this is the first optical flat lens I am aware of. Theirs is pretty damned clever!

They are already looking at applications such as flat microscope objectives, and have probably covered most of the biggest opportunities. But just in case, and researchers do occasionally miss some opportunities, here are a few for free:

Kite telescopes

NASA are currently flying a 747-based telescope, chucking out huge quantities of water vapour into the high atmosphere, contributing to global warming to take over from their space shuttles. Ironic that such a warmist organisation should do that, but there we go. A large flat surface telescope could presumably be made into a high altitude kite, albeit one that needs a little engineering. And it wouldn’t add to stratospheric water vapour, or even add CO2.

High altitude telescopes could be used for ground imaging as well as space of course, and there would be many commercially viable businesses from this root, as well as military surveillance of course.

Smart glasses and contact lenses

I would like a pair of glasses that record everything I look at. Flat surface cameras would allow this. Glasses are much bigger than my pupil, so they could allow much higher resolution, so I’d be able to see at very high magnification without having to use binoculars. I’d also be able to see infrared, microwaves, see where the strongest cellphone signal is, enable a whole new kind of fashion using different spectra, add to augmented reality hugely by using the infrared channel to show real as well as digital auras. Wow, can’t wait for these! I am playing Assassin’s Creed again, and this is Eagle Sense and then some.

Of course, active contact lenses could also use this tech and offer intuitive optional zoom. I would see the world as normal, but by trying to focus on something in the distance, it would zoom in automatically. There have only been a few updates to my original active contact lens idea from 1991, http://www.futurizon.com/inventions/activecontactlensmay91.pdf but this will be another generation for its 21st anniversary.

Credit card cameras

The smartphone is causing the decline of standalone digital cameras. Digital jewellery will cause the decline of smartphones, but one of the things we still needed them for is the camera. Not any more. A simple credit card camera would work fine. Or maybe even a wristband could be used. Flat cameras will hasten the decline of smartphones.

Smart posters

If they can be printed cheaply, cameras could be built into much of the urban environment. Any poster could have video capture and storage built in, powered by solar, with some comms added too. What and who it sees could direct what it displays. Sure, you can do all that and then some with augmented reality, but augmented reality is a whole load of additional functionality that lives happily alongside other stuff, and doesn’t necessarily replace everything. Posters could be the next wave of Big Brother or the next wave of advertising. Or both.

Teletubby T-shirts revisited

When the Teletubbies were still new, I suggested that we’d be able to make clothes with video panels in using polymer screens. Teletubby t-shirts. Flat panel cameras would allow these to be two way. They could display images but also act as a cameras. They could link to cameras in other people’s t-shirts. You could have a camera on your back that links to the video image on your front, making you appear to have a big hole through you.

Thought recognition and smart microwaves

Wired carries another interesting article on brain wave recognition of PINs via the headsets used to play computer games. Old stuff in idea terms perhaps but it’s always nice to see practice catching up. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brainwave-hacking/

It seems obvious that this could work nicely with the flat lens idea. A flat surface could image the electrical activity in the brain from a greater distance instead of having to use a helmet.

It would also be possible to put flat cameras on the inside surfaces of microwave ovens, looking at the food to see where the hot spots and cold spots are, so that the microwave beams could be directed better to the areas needing heated.

I think that’s enough for now.

What do solar panels on your roof say about you?

I mostly work from home and since my office is just a short walk from the bedroom, lounge or kitchen, I have started going on short walks round the neighbourhood to avoid becoming fat. I noticed some of my neighbours have covered their south-facing roofs with solar panels.

What image did they convey? Here is a multiple choice:

a) I had some spare cash and wanted to get a big return on my investment and solar panels offer a fantastic return.

b) I had a guy come round promising me lots of cash if I let him put panels on my roof.

c) I hate paying big greedy companies for energy and paying too much taxes, so am very keen to take full advantage when there is a means to get my own back.

d) I really love technology and am keen to demonstrate it.

e) I want everyone to know what a nice person I am looking after the environment.

f) I want to do my bit for the environment and solar panels are a good way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and reduce CO2 emissions.

g) I want my kids to live in a sustainable world and that is far more important than the appearance of my house.

I get the impression that each of the above would have some people ticking them. Some would tick several.

Well, I did have a guy come round offering me cash if he would let me stick panels on my roof too. I sent him away, mainly because I am a not an idiot. I had thought it through long before he came. Let me explain what image solar panels on a roof conjure up in my mind when I see them. And bear in mind that my full-time job is as a futurist and I think systemically about how people will behave over the longer term. Using the same tick list, with alternative answers:

a) I wanted a fantastic return on my investment and I don’t care at all that it is other people with less cash to invest who will pay that high return. So I am  greedy and selfish. As the recession lingers on, some people may be tempted to spray nasty messages on my door or run keys down my car doors or shame me on social networking sites, and maybe my family will live in fear or I will be forced to remove them. So I am an idiot too. I am a greedy selfish idiot.

b) I was fully taken in by a door to door salesman and didn’t understand that I could easily commission the panels myself so was happy to give most of the returns to a company who won’t have to suffer the drop in value of my home or the unsightliness, or the maintenance problems they will cause, or the hassle when I move or any other problems. So I am a first class idiot.

c) If energy companies can’t get as much from the energy they sell, they will try to increase the rental and maintenance and billing charges to maintain their revenue. And that means I will get less net profit from any energy I put back into the grid. So I probably won’t save much on what I buy and won’t make much on what I put back. And when I sell my house, even though I will get less for it because the panels make it look awful, I will probably lose heavily again in various admin fees to transfer the solar contracts over to the buyer, who probably won’t get the same deal, so won’t pay me much for it. So I am not as canny as I thought and my returns will be far less, so I am an idiot.

d) As long as I have the latest panels I will look cool and trendy. But they won’t be the latest panels for more than a few months, after which they will quickly start to look obsolete as well as unsightly, so I will have to either reinvest regularly or accept looking like a loser. So I am an idiot.

e) I care for the environment but not enough to do any basic reading and can’t think for myself anyway. I have been fully taken in by the anthropogenic global warming scam and as the global warming panic changes to global cooling panic I will increasingly be labelled as one of the idiots who went along with the AGW panic and just did what the environmentalists told me to do. I am a well-meaning idiot with little or no independent thought. Still an idiot though.

f) Solar panels will one day be an excellent way of reducing CO2 emissions, albeit in sunny countries. However, they are darker and absorb more of the sun’s energy than the roof did previously, so contribute directly to warming the earth, and manufacturing them creates loads of pollutants today, so it isn’t really quite as simple is it? And anyway, maybe we should have waited and put our panels in later, in the Sahara, and got far more energy for far lower costs, while helping poor African economies. And we now know for certain that the impact of CO2 has been greatly exaggerated and is fairly small compared to other impacts on global temperature. On the other hand, as global cooling sets in, we will welcome the extra heat absorption and I’ll be able to get my energy while helping warm the earth. But I didn’t expect it, so am a lucky idiot who landed in poo and came out smelling of roses.

g) I am holier than you are. You obviously don’t care about your kids and their future. I do, aren’t I wonderful? But I can’t think clearly so am happy to do make some ill-informed token gestures instead of things that actually help. So I am a sanctimonious idiot.

At the moment, public opinion hasn’t had time to catch up and many people are still influenced by AGW panic. But it will. Give it a while, and attitudes will migrate from the first list to the second.

I am all in favour of solar energy in the future in some sunny areas. It has an important role to play, but it isn’t as squeaky clean as it initially looks. It doesn’t need subsidised. When the technology is mature, it will be far cheaper than many other forms of energy, but it isn’t there yet. Since global warming has stopped for 15 years or more now, and it looks more and more like we are heading into a prolonged period of cooling, there is no economic or environmental justification for installing subsidised solar. If it indeed helps the environment overall, it will be far better to invest the same amount later, when we can buy more and help more. There is certainly no cause for panic based subsidies. In the short term they move money from the poor to the greedy, and in the longer term, even those people will lose out. Even the companies installing them can’t seem to survive because of the rapid technology evolution, making their investments in stock worthless and changes in subsidies undermining their business models. It really seems that there are no winners from early investment.

One day, in some places and circumstances, it may be a great idea, but for now, across the UK, rooftop solar power is for greedy, selfish, sanctimonious idiots.

Augmented reality will objectify women

The excitement around augmented reality continues to build, and my blog is normally very enthusiastic about its potential. Enjoying virtual architecture, playing immersive computer games while my wife is shopping, or enjoying artworks transposed onto walls in the high street are just a few of the benefits.

But I realized recently that it won’t all be wonderful. I’ve often joked that you could replace all the ugly people in the high street with more attractive ones. But I didn’t really consider the implications of that. And now I have, I think it will actually become a problem.

In spite of marketing hype and misrepresentation of basic location based services, AR is only here in very primitive form today, outside the lab anyway. But very soon, we will use visors and contact lenses to enable a fully 3D, hi-res overlay on the real world. So notionally, you can make everything in the world look how you want, but only to a point. You can transform a dull shop or office into an elaborate palace of spaceship. But even if you change what they look like, you still need to represent real physical structures and obstacles in your fantasy overlay world, or you may bump into them, and that includes all the walls and furniture, lamp posts, bollards, vehicles, and of course other people. Augmented reality allows you to change their appearance thoroughly but they still need to be there somehow.

When it comes to people, there will be some small battles. You may have a wide variety of avatars, and may have invested a great deal of time and money making or buying them. You may have a digital aura, hoping to present different avatars to different passers-by according to their profiles. You may want to look younger or thinner or as a character you enjoy playing in a computer game. You may present a selection of options. The avatar they choose to overlay could be any one of the images you have on offer, that you spent so much time on. Maybe some people get to pick from some you offer, or are restricted to just one that you have set for their profile.

However, other people may choose not to see you avatar, but instead to superimpose one of their own choosing. The question of who decides what the viewer sees is the first and most obvious battle in AR and it will probably be won by the viewer (there may be exceptions, and these may be imposed by regulations). The other person will decide how they want to see you, regardless of your preferences.

You can spend all the time you want making your avatar or tweaking your virtual make-up to perfection, but if someone wants to see Lady Gaga walking past instead of you, they will. You and your body become no more than an object on which to display any avatar or image someone else chooses. You are quite literally reduced to an object in the AR world. If you worry about objectification of women, you will not like what AR will bring.

Firstly they may just take your actual physical appearance (via a video camera built into their visor for example) and digitally change it,  so it is still definitely you, but now dressed more nicely, or dressed in sexy lingerie, or how you might look naked, body-fitting any images from a porn site. This could easily be done automatically in real time using some app or other. They could even use your actual face as input to image matching search engines to find the most plausible naked lookalikes. So anyone can digitally dress or undress you, not just with their eyes, but with a hi-res visor using sophisticated software and image processing software. They could put you in any kind of outfit, change your skin colour or make-up, and make you look as pretty and glamorous or as slutty as they want. And you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. You simply won’t know whether they are celebrating your inherent beauty with respect, flattering you and simply making you look even prettier, which you might not mind, or stripping or degrading you to whatever depths they wish, which you probably will mind a lot.

Or they can treat you as just an object on which to superimpose some other avatar, which could be anything or anyone, a zombie, favourite actress or supermodel. They won’t need your consent and again you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. The avatar may make the same gestures and movements but it won’t be you. In some ways this won’t be so bad. You are still reduced to an object but at least it isn’t you that they’re looking at naked. To most strangers on the high street, you were mostly just a moving obstacle to avoid bumping into before. Most people will cope with that bit. It is when you stop being just a passing stranger and start to interact in some way that it starts to matter. You probably won’t like it if someone is chatting to you but looking at someone else entirely, especially if the viewer is one of your friends or your partner. And if your partner is kissing or cuddling you but seeing someone else, that would be a strong breach of trust, but how would you know? This sort of thing could and probably will damage a lot of relationships.

It’s a fairly safe bet that the software to do some or all of this is already in development. Maybe some of it already exists in primitive forms but it will develop quickly once AR display technology is really with us. The visor hardware required is certainly on its way and will be here by christmas.

In the office, in the home, when you’re shopping or at a party, you won’t have any idea what or who someone else is seeing when they look at you. Imagine how that would clash with rules that are supposed to be protection from sexual harassment  in the office, but how to police it?

The main casualty will be trust.  It will make us question how much we trust each of our friends and colleagues and acquaintances. It will build walls. People will often become suspicious of others, not just strangers but friends and colleagues. Some people will become fearful. You may dress as primly as you like, but if the viewer sees you in a slutty outfit, perhaps their behaviour and attitude towards you will be governed by that rather than reality. So we may see an increase in sexual assault or rape. We may see more people more often objectifying women in more circumstances.

It applies equally to men of course. You could look at me and see a gorilla or a zombie or see me fake-naked. I won’t lose any sleep over that because I don’t really care all that much. Some men will care more than I will, some even less. I think the real victims will be women. Many men objectify women already. In the future AR world , they’ll be able to do so far more effectively.

We can still joke about a world where you use AR to replace all the ugly people with supermodels, but I think the reality may well not be quite so funny.

 

Is greed more sustainable than frugality?

Sustainability is much misunderstood. Certainly government and corporate sustainability policies often point completely the wrong way.

To be sustainable, we must ensure that future generations are able to live decent lives. Not much argument about that usually. But conventional wisdom in the field is that this means we should cut back on consumption.  That leap of logic is flawed. Cutting back reduces environmental impact in the short term but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will reduce it in the long term, or overall over any significant length of time. The full lifetime, full system impact is what counts. Achieving a reduction in overall impact well be best served by increasing consumption in the short term, if this leads to development that reduces the later impacts enough to offset short term damage.

An excellent example is in mobile phone design. Vigorous marketing and encouragement to replace mobiles frequently seems to many people to be wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. However, the rapid obsolescence cycle here has given us 150g mobiles that essentially replace 600kg of previously needed IT equipment. If everyone wants a mobile phone, or to access to the functions they provide, then the lowest environmental impact is achieved by using ultra-high tech phones that do far more with far less. Increased consumption has led to lower environmental impact. If instead, we had held back development and demanded that people use their phones till they fail, we would still be using a lot of heavy and resource intensive kit that needs lots more energy, generates far more waste, and would need far more mining, nasty heavy metals and pollution. And it wouldn’t work half as well, so we’d have less happy lives too.

Greed v frugality? Greed is the more sustainable. Because it leads faster to more advanced technology that is invariably better for the environment.

For a fuller analysis of sustainability and technology, download http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf. It is free.

Cellular automata, social jewellery, and the X Factor

I confess that I was among many who watched the x factor final last night. I know it’s not high culture, but it was fun. During one of the performances (Coldplay in this instance) the lights were dimmed and the cameras showed the effect of many people in the audience wearing glowing electronic bracelets. These were clearly centrally controlled and were either red or green (or was it yellow, can’t remember). There are lots of ways this might have been orchestrated. You can signal using the lights, or by radio, ultrasound, the web, or many other mechanisms. It doesn’t matter which they used, it was a nice touch and worked well. But it did make me realise how little people use electronic jewellery. I predicted LED jewellery particularly would take off many years ago and have been very disappointed how little it has. Apart from novelty Christmas accessories, you hardly ever see LEDs in jewellery. I don’t know why that is, but you can’t argue with the market. Maybe everyone just has less tacky taste than me.

Anyway, to the point.

It isn’t necessary to have central signalling to get nice pretty effects. If each person’s bracelet were to interact only with the nearest ones, you would still get interesting effects, with much more elaborate patterns than you would expect. In the early days of study of evolution in electronic systems, there was much talk of cellular automata. Stephen Wolfram showed that some seemingly complex natural shapes and behaviours could be explained if each cell made its development ‘decisions’ based simply on the properties of its nearest neighbours. If you aren’t familiar with cellular automata, it is worth checking it out on Google, you’ll find it very stimulating and it can easily suck up a day of your time. I loved that theory and greatly enjoyed exploring the patterns on my computer. It worked well. With my own background in finite element analysis it seemed obvious in hindsight, as many great insights do. But he had that insight, not me. I went on to apply it to hardware and network evolution based on digital hormone gradients, but that’s a different story and ancient history now. Since then, a lot of work has been done on the wider class of emergent behaviours, linking strongly to complexity and chaos theory.

I didn’t track down who makes the X Factor bracelets,so I don’t know their full functionality but let’s hope that they will bring out future versions that can talk direct to each other, assuming that these can’t yet. And obviously they could be hats, headbands, bracelets, rings, t-shirts or pretty much anything you can wear. As long as they are easily visible they could work well. It doesn’t even have to be a new piece of jewellery. It would work just as easily with a smartphone app, though I can’t be bothered to write one.

Emergent behaviours will produce interesting effects, many of which can’t be predicted. They could be programmed to behave out of the box with some basic cellular automata algorithms , e.g what is the state of the other devices I can hear best? That would already produce nice patterns to someone watching at a distance, with waves of colour change oscillating wildly around a community as people move around. Many of these would be biomimetic, precisely nature apparently uses similar algorithms. Or they could take manual inputs from their wearers. That would also be fascinating. Users might pick a particular emotional state they want to  project. Then the patterns and colours would evolve according to the social mood in the area. People could play games with the patterns, or use them as an elaborate form of tribal signalling and communication. In today’s age that could be in anything from parties and rock concerts to urban riots. Marketers are unlikely to ignore their potential too.

The X Factor may make debatably good TV, but social jewellery can certainly be good fun, and you can prove mathematically that its effects can’t all be predicted, so we’d get some surprises too. It might not take off, but I really hope it will. In times of economic gloom, we can do with some extra fun.

 

 

Time for the 13″ pad

800M people now have e-book readers, iPads or various other tablets. Most are around 7″ or 10″ screen size. The next obvious step upwards is magazine tablets.  There are a few very large format magazines out there, but Time magazine comes in at 13″ and I’d place my money on this being the next size for popular tablets. People can read books, papers and magazines on pads already, or even iphones for that matter, but with middle-aged eyes, I am not alone in wanting a bigger display and even the ipad feels cramped.

Smart-phones fit in your pocket, current pads are designed for taking out and about, but the 13″ pad will live mostly on the desk, coffee table or kitchen table. It is a better substitute for the laptop, and this is an important niche of course, but enabling new services in the home will be the big market for it. People who are used to reading paper magazines are more likely to buy a large format pad if the price is right. Games will look better on a bigger display, and so will videos. Even books can feel cramped on a 7″ pad, and in the home some will prefer to read them on large formats with bigger text instead of having to squint or juggle different pairs of glasses.

The 13″ format is more likely to be a shared device then the smaller formats. It is the natural home of home messaging, calendars, magazines, books, general web access and information services. Some of these are personal and will live on individually owned smaller pads, but the shared ones will move up.

I am expecting the phone to ring any minute as newspapers start producing their “what will happen next year then?” articles. Well, the 13″ pad will be top of my prediction list for 2012.

 

New book on the future of everyday life: You Tomorrow

My brand new book is called You Tomorrow, and now is available at http://t.co/yPcRwdY . It is all about the future. I started by collecting a lot of the ideas from my blogs and papers over the last few years, but found loads of gaps and filled them in, updated and rewrote a lot of stuff, sorted it, and finally was happy with a contents list for 2 books. Then I started writing them. The one that I just released is about everyday life and for ordinary people in ordinary language and is called You Tomorrow. My next one is for business and will be a full PEEST analysis – politics, economy, environment, society and technology, and is a bit like a long overdue update of Business 2010. If it gets too big, I may split off the technology and environment bits into a third book. It will be much more jargonny, if that’s an acceptable word, but still aimed at intelligent people from pretty much any discipline so will explain terms where I think they need it.

Meanwhile, buy this book about your own normal everyday life. I made it cheap enough to be a casual purchase and easy enough reading for bedtime or the beach. It is £5.74 inc tax and delivery in the UK. It is approximately 86,500 words.

It looks at how technology will change the ways we make kids, the life stages they will go through, from pre-design to electronic immortality. Then it looks at just about every aspect of everyday life, then the ways careers will change, then the sort of stuff we own, and finally the nature of our surroundings, real and virtual. Although aimed at pretty much anyone, it is I think still a useful guide for anyone in strategy or planning.

It is only available so far as an e-book, and a few comments here and there are UK-specific. But USA and German versions will come soon, and if it sells well, I will also issue it on paper, though at a higher price.

I hope you enjoy reading it, while I get on with the next one.

 

What if the future goes wrong?

In the future, our lives will be greatly enhanced by the ever-faster networks. Ultra-smart computers, sophisticated robotics and unlimited capacity communications will make every aspect of our everyday lives pleasant. Machines will do all the work while we enjoy the results on a beach. We will be always in touch, always in control. But sometimes, technology has a habit of turning out different than planned. Let’s remember that the telephone was once thought to be useless except for listening to opera. Here’s how it might be on a bad day in the future if we get it wrong.

So, at home first. You wake up. Beautiful original music is being composed in real time by your computer and is coming out of flat panel speakers that are cunningly disguised as paintings. Except that it is trance instead of Mozart because the kids were up first.

You need to visit the loo, but it’s a smart loo with built in health diagnostics. You’re developing a loo phobia and have started eating to please it. You have recently bought a chemical kit designed to fool it into leaving you alone. But the loo is also in collaboration with the smart fridge, conspiring to make you healthier. The fridge has time locks on the door and a video camera watching what you take out, in case you try to fool it by tearing off the smart packaging first. It won’t allow the microwave to cook it because it contains too many calories. Kitchen rage is becoming a major social problem. But you can’t break anything. The insurance companies insist on proof of accident in the form of video of the event before they will pay up.

The videophone rings and you put on your video bathrobe. This is made of ultra-flexible polymer display. It allows you to use a video-conferencing terminal when you have just crawled out of the bath. It actually simulates what you looked like after two hours putting on makeup and two months with a plastic surgeon, 5 years ago.

Your living room is devoid of black boxes, full instead of huge screens, tablets, virtual fish tanks and electronic paintings. You’ve flushed all the real fish down the loo, just to try to confuse it so it will leave you alone.

You talk to the home manager program via speech interfaces, using natural language, gesture interfaces etc. Unfortunately it remembers what you say and isn’t very good at keeping secrets. When your wife says she told you to empty the bin, she will be able to prove it. Computers will latch onto keywords to monitor significant conversations. In divorce proceedings, all those romantic interludes at the office party were recorded, digitally enhanced, and are used as evidence.

We will need personal screens to avoid conflict between the kids – one screen for everything would be unthinkable. We will also need 3d sound positioning to provide personal sound zones. The result is your whole family can sit together again, but are still all locked securely in their own private virtual worlds.

In the old box room, you now have a Star Trek holodeck, fully immersive inputs to your hi-res active contact lenses, but a movable floor panel that allows you to walk continuously in any direction. It also uses fractal robotic matter, T1000 technology, with direct sensory links. Social problems are arising, real world withdrawals are commonplace, you just surface to breathe, eat and sleep.

In public buildings, this same technology is used to simulate everything from plasma flooring to traditional oak beams, sawdust and dirt, with pubs changing period regularly. Each time you go anywhere, it takes several minutes to learn your way around again.

The TV learns what you like to watch and automatically finds us something suitable when you switch it on, recognising your face. Unfortunately this is not a good idea when the vicar comes round. ‘Let’s see a nature programme’. The TV starts showing ‘Emmanuel in the Amazon’.

You have a robotic cat with video-camera eyes and microphone ears. It is stuffed with electronics, and its batteries are recharged when it goes back to its rug in the corner. The robotic cat is the centre of home automation and is linked by radio to the global superhighway. It teases the real cat, while everybody teases it, trying to confuse its AI. There is a growing demand for robotic psychiatrists. You will also need a robotic vet when the dog eats the robot cat.

Insect-like robots are supposed to cut the grass and do the cleaning, but all the cleaning robots are stuck to the carpet where little Johnny has left his sticky half eaten lollipop, and the grass cutting robots have all been kidnapped by the local magpie. The baby magpies are suffering from severe indigestion and the RSPCA are on their way.

Your kids regularly spend hours designing ambushes for the surviving robots, now laying trails of sugar crystals to a cliff with a bowl of water under it.

Food shopping is helped by the smart waste bin that scans beans cans as they are thrown away. Of course it won’t work because your toddler peals all the labels off. We would also need a whole new field of custard proof electronics.

The supermarket van still delivers to your door, but leaves the ice cream melting outside because you’ve rushed the cat to the robotic vet at the last minute. Only the cat knows their number to arrange delivery times. Now you will have to go shopping yourself.

Clothes shopping uses computer simulations of you instead of Leonardo Di-Caprio or Kate Moss. Your body is scanned by laser, recording every bit of cellulite, every pimple. The shop becomes a try-on outlet with mass customisation, while the data on your figure is sold to plastic surgeons that later swamp you with junk email with pictures of how you could look. People have never been less happy about their shape. With smart materials we can of course have extra Lycra to smooth out the various folds until the surgery.

You give your kids electronic pocket money. Being digital cash, it can all be labelled: only two quid for sweets, none for booze; but kids will not be dictated to and a playground black market is becoming a problem at the local school. Digital cash has provenance too. This £17.23 was once spent by Kate Middleton and is highly collectable. Electronic cash is truly global and is used on the net and in the street, so the Euro is almost an irrelevance

So now it’s time to go out. But at least you are up and dressed. You are on the way to the supermarket.

Your cars has full RTI and in car entertainment, and runs on fuel cells. Tourist information is provided on the way. Unfortunately you are on the M25 and you don’t want to hear yet again how many cars travel every day on the A12, coming up on your right. So you turn it off. You’ve been plotting a scam for your next holiday: Planes can carry 1000 people 10000km in 10 hours, so they have jogging tracks and cinemas on board. You can spend so much time on board doing other things you can sub-let your seat and make a profit on the trip.

Before it died, your cat booked you a slot on M25, and you need the computer to drive you because otherwise you’ll miss it if a rabbit jumps out on the way and have to wait a day for another slot.

E-cash and electronic tolling has evolved to allow paid overtaking. Your agent negotiates with other car’s agents to pull over and let you past. It is the same in queues at shops. You can make a living just by clogging up queues and waiting for people to pay to get past.

You are wearing a video T-shirt, with cartoons or adverts showing depending where you are. In the supermarket, store positioning systems enable location dependent ads, appearing on your video T-shirt as you walk past other shoppers, depending on their customer profile. You get paid in extra loyalty points for this.

In the shop, in store positioning allows precise alerts to special offers etc. With an electronic shopping list, you could almost shop blind. Active contact lenses give you information wherever you go. There are arrows for navigation and robocop style information overlays, so the beans shelf could be flashing so you can actually find it. The chips in the products themselves can write onto this lens, with competing brands trying hard to attract your attention as you walk past. With another piece of software, you can actually watch them slug it out in a cyber-boxing match.

The lenses actually communicate via your Star Trek com-badge that doubles as an Ego badge. This stores various aspects of your personality, hobbies, job, marital status, sexual preferences etc. It cuts through the ice at parties, and you spend a lot less time chatting up the wrong people and much more time getting to know the partner of your dreams.

Some of your shopping takes place in shared computer generated spaces, where you make new friends as well as meeting various computer generated personalities, again offering the means of withdrawal from dull reality. The computer is intent on introducing you to every compatible person in the country. This is often used by government to keep people off the streets. But later you go to a real party anyway.

At the party, there is always a bore, but at least now, digital bore enhancement uses the latest sound cancellation and 3D sound positioning technology to replace his boring voice and boring message with much more stimulating conversation, and your active lenses can even make him look fashionably dressed. A new era of apparent tolerance will result where everyone seems to be nice to everyone else regardless of their actual behaviour.

Surveillance technology is everywhere. It is of course linked to traffic control and collects photos of you speeding. Fines are replaced by blackmail since they can now identify the passenger too, and The Shame Show is one of the most popular on digital TV. Government know everywhere you’ve been, who with, what you did, everything.

You’ll still have to work to pay the bills though. We will all be care workers in 2020, partly because of the extreme stress caused by the technology around us trying to make our lives more fulfilling, and partly because all the other jobs are automated. Tech-free zones are the main holiday camps where you go for technology detox.

When you go to Macdonald’s, the meal comes out of a vending machine, but in the French restaurant down the road, you are paying for the French waiter to sneer down his nose at you when you choose the wrong wine. Some jobs just can’t be automated. When you are in hospital, you will still prefer a nice cuddly nurse to R2D2.

We need human child care workers too. Nothing is 3-year-old proof. They regularly dismantle the robot cat, and pull the legs of the grass cutting robots, while repeating the mantra “Daddy will fix it”. Kids only love technology because they haven’t lived long enough for experience to take over. They are simply too young to know any different.

People either work in virtual companies or virtual co-operatives. Many companies don’t have any human employees but you can’t tell which ones because they all use synthetic personalities at the customer face. It is only by trying to make someone angry that you can tell if they are human. Consequently, most humans are frequent victims of aggression, keeping the care workers busy, while the computers don’t mind at all.

For non-caring jobs, AI agents are used mostly instead of people, computers dominate the board, pocket calculators replaced half the board in 2020.

Information companies are just roaming algorithms so they don’t pay taxes any more, making industrial companies rather miffed.

But what of the further future?

When you are very old and very grey, engineers will be able to link your brain to a computer that will be thousands of times faster. Surprisingly, at one atom per bit, it will only take one ten thousandth of a pinhead to store your whole mind. Then it won’t matter if a bus runs you down, you will be backed up on the network. Your kids will still have a parent, but best of all, your company just gets you for free afterwards. In fact, this is an irresistible side-line for bus companies, which will use satellite positioning and tracking to hit you at exactly the right point to ensure a clean kill with minimal damage to the bus.

But you won’t mind. Your body has died, your soul cleared off to whatever afterlife you’ve booked for. Meanwhile down here, once you have become entirely electronic, you can travel around the world at light speed and pick up a hire android at the other end. You can make multiple versions of yourself. Everyone is linked together in a single global mind. With immortality, infinite intelligence and mobility, keeping up with the Jones’s will ensure that everyone will make the jump to Homo Machinus. Biological humans will eventually become extinct. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Enjoy.

Video visors are the missing link between us and the future

In the early 1990s, the IT industry got very excited about virtual reality, the idea that you could use some sort of headset display to wander around in a 3d computer-generated world. We quickly realised there are zillions of variations on this idea, and after the one that became current computer gaming (3d worlds on a 2d monitor) the biggest of the rest was augmented reality, where data and images could be superimposed on the field of view.

Now, we are seeing apps on phones and pads that claim to be augmented reality, showing where the nearest tube station is for example. To a point I guess they are, but only in as far as they can let you hold up a display in front of you and see images relevant to the location and direction. They hardly amount to a head up display, and fall a long way short of the kind of superimposition we’re been used to on sci-fi since Robocop or Terminator. It is clear that we really need a proper head-up display, one that doesn’t require you to take a gadget out and hold it up in front of you.

There are some head-up displays out there. Some make overlay displays in a small area of your field of view, often using small projectors and mirrors. Some use visors.  However the video visor based displays are opaque. They are fine for watching TV or playing games while seated, but not much use for wandering around.

This will change in the next 18 months – 2 years. Semi-transparent visors will begin to appear then. The few years after that will undoubtedly see rapid development of them, eventually bringing a full hi-res 3d overlay capability. And that will surely be a major disruptive technology. Just as we are getting used to various smart phones, pads, ebbook readers and 3d TVs, they could all be absorbed into a general purpose head up display that can be used for pretty much anything.

It is hard to overstate the potential of this kind of interface once it reaches good enough quality. It allows anything from TV, games, or the web, to be blended with any real world scene or activity. This will transform how we shop, work and socialise, how we design and use buildings, and even how we use art or display ourselves. Each of these examples could easily fill a book.  The whole of the world wide web was enabled by the convergence of just the computing and telecoms industries. The high quality video visor will enable convergence of the real world with the whole of the web, media, and virtual worlds, not just two industry sectors. Augmented reality will be a huge part of that, but even virtual reality and the zillions of variants can then start to be explored too.

In short, the semi-transparent video visor is the missing link. It is the biggest bottleneck now stopping the future arriving. Everything till we get that is a sideshow.

Future high street retailing

Retailers are complaining afresh about their high street shops being finely balanced between survival and closure: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8358028/Retail-chiefs-warn-Treasury-over-wave-of-shop-closures.html.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy with them, but I also feel a degree of annoyance at their lack of vision. They look like yet another British industry group whose managers can seemingly only understand two tools – cost reduction and price increases. I guess they could get jobs with government if they are made redundant, they are obviously a good match for those who are seemingly only able to tweak tax and interest rates (I feel another blog entry coming on).

In brief, many people have much less money due to the recession, and petrol and food prices have risen a lot, so they have consequently reduced their spending on clothes to help balance their budgets. Like many people, I buy almost everything online or in out of town superstores, and only ever go into town if I need clothes. But the clothes I buy do come from the high street, apart from basic stuff that you can easily pick up at Tescos. (I did notice that my favourite men’s shop in Ipswich has now gone. I have often joked that Ipswich used to be a one-horse town, but then the horse died. So my joke has become a personal reality. Anyway, back to the point).

The retail industry leaders want less financial and administrative pressure on them from government (fair enough) and the ability to pay less to young people (not so sure here). They argue that being able to reduce wages for young workers would let them employ more, thus increasing employment and leading to a retail-led recovery. There is some truth in the argument of course. Reducing the cost of labour allows prices to be reduced, increasing sales. Extra sales stimulates more manufacturing, more supporting services, more R&D, new ideas, and some of all that might be suitable for export. So the argument is not without merit, but economics is very complex, and it is very easy to trip up and invest too much in policies with poor returns. For example, retailers could simply abuse wage reduction to increase profit margins, without either creating  increased jobs or reducing customer prices. Also, many clothes are imported so much of the associated economic benefit from increasing sales would go elsewhere. So, even though allowing retailers to pay lower wages might yield a little economic benefit for the UK as a whole, I think other policies might prove better.

There are many factors in costs of running a high street shop, and many that affect the overall cost of a shopping trip other than the price of the goods. Some have a natural feedback loop. If lots of high street shops close, and there is insufficient demand for yet more coffee shops, the rents demanded by the property developers will fall – they make nothing at all if they charge so much that their building is left vacant. If town centres are left sufficiently empty, the amount that councils can demand for car parking will fall.

There are also lower limits on how far demand will fall. Not everyone is severely affected by recession. A high proportion of the workforce is still in jobs with high job security, especially in the public sector. Some have just as much money as ever, and if anything, have benefited from reducing prices and interest rates. Most are not facing any likely redundancy that might make them unwilling to spend. Others have seen only small reductions in income, via reductions in pay rises or overtime. This bulk of the population guarantees a continued demand for products and services, even in luxury sectors. They will still want clothes, regardless of price reductions, so some stores will certainly be able to stay in business.

So although reducing wages and using the savings to lower prices or increase jobs a bit might help a little, what we really need is the development and deployment of new manufacturing and services that can be sold elsewhere as well as internally. Moving wealth around inside the economy doesn’t help nearly as much, and only yields slow growth. If the retailers focused less on cost reduction and more on other ways to stimulate sales, the benefits would be greater. This is actually true throughout the UK economy, in every sector. UK managers have generally been far to focused on cost reductions instead of looking at ways to improve revenues.

During the 1990s, many retailers introduced coffee shops and restaurants into their high street stores. Since then, there has been little change. The next decade will have to be a bit more imaginative. There are many areas where shops should be innovating and many new areas will be opening in the next few years. High street shopping could and should be much more exciting, and retail revenues could be increased. Some of the services and technologies required would be well suited to exports, so the UK economy as a whole would grow. It is developing these that should be the priority, not wage reductions. So what are they? I looked at some upcoming retail trends in my blog last summer, slightly more nicely packaged in http://futurizon.com/articles/retailing.pdf, but I’ll cut and paste the more relevant bits now to save you having to click, and maybe update a bit.

Since the iPhone and iPad became popular, followed by numerous competitive offerings, mobile internet access is now much more useful and accessible. People can now access the net to compare products and prices, or get information, or add value to almost every activity. But the underlying, less conspicuous trend here is that people are getting much more used to accessing all kinds of data all the time, and that ultimately is what will drive retail futures. With mobile access increasing in power, speed and scope, the incentives to create sites aimed at mobile people is increasing, and the tools for doing so are getting better. For example, people will be able to shop around more easily, to compare offerings in other shops even while they remain in the same one. Looking at a suit in M&S, I’ll also be able to see what comparable suits Next has across the street, and make a sensible decision whether it is worth going to try it on.

This will be accelerated by the arrival of head-up displays – video visors and eventually active contact lenses. The progress in 3d TV over the next few years will result in convergence of computer games and broadcast media, and this will eventually converge nicely into retailing too, especially if we add in things like store positioning systems, gesture recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) based profile and context engines. These are all coming quickly. Add all this in to augmented reality, and we have a highly versatile and powerfully immersive environment merged with the real world. It will take years for marketers and customers to work out the full scope of the resultant opportunities. Think of it this way: when computing and telecoms converged, we got the whole of the web, fixed and mobile. This time it isn’t just two industries converging – it is the whole of cyberspace converging with the whole of the real world. And while technology will be the main driver, it will also stimulate a great deal of innovation and progress in the human sides of retailing.

So we should expect decades of fruitful development, it won’t all happen overnight. Lots of companies will emerge, lots of fortunes will be made, and lost, and there will also be lots of opportunities for sluggish companies to be wiped out by new ones or those more willing and able to adapt. Companies that only look at cost reductions will be among the losers. The greatest certainty is that every company in every industry will face new challenges, balanced by new opportunities. Never has there been a better time for a good vision, backed up by energy and enthusiasm. All companies can use the web and any company can use high street outlets if they so desire. It is a free choice of business model. Nevertheless, not all parts of the playing field are equal. Occupying different parts requires different business models. If a store has good service but high prices and no reason someone should not just buy the product on-line after getting all the good advice, then many shoppers will do just that.

An obvious response is to make good use of exclusive designs. A better and longer lasting response is to captivate the customer by ongoing good service, not just pre-sale but after-sale too. A well cared for customer is more likely to buy from the company providing the good care. If staff build personal relationships and get to know their customers, those customers are highly unlikely to buy elsewhere after using their services. Augmented reality isn’t just a toy for technophiles. We’ll all be using it, just as we all now use the web and mobiles. Augmented reality provides a service platform where companies can have an ongoing relationship with the customer. Relationships are about human skills, technology is just a tool-kit.

As we go further down the road of automation, the physical costs of materials and manufacturing will generally fall for any particular specification. Of course, better materials will emerge and these will certainly cost more at first, but that doesn’t alter the general cost-reduction trend. As costs fall, more and more of the product value will move into the world of intangibles. Brand image, trust, care, loyalty, quality of service and so on – these will account for an increasing proportion of the sale price. So when this is factored in, the threat of customers going elsewhere lessens.

AI will play a big role in customer support in future retail, extending the scope of every transaction. Recognising when a customer wants attention, understanding who they are and offering them appropriate service will all fall within the scope of future AI. While that might at first seem to compete with humans, it will actually augment the overall experience, enabling humans to concentrate on the emotional side of the service. Computers will deal with some of the routine everyday stuff and the information intensive stuff, while humans look after the human aspects. When staff are no longer just cogs in a machine, they will be happier, and of course customers get the best of both worlds too. So everyone wins.

Adding gaming will be one of the more fun improvements. If a customer’s companions don’t want to just stand idly and get bored while the customer is served, playing games in the shop might be a pleasant distraction for them. But actually games technology presents the kind of interface that will work well too for customers wanting to explore how products will look or work in the various environments in which they are likely to be used. They can do so with a high degree of realism. All the AI, positioning, augmented reality and so on all add together, making the store IT systems a very powerful part of the sales experience for shopper and staff alike.

Positioning systems exist already, via GPS and mobile phone networks, with Galileo also maybe coming soon. Indoors, some of these systems don’t work, so there is a potential niche for city positioning systems that extend fully inside buildings. With accurate positioning, and adding profiling and AI, retailers can offer very advanced personalised services.

Social networking will change shopping regardless of what retailers do, but if the retailers are proactively engaged in social networking, adding appropriate services in their stores, and capitalising on the various social networks fads, that is surely better than being helpless victims.

Virtual goods have a significant market – online gaming and social networking has created a large market for virtual things, and some of these overlap with stuff sold in high street shops – clothing, cards, novelties, even foods. People in games spend real money buying virtual goods for their characters or their friends. There is no reason why this can’t happen in the high street. Someone playing a fantasy character in World of Warcraft may well be open to trying on a magic cloak in a high tech changing room in a high street clothes store, or drinking something in a coffee shop based on a potion their character is drinking. In fact, the good on offer in a shop could extend to vastly more than are currently on display. With augmented reality, a shopper might walk around a physical store where the entire display area is full of goods customised to them personally. The physically present items that are not suited to them might be digitally replaced in their visors by others that are. This increases the effective sales area dramatically. The goods need not be entirely virtual of course. They might well be real physical products available online, or form a larger store, or from associates. We may see companies like Amazon using real high street shops to sell goods from their stores – they’ve effectively been doing that with bookshops for years without even having the consent of the bookshops, so why not extend it using proper business alliances, implemented professionally, instead of simply digitally trespassing?

Try-on outlets are another obvious development. People mostly want to try clothes on before purchasing them (I am one of the many men who lets their wives buy most of their clothes, so am not sure how much of a ‘mostly’ it is). But not everyone is a standard shape or size, in fact very few people are. So although an item might fit perfectly, usually it won’t. Having a body scan to determine your precise shape and size, and having a garment custom manufactured would be a big improvement. With advanced technology and logistics, this wouldn’t add very much to the purchase price. A shopper in a future high street outlet might try on a garment, and if they like it, they would take it to the checkout, or more likely, just scan the price tag with their mobile. Their size and shape would be documented on a loyalty card, mobile device, store computer, or more likely just out there somewhere on the cloud. The garment then goes back on the shelf. A custom garment (the customer may be able to choose many personalisation options at this stage) would then be manufactured and delivered to the person’s home or the store, and this process could well be as fast as overnight. The customer gets a garment perfectly suited to them, that fits perfectly. The shop also gains because only one item of each size needs to be stocked, so they can store more varieties. The store evolves into a try-on outlet, selling from a greatly increased range of products. Their revenue increases greatly, and their costs are reduced too, with less risk of being left with stuff that won’t sell. Local manufacturing benefits, because the fast response prohibits long distance outsourcing. If the services and technologies required for all of these advances are developed in the UK, there may well be large export potential too. From a UK perspective, everyone wins. None of this would happen simply by trying to cut costs.

Clothes and accessories stores will obviously benefit greatly from such technology, allowing customers to choose more easily. But technology can also add to the product itself. Some customers will be uninterested in adding technology whereas for others it will be a big bonus having the extra features. Today, social networking is just starting to make the transition to mobile devices. In a few years’ time, many items of accessories or clothes will have built in IT functionality,enabling them to play a leading role in the wearer’s social networking, broadcasting personal data into surrounding space or coming with a virtual aura, loaded with avatars that appear differently to each viewer. Glasses can do this, and also provide displays, change colour using thin film coatings, and even record what the wearer sees and hears. They might even recognise some emotional reactions via pupil dilation, identifying people that the user appears interested in, for example. Health is another are obviously suited to jewellery and accessories, many of which are in direct contact with skin. Accessories can monitor health, act as a communications device to a clinic, even control the release of medicines in smart capsule.

But the biggest change in retailing is certainly the human one, adding human-based customer service. Technology is quickly available to everyone and eventually ceases to be a big differentiator, whereas human needs will persist, and always offer a means to genuine value add. This effect will run throughout every sector and will bring in the care economy, wherehuman skills dominate and computers look after routine transactions at low cost. Robots and computers will play an important part in the future, but humans will dominate in adding value, simply because people will always value people above machines – or indeed any other organic species. Focusing on human value-add is therefore a good strategy to future proof businesses. The more value that can be derived from the human element, the less vulnerable a business will be from technology development. The key here is to distinguish between genuine human skills and those where the human is really just acting as part of a machine.Putting all this together, we can see a more pleasant future of retailing. As we recover from the often sterile harshness of web shopping and start to concentrate more on our quality of life, value will shift from the actual physical product itself towards the whole value of the role it plays in our lives, and the value of associated services provided by the retailer. As the relationship grows and extends outside the store, retailing will regain the importance it used to have as a full human experience. Retailers used to be the hub of a community and they can be again if the human side is balanced with technology.Sure, we will still shop on-line much of the time, but even here, the ease and quality of that will depend to some degree on the relationship we already have with the retailer. Companies will be more responsive to the needs of the community and more integrated into them. And when we once again know the staff and know they care about us, shopping can resume its place as a fun and emotionally rewarding part of our lives.In the end it is all about engaging with the customer, making them excited, empowering them and showing them you care. When you look after them, they will keep coming back. And it is quite nice to think that the more advanced the technology becomes, the more it humanises us.

So, retailing, and even in the high street, has a potential very bright future. There is lots of competition, but good companies will thrive. Cost cutting is the wrong approach, even during recession. Investing in advanced technologies and improved services increases revenue, increase profits, leads to real economic growth, maintains potentially high wages, stimulates lots of new jobs in many sectors, and improves quality of life for all concerned. It really should be a no-brainer. Retailers should stop moaning and get on with it.