One of the things I remember from way back when, were the family trips to World Fairs and similar events. Seems that every one had a couple of hyper-optimistic visions of "tomorrow," that explored the potential of then-current technologies. And yes, I was geeky enough to be fascinated by "what-could-be", even as I was realistic enough to know that predicting the future of technology is tough. (Just ask the 1950s president of IBM who predicted that world-wide demand for computers was 3).
There have been other visions buried in science fiction books and movies (i.e. the PanAm clipper service to space in Kubrick's 2001; and the always present & hyper-partisan news inserts in Starship Troopers), but these have become much less positive visions (Blade Runner, Matrix, the Fifth Element, for example) over the years. And somewhere along the way the idea of World's Fair seems to have disappeared.
The point of all this is that Corning Glass seems to have hit a chord with their somewhat sappy video clip "A Day Made of Glass," which is nearing 10 million hits in less than 2 months on YouTube. The point of most of it is not glass per se, but as glass as screens accessing an interconnected media/computing virtual universe. It's somewhat sappy, but most of the glass surfaces displayed are either here, or are reasonable extrapolations from current R&D. The interconnected multimedia networked computing implied may be a bit more of a reach - not because the technology is not possible, but in that it's implying a smoothly integrated set of operating systems and applications that is less likely to emerge in the short term.
Anyway, it's worth a look, and I kinda like the return of sappy, over-optimistic visions of the future, after all of the dismal futures dominating modern media.
No comments:
Post a Comment