Upon 2020

I arrive at the airport. At curbside, I drop my (to be checked) bags onto the conveyor belt. Takes 10 seconds.

As I walk through the front door of the terminal, my smart phone rings and confirms the number and weight of my bags. It also gives me specific instructions how to get to my flight, such as:

• turn right, pass by the pretzel stand, go another 20 steps to the left to the elevator as the escalator is currently broken; go to floor 5. etc.

I don’t check in. Instead, I directly go to security.

Instead of getting at the end of the security line, I swipe my frequent flyer card at a reader there. It tells me which security line to go to (taking things into account such as how much time there is till final call, whether I’m first, business or economy etc.)

I go to the gate and swipe my frequent flyer card to get on the plane. No boarding passes needed.

Time saved: priceless.

How it works:

• I book my flight at the airline’s site. It asks me whether I own a smart phone and invites me to download the airline’s branded app, which becomes their primary customer satisfaction tool.
• My suitcase contains an RFID chip with my frequent flyer number. A simple database lookup tells the baggage handling system where it needs to go. (Why again do airlines put paper tags on all bags today?)
• I don’t need to check in because my smartphone app knows I’m in the airport.
• I don’t need a boarding pass because I show my frequent flyer card. It’s been “upgraded” to the security of a credit card. Sometimes I might have to show government identification, too, but I need to do that today, too.
• I don’t need to worry whether I’ll catch my flight while standing forever in a long security line. Just like sometimes airline employees cut their passengers into the front of the line for close flights, the system does this automatically.
• I don’t lose or break etc. my boarding pass, so I don’t need to check in and get paper or print out paper. That paper does not containing anything anyway that isn’t in the database record easily found from my frequent flyer number.

This past weekend, while ending up in the wrong (endless) line trying to return from vacation, and not getting where I needed to go (”first agricultural scanning, then check-in, then carry your back all across the airport, then security” in case you wanted to know), I realized that the airport check-in system likely hasn’t changed in 30 or more years. Why oh why? What I’m asking for is not exactly rocket science, is it?

Will we have it or better by 2020? Unfortunately, I have my doubts.

CNET reports:

In a report on the Stereo 3D PC market, Jon Peddie Research argues that 1 million 3D PCs will ship in 2010 and surge to 75 million units by 2014. Simply put, 3D will become a standard feature in your PC in four years.

Interesting take and very consistent with my series of posts on how computing is moving all around us:

I truly believe that the models of human-computer interaction (”HCI”) that all of us grew up with are going to change dramatically in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. … the iPad is such an important device [because] it is a decisive break from the keyboard/mouse paradigm that we’ve been living in for 45 years (yes, the mouse is over 45 years old).

Add the “watch” paradigm of the TV, but which is not natural either.

The iPad makes electronic things touchable — if you think of it, a much more natural way of interacting than a keyboard or a remote control or a mouse. And because it is portable and can be put anywhere, and can act as a remote control, it becomes part of the set of everyday things around it, instead of being “a computer”.

Of course it’s a V1 device, so we have to overlook a few things as Eric says. But five years from now … transformational.

I was thinking the other day how Apple now has a contiguous line of screen sizes from 30 inches down to just a couple of inches (Desktop Mac, MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iPod nano). They don’t do TVs, so there is still room at the large end. But they have all other sizes covered.

So if I were Apple, and there aren’t any screen size holes to fill any more, what new device would I come up with?

I can think of only one, and that may turn out to be the most important of all: smart glasses. Heads-up goggles that is, using the same form factor that has worked well for glasses for centuries.

My understanding is that in 2010, nobody has technology that could do that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the following chain of events occurred through 2020:

1. 3-D movies like Avatar are a huge hit, so mass production of 3-D screens commences (already happening).
2. Computer desktop monitors go 3-D and the main Mac Finder / Windows Explorer user experience becomes 3-dimensional. (In the past month, the first 3-D monitors have gone on sale at Fry’s, at a rather reasonable price. I think this one is unstoppable.)
3. People get used to wearing glasses to look at monitors (they are needed for the 3-D effect), and the monitor manufacturers are bundling them with their monitors.
4. Then they might as well incorporate Bluetooth audio in the 3-D glasses. They sit on one’s ears already anyway, and it helps with watching TV in a room with other people.
5. Now the stage is set to make the glasses smarter: first, only a few pixels might be projected into the glasses. Perhaps the volume control indicator for the audio, or an alert.
6. They will also start to connect to one’s cell phone, so one can use the Bluetooth audio already on one’s head to take an incoming call. And before we know it, we’ll keep wearing the glasses even when not looking at a 3-D screen.

Of course, this is total speculation. But I’m quite certain we’ll have intelligent glasses, even if it takes a long time there, and this adoption avenue sounds plausible to me. They will then be the last screen we’ll buy.

The other day, I’m looking out the window on the street in front of our house, and see this elderly couple walking by our house. That happens all the time, of course, but this was different: both of them had Bluetooth headsets on their ears.

They looked like they had been married for a long time, like they were retired, and they were on a very normal afternoon stroll through the neighborhood. They didn’t look like the people who were on an urgent conference call while taking the kid to the park. Or like they were expecting a must-take call any minute. (both of them?)

They looked like they put on their headsets every morning as a matter of course, calls or no calls. I do that, too, some days, when I’m expecting to be on a bunch of calls and on the move (because I always misplace my headset on the move). But I don’t do it as a matter of course. And they were a generation older than me.

There is this transition between when something is a tool that I may or may not use, to something I attach to my body and in a way it becomes part of me. The transition to becoming a cyborg.

I figure our cyborgishness is growing exponentially:

First, our ancestors augmented their bodies with clothes to keep warmer, and put on shoes.

Glasses, for those who need them and could afford them.

The next one must have been the watch.

Now everybody has a cell phone. Not sure it qualifies as “part of us”.

But now we are apparently permanently adding headsets to our ears.

My guess is that augmented reality glasses will be next. Separate post on that.

One step at a time to being cyborgs. Perhaps more than one in the next decade. And all without a public outcry.

So how are we going to interact with all of those screens?

Let’s first list what won’t work:

• keyboards: we’re not about to have a keyboard underneath each picture frame in our houses.
• mice: same as for keyboards. There also won’t be a table surface in front of each screen.
• tiny little buttons on the sides of the screen, like TVs have. It works, but can you imagine going from screen to screen in your house, a couple of dozen times, doing something on tiensy little buttons? I don’t think so. Some screens will be up the wall and out of reach anyway.
• a remote control for each of them, like so many of the digital picture frames today. Having to deal with (and find!) today’s remote controls is bad enough. It’s impossible to keep track of dozens of them. (”Oops, wrong screen” … let’s not go there)

What might work:

• touch. I know, that’s fashionable these days, but it won’t work for screens on the wall: they are too far away, and who would want fingerprints all over their images that require us to dust and polish the screens once a week.
• gestures, as interpreted by the screen’s camera (which will become a standard feature of screens). We’ll see whether that will find acceptance, but it does sound like a possibility.

This post was actually inspired by recent post by Fred Wilson. Like him, I had tried the wireless keyboard and all of that, and it doesn’t work unless you like to fiddle and are really, really patient, which I’m not. On his advice, I downloaded the Mobile Air Mouse application for the iPhone, and while it still lets lots to be desired, it works much better than any alternative.

So I’m betting on our “mobile phones” to become our universal remote controls that enable us to interact with the screens (and lots of other things) around us. Basic model: point and click. Turns out that Apple of course already has a Remote application on the iPhone/iPod Touch to control iTunes and AppleTV, and that model is very useful. It takes too long to boot and find the network, and of course it makes no sense that each device (screen, AppleTV, Wii Remote …) needs its own app with its own idiosyncracies, but those problems will be solved. (More about software in subsequent posts.)

I kind of like the idea of being able to control my surroundings from the device I have in pocket already anyway.

Perhaps the rate of technological change is indeed accelerating. One can’t even make a few outlandish predictions any more (as I did on this blog last week) without being passed on the right by actual events. Take the past week’s CES:

On the subject of 3D TVs, I’ll just note that the world’s software developers will have to learn how to write 3D user interfaces. It can only be a matter of time until 3D displays show up as PC monitors. It’s cute and impressive and all that, but not transformational.

But there were several items of major news that are transformational from the perspective of this blog:

1. Intel announced what’s essentially a new monitor cable standard, except without a cable. Called WiDi, it enables PCs to send their graphics to displays wirelessly. White not many details are available yet, according to CNET, the first enabled systems are supposed to show up in stores next week! They are building it into the standard Intel chip sets starting this year, so wide distribution is virtually assured. Netgear is already selling a HDMI-output bridge box which allows any TV to become a receiver. So by the end of this month, theoretically we should all be able to use any display in the house as a PC monitor, wirelessly. This technology will be a major enabler for the vision I outlined in the last post. It’s coming a earlier than I thought. I hope it isn’t just for video, but for all kinds of PC graphics.
2. Skype announced a push to have TV manufacturers embed Skype directly in TVs, no PC required. LG and Panasonic have already signed up. Note this is competitive, in a way, with WiDi, because it will give me a choice to display Skype videoconferences via my PC and WiDi, or with the Skype client built into my TV. (That’s a new kind of competition.) But most interestingly, they will modify their TVs to also include a camera and intelligent microphones, so audio quality is good enough when people move about the room.
3. Microsoft’s “Natal” add-on for Xbox will essentially give the Xbox a Wii controller — except, without the controller. It accomplishes this by using a camera and audio processing that together essentially can tell what is going on in front of the display.

If we add these things together, what do we get?

• Displays of the future will have microphones and cameras built-in, so they will not only show us stuff, but they will also look at us, and observe us what we do.
• Not only will all the picture frames in the house becomes dynamic displays, they will be connected to each other in various ways, including to the PCs and laptops (and mobile devices) in the house, using bidirectional data streams.
• Add 3D, and the (moving) picture on the wall becomes a 3D “window” to look out of, and through which others (via the cameras and microphones) look in.

I’m feeling like my house just had its walls torn down. And I’ll get (looking at the positive side) an all-knowing butler that watches every single move I make, serving whatever information is best for me at that time right in front of me. (Let’s ignore the scary side for today…)