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What's interesting is that for most of my childhood (80s and 90s), aside from a few wow moments I was pretty underwhelmed by the standard of the tech. It was li
by hgomersall 5y ago
What's interesting is that for most of my childhood (80s and 90s), aside from a few wow moments I was pretty underwhelmed by the standard of the tech. It was like it was trying hard to be something it wasn't yet ready to be. I used to walk into television shops and think they all just look crap. Computers used to frustrate me so much - crunch crunch to do anything, and 256 colours was deemed good (!?). The first music players where you might be able to get one whole album onto a memory card that was too expensive to put a price in the rs catalogue (or perhaps too volatile a price). Anyway, tech was crap. Then around 2005 or something, it started becoming what it was meant to be. You could buy a computer and it could do everything you needed it to do; of course you always wanted more number crunching, but you could see where it was only just right the corner. Then GPUs started doing computation, and computation stopped being thought about. Memory was super fast and copious. One now felt limited by programming capability, not hardware. I'm now genuinely excited by technology. As much as it pains me to say it, the television departments are places of wonder.
It's in that context that this post feels like another step towards achieving some promised vision. If this is realtime, it is truly fantastic.
Now to hope we can deal with climate change and despots and poverty so it's not all for nought.
As an aside, one early wow moment was the first time I saw a mini camcorder, then another for the first genuinely mobile phone; both Sony I think. Also, though a bit later, I remember seeing an in-car GPS and deciding it was basically a perfect interface for it's task.
- hnuser123456 5y agoIf you're interested in tech becoming really magic, lookup the VRchat club scene. Real-life skilled DJs put out of clubs by covid, setup a twitch stream with a webcam on their DJ controller, while wearing full-body VR themselves, also streaming their DJ software and in-game view to an in-world stage screen in front of up to 80 guests, many if not most also wearing full-body VR, dancing along together, in any kind of digital world and wearing any kind of semi-humanoid (or not) 3D model you can imagine. The "metaverse" has already been running for a few years, but it's not Meta's, it's a thin multiplayer VR wrapper over Unity.
- Cloudef 5y agoPeople alone in their rooms strapped screen into their face, just to be "together with other people" sounds more like dystopian nightmare to me
- hnuser123456 5y agoCan't deny there's an aspect of that to it, yeah. But to the ravers and clubbers, this was a lifesaver.
- ynx 5y agoI suppose I'm struggling to see the dystopian nightmare in that? Is Discord dystopian because people alone in their rooms have a headphone fitted to their head "just to be 'together with other people'"? Is it that it's more immersive than just audio and therefore...somehow bad?
- finiteseries 5y agoIt’s that you’re alone in a room with a screen strapped to your face looking at pixels instead of seeing, touching, feeling, smelling, hearing, sweating, dancing, and sensing in the middle of a rave of physical human beings It’s literally senseless in comparison, lossy digitalization of basic analog humanity ie dystopian
- Cloudef 5y agoYes even voice chat feels dystopian if thats all your interaction with other humans. Social platforms have ironically made us less social beings. Real ourselves live in the digital world while our fake zombie selves do the mundane tasks in the real world. It does not feel right at all. Its easier to connect and find similar people through internet so i get why it is like this, but i think its also the factor thats making us less mentally balanced, causing real world to feel more foreign and harder to interact with. Drug of social interaction that's not real which leaves you lonely in the end.
- 0ldskool 5y ago