5 ms·

I remember some visions of the future from Microsoft from the early 2000s. They even demoed some cool gear with the Kinect and I even managed to try out the tab

by kd913 3y ago

I remember some visions of the future from Microsoft from the early 2000s. They even demoed some cool gear with the Kinect and I even managed to try out the table at their campus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs That and this vision too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wraF2DjALls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wraF2DjALls Now I speak to others SWEs in tech from semis to hyperscalers and it feels so bleak. All ethereal bollocks with crypto and AI. All designed to make someone else money. Where is the cool wearable, IoT, actual human interaction tech. We should be having magic mirrors, that style of coffee table... Heck I would settle on smarter green tech. Everything honestly seemed more fun back then from the state of the web, gaming. I have never been so bored with the state of tech.

aprilthird2021 3y ago
Meta is working on some of that stuff. But in the current economic era of profit over innovation / growth, those sentiments you miss are going to be dormant for a while.
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  And who can trust Meta anyway? No thanks.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    I don't "trust", but I'm happy that a big CEO named Zuch want to invest VR/AR area instead of easy money area like ads
nine_zeros 3y ago
> Where is the cool wearable, IoT, actual human interaction tech You should look into wearable devices like whoop which are steadily carving out the future of useful health-related wearable tech.
- kd913 3y ago
  I already use an apple watch ultra, and it has improved my life in many ways. Again though, everything feels so limited to the possibilities? I have some ideas for social interaction apps that I am hoping to build, just the current choices of focusing on health tracking right now seems limiting to me. At a gig, why can't I use my watch to find my mate? Why can't I play corporate wide pandemic zombie survival with my watch? Why can't my house auto-detect where I am and adjust thermostats accordingly? Why can't I unlock and open my house with my watch? Why can't I use my watch NFC to bump myself in at work? List goes on.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > just the current choices of focusing on health tracking right now seems limiting to me. Anecdotally, my peer group uses it everyday to check how their last day was and use that info to regulate their activities today. Then discuss it with their peers everyday.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    I deeply wish that the apple watch was a general computing device. I want maps (not directions, maps, dammit), I want direct sensor readouts, I want developers to be able to build whatever it is capable of without having to color inside of Apple's lines. However, I suspect I'll see all that around the same time I get command line access on an ipad.
f6v 3y ago
I kind of want tech to become invisible and just do things without my explicit order. So, AI progress would be exciting. But it feels like 95% is gimmicky. Which is fair, people trying to find a way to extract real value from tech advancements.
- endgame 3y ago
  Funny. I want less invisible tech doing strange things in subtle ways, and I want things to do what I tell them, on my orders, and do so rapidly. I'm sick of invisible updates, invisible data collection, etc.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    I want tech to figure out what I want and do that invisibly. I don't want all the data collection. I also don't want to have to tell the clothes washer to do laundry, I want it to detect clothes on my floor and return them to the correct place clean. Note that this needs to be correct, it needs to understand the difference between clothes I'm going to wear again and cloths that I want washed. Similarly, the kitchen robot should figure out a healthy meal we will enjoy, get it on the table for our dinner and then clear the table when we are done eating: putting the leftovers away and clean up everything else. The above is what slaves could do 150 years ago. We have lost much - it is worth not having slaves in society, but if you would have had a slave (or servant) 150 years ago your life is worse in some ways for that progress and I want it back. I also want this affordable for everyone.
    - winternett 3y ago
      >The above is what slaves could do 150 years ago. We have lost much - it is worth not having slaves in society, but if you would have had a slave (or servant) 150 years ago your life is worse in some ways for that progress and I want it back. I also want this affordable for everyone. I'd recommend avoidance of references to "slavery" in this manner... It really just comes across wrong to likely anyone who knows what real slavery is like... Polarising language.
tsunamifury 3y ago
The answer to that is right in your own comment. No one wanted that cumbersome demo ware crap. It had no utility and no value other than visual bling. The reality is people want to live their lives freely, not tied to technology. This is something Apple understood under Ive so very well until Cook drove him out. Now I expect we will see Apple's first failure with Vision as HCI will demand a less constricting interface. AI is likely that freeing engagement paradigm, and Ive is jumping onboard there.
- kmlx 3y ago
  > The reality is people want to live their lives freely, not tied to technology. considering every one and their dog has a phone, the incredible rise of digital payments, more and more time being spent online, more people globally getting online, more expansive internet ever year, cars and their media systems, electric cars, all devices connected to the internet and so many other things i’m missing, i would qualify this statement as false.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    All of these took off once the technology to use them became unobtrusive. That’s the obvious point here.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  When I was younger I would have agreed with you negatively, that apple hides the technology too much. But now I agree with you and think Ive and Jobs did get it on a product level. Tech should do something for you, and ideally you should not realize you are using technology. Imagine you are a carpenter, and you build houses. You only have ever used a hammer and nails for nailing. One day you get a super fancy nail gun that you adjust pressure and tweak 1 million settings and it has a lazer sight and cloud connectivity etc you would probably hate it. But if you get a nail gun that is idiot proof and works well with no tweaks you would love it. Technology exists to solve prolbems not for its own sake.
- fidotron 3y ago
  Yes, I think the difference is something like classic Apple viewed computers as things within a lived in external environment, classic Microsoft (Gates, at least) views the physical world as merely an inconvenience getting in the way of your connection with the metaverse, for want of a better term. The big balance to make with ambient computing is to ensure the humans using it are the entities that have agency, and they don't merely give it up to the system. Arguably things like Tiktok, Facebook etc. demonstrate people already have. There was a project in Japan called TRON, at least superficially a sort of academic/industrial operating system research effort, however, the leader used to write introductions to their annual conferences, and one of these contains a rant about why virtual reality is misguided and the internet of things is the way to go, and this is from like 1995.
tomrod 3y ago
Humane looks promising.
CalChris 3y ago
> I have never been so bored with the state of tech. First, I agree that crypto and AI are much VC nonsense. Not so much make someone else money as consume it while dominating the conversation. Maybe AI will put customer support people out of a job. Congratulations VCs, that's what you were put on the planet for. Bravo, well done. Otherwise, maybe tech is too good. Wearables? Apple Watch and iPhone. I'm very happy with the MacBook Air that I'm typing this on. I'm quite happy with my EVs. When I need to see a doc, I send a message on MyChart. Chat with a friend, WhatsApp. When I need to look something up chances are pretty high that there's something on Wikipedia. When I want a book, I check it out online and pick it up at the library. Or I'll buy it on Alibris or Amazon. A nice late edition copy of my college calculus book cost $5 + shipping. I can travel anywhere and have a map and be able to pay for something with my credit card. When I want a quick tutorial and drills on Kyrie Irving's moves, it's on YouTube. Chess? I can play programs that would destroy Bobby Fischer. As for systems and infra, I'm very happy with LLVM, Linux, FreeBSD, homebrew, .... Readily available consumer systems are infinitely fast compared to what we grew up with. No Apple IIgs for me, thank you Boomer. My complaint? No late night haunts because everyone is online. I'll grant that what isn't there is the sense of the new. But what is there is really, really good.
999900000999 3y ago
I'm actually really happy with the progress made with wearables. Smart watches are great, the Humane pin is cool ( massively overpriced considering you could probably give these out to anyone who prepays for a year of service). I imagine the next great step will be AI powered pseudo code.
fidotron 3y ago
I think what's funny about these videos is they aren't exactly dependent on advances in computing, but in display technology and network bandwidth. I've been annoying people for years by pointing out software is often the easiest part of all of this, and anyone doubting that should attempt to build a physical device, let alone a state of the art one. Really the canary in this particular coal mine was when Silicon Graphics hit the wall in the late 90s. They were the epitome of pushing this dream that with visual computing everyone will be able to leverage their own intelligence that much more, leading to a better world, and it just doesn't seem to happen - we all just use it to distract each other instead. In the world today you have SGI level graphics in everything, and yet the applications of it are so mundane. For example, you don't see people doing finance visualizations in immersive 3D, we don't see people using VR for Minority Report style interfaces even though they are now viable, and even the Mac Finder is no longer spatial. Ultimately I think our culture has lost hope in the whole idea of visual intelligence.
- kd913 3y ago
  May be true, but that coffee table is still something I want. Given it existed 16 years ago why did the concept just get culled? We are now just left with boring coffee tables, photo sharing, music selection, movie picking, event planning, all stuck in the same model for the last 15 years. Where are my smart glasses and HUDs? We all have gone back to being excited over talking with a chatbot via text. Personally I would rather have some mates over having fun with the above table.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Glass HUD is in progress by Apple, Meta, and ventures. Improving hardware is hard.
  - mncharity 3y ago
    > why US industrial policy (IP;) is optimized for pharma-shaped industry, so that's what you get? Apple is investing years of nifty R&D to create an extremely difficult mass consumer market HUD, and far easier "niche" markets will be addressed afterwards, not before. Because patents. Maybe sufficiently long-term that's a win. Maybe not. Absent mandatory FRAND licensing, patents don't play well with many-player small-market exploratory industrialization/commercialization. Pre-boom VR and large touch surfaces used the DIY dodge, "we're selling a kit, not a thing, so violations are on you, and of course you can't sell what you build". So you might then have bought a kit for a crufty coffee table surface, and adapted code from a we-cant-be-commercial small and scattered but active FOSS ecosystem. It all rather crimps market gestation. My understanding is the current trade war kicked off because pharma insisted on a "everything pharma wants, now" US position, and China considered that an intolerable new 'unequal treaty' (opium wars context). Importation barriers don't help. And people trading incremental collective progress for moats and unicorn dreams. And just small-population "why was X never done?". As you accumulate market inefficiencies, eventually it all just doesn't fly? But mostly patents it seems to me.
zeusk 3y ago
These videos and the VR demos have an eering similarity (especially ones from Microsoft and Apple).
maxerickson 3y ago
The surface table became the dominant paradigm, just on much smaller devices. The sort of production version launched after the iPhone.
southernplaces7 3y ago
>I have never been so bored with the state of tech. When a significant portion of the world's best funded tech companies (and now an increasing number of other companies for which digital technology is more peripheral) devote significant parts of their brains and money to leeching as much private data from people for the sake of advertising random garbage to them, or to locking people into some bullshit silo or another, it's not surprising if much of the web stagnates. Even when new things that look good come along, you quickly often see how full of hooks, suckers and catches they are for secretly extracting something from your life and activity.

by kd913 3y ago

aprilthird2021 3y ago

Meta is working on some of that stuff. But in the current economic era of profit over innovation / growth, those sentiments you miss are going to be dormant for a while.

ohthatsnotright 3y ago
And who can trust Meta anyway? No thanks.
- fomine3 3y ago
  I don't "trust", but I'm happy that a big CEO named Zuch want to invest VR/AR area instead of easy money area like ads

nine_zeros 3y ago

> Where is the cool wearable, IoT, actual human interaction tech You should look into wearable devices like whoop which are steadily carving out the future of useful health-related wearable tech.

kd913 3y ago
I already use an apple watch ultra, and it has improved my life in many ways. Again though, everything feels so limited to the possibilities? I have some ideas for social interaction apps that I am hoping to build, just the current choices of focusing on health tracking right now seems limiting to me. At a gig, why can't I use my watch to find my mate? Why can't I play corporate wide pandemic zombie survival with my watch? Why can't my house auto-detect where I am and adjust thermostats accordingly? Why can't I unlock and open my house with my watch? Why can't I use my watch NFC to bump myself in at work? List goes on.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > just the current choices of focusing on health tracking right now seems limiting to me. Anecdotally, my peer group uses it everyday to check how their last day was and use that info to regulate their activities today. Then discuss it with their peers everyday.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I deeply wish that the apple watch was a general computing device. I want maps (not directions, maps, dammit), I want direct sensor readouts, I want developers to be able to build whatever it is capable of without having to color inside of Apple's lines. However, I suspect I'll see all that around the same time I get command line access on an ipad.

f6v 3y ago

I kind of want tech to become invisible and just do things without my explicit order. So, AI progress would be exciting. But it feels like 95% is gimmicky. Which is fair, people trying to find a way to extract real value from tech advancements.

endgame 3y ago
Funny. I want less invisible tech doing strange things in subtle ways, and I want things to do what I tell them, on my orders, and do so rapidly. I'm sick of invisible updates, invisible data collection, etc.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I want tech to figure out what I want and do that invisibly. I don't want all the data collection. I also don't want to have to tell the clothes washer to do laundry, I want it to detect clothes on my floor and return them to the correct place clean. Note that this needs to be correct, it needs to understand the difference between clothes I'm going to wear again and cloths that I want washed. Similarly, the kitchen robot should figure out a healthy meal we will enjoy, get it on the table for our dinner and then clear the table when we are done eating: putting the leftovers away and clean up everything else. The above is what slaves could do 150 years ago. We have lost much - it is worth not having slaves in society, but if you would have had a slave (or servant) 150 years ago your life is worse in some ways for that progress and I want it back. I also want this affordable for everyone.
  - winternett 3y ago
    >The above is what slaves could do 150 years ago. We have lost much - it is worth not having slaves in society, but if you would have had a slave (or servant) 150 years ago your life is worse in some ways for that progress and I want it back. I also want this affordable for everyone. I'd recommend avoidance of references to "slavery" in this manner... It really just comes across wrong to likely anyone who knows what real slavery is like... Polarising language.

tsunamifury 3y ago

The answer to that is right in your own comment. No one wanted that cumbersome demo ware crap. It had no utility and no value other than visual bling. The reality is people want to live their lives freely, not tied to technology. This is something Apple understood under Ive so very well until Cook drove him out. Now I expect we will see Apple's first failure with Vision as HCI will demand a less constricting interface. AI is likely that freeing engagement paradigm, and Ive is jumping onboard there.

kmlx 3y ago
> The reality is people want to live their lives freely, not tied to technology. considering every one and their dog has a phone, the incredible rise of digital payments, more and more time being spent online, more people globally getting online, more expansive internet ever year, cars and their media systems, electric cars, all devices connected to the internet and so many other things i’m missing, i would qualify this statement as false.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  All of these took off once the technology to use them became unobtrusive. That’s the obvious point here.
ecshafer 3y ago
When I was younger I would have agreed with you negatively, that apple hides the technology too much. But now I agree with you and think Ive and Jobs did get it on a product level. Tech should do something for you, and ideally you should not realize you are using technology. Imagine you are a carpenter, and you build houses. You only have ever used a hammer and nails for nailing. One day you get a super fancy nail gun that you adjust pressure and tweak 1 million settings and it has a lazer sight and cloud connectivity etc you would probably hate it. But if you get a nail gun that is idiot proof and works well with no tweaks you would love it. Technology exists to solve prolbems not for its own sake.
fidotron 3y ago
Yes, I think the difference is something like classic Apple viewed computers as things within a lived in external environment, classic Microsoft (Gates, at least) views the physical world as merely an inconvenience getting in the way of your connection with the metaverse, for want of a better term. The big balance to make with ambient computing is to ensure the humans using it are the entities that have agency, and they don't merely give it up to the system. Arguably things like Tiktok, Facebook etc. demonstrate people already have. There was a project in Japan called TRON, at least superficially a sort of academic/industrial operating system research effort, however, the leader used to write introductions to their annual conferences, and one of these contains a rant about why virtual reality is misguided and the internet of things is the way to go, and this is from like 1995.

tomrod 3y ago

Humane looks promising.

CalChris 3y ago

> I have never been so bored with the state of tech. First, I agree that crypto and AI are much VC nonsense. Not so much make someone else money as consume it while dominating the conversation. Maybe AI will put customer support people out of a job. Congratulations VCs, that's what you were put on the planet for. Bravo, well done. Otherwise, maybe tech is too good. Wearables? Apple Watch and iPhone. I'm very happy with the MacBook Air that I'm typing this on. I'm quite happy with my EVs. When I need to see a doc, I send a message on MyChart. Chat with a friend, WhatsApp. When I need to look something up chances are pretty high that there's something on Wikipedia. When I want a book, I check it out online and pick it up at the library. Or I'll buy it on Alibris or Amazon. A nice late edition copy of my college calculus book cost $5 + shipping. I can travel anywhere and have a map and be able to pay for something with my credit card. When I want a quick tutorial and drills on Kyrie Irving's moves, it's on YouTube. Chess? I can play programs that would destroy Bobby Fischer. As for systems and infra, I'm very happy with LLVM, Linux, FreeBSD, homebrew, .... Readily available consumer systems are infinitely fast compared to what we grew up with. No Apple IIgs for me, thank you Boomer. My complaint? No late night haunts because everyone is online. I'll grant that what isn't there is the sense of the new. But what is there is really, really good.

999900000999 3y ago

I'm actually really happy with the progress made with wearables. Smart watches are great, the Humane pin is cool ( massively overpriced considering you could probably give these out to anyone who prepays for a year of service). I imagine the next great step will be AI powered pseudo code.

fidotron 3y ago

I think what's funny about these videos is they aren't exactly dependent on advances in computing, but in display technology and network bandwidth. I've been annoying people for years by pointing out software is often the easiest part of all of this, and anyone doubting that should attempt to build a physical device, let alone a state of the art one. Really the canary in this particular coal mine was when Silicon Graphics hit the wall in the late 90s. They were the epitome of pushing this dream that with visual computing everyone will be able to leverage their own intelligence that much more, leading to a better world, and it just doesn't seem to happen - we all just use it to distract each other instead. In the world today you have SGI level graphics in everything, and yet the applications of it are so mundane. For example, you don't see people doing finance visualizations in immersive 3D, we don't see people using VR for Minority Report style interfaces even though they are now viable, and even the Mac Finder is no longer spatial. Ultimately I think our culture has lost hope in the whole idea of visual intelligence.

kd913 3y ago
May be true, but that coffee table is still something I want. Given it existed 16 years ago why did the concept just get culled? We are now just left with boring coffee tables, photo sharing, music selection, movie picking, event planning, all stuck in the same model for the last 15 years. Where are my smart glasses and HUDs? We all have gone back to being excited over talking with a chatbot via text. Personally I would rather have some mates over having fun with the above table.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Glass HUD is in progress by Apple, Meta, and ventures. Improving hardware is hard.
- mncharity 3y ago
  > why US industrial policy (IP;) is optimized for pharma-shaped industry, so that's what you get? Apple is investing years of nifty R&D to create an extremely difficult mass consumer market HUD, and far easier "niche" markets will be addressed afterwards, not before. Because patents. Maybe sufficiently long-term that's a win. Maybe not. Absent mandatory FRAND licensing, patents don't play well with many-player small-market exploratory industrialization/commercialization. Pre-boom VR and large touch surfaces used the DIY dodge, "we're selling a kit, not a thing, so violations are on you, and of course you can't sell what you build". So you might then have bought a kit for a crufty coffee table surface, and adapted code from a we-cant-be-commercial small and scattered but active FOSS ecosystem. It all rather crimps market gestation. My understanding is the current trade war kicked off because pharma insisted on a "everything pharma wants, now" US position, and China considered that an intolerable new 'unequal treaty' (opium wars context). Importation barriers don't help. And people trading incremental collective progress for moats and unicorn dreams. And just small-population "why was X never done?". As you accumulate market inefficiencies, eventually it all just doesn't fly? But mostly patents it seems to me.

zeusk 3y ago

These videos and the VR demos have an eering similarity (especially ones from Microsoft and Apple).

maxerickson 3y ago

The surface table became the dominant paradigm, just on much smaller devices. The sort of production version launched after the iPhone.

southernplaces7 3y ago

>I have never been so bored with the state of tech. When a significant portion of the world's best funded tech companies (and now an increasing number of other companies for which digital technology is more peripheral) devote significant parts of their brains and money to leeching as much private data from people for the sake of advertising random garbage to them, or to locking people into some bullshit silo or another, it's not surprising if much of the web stagnates. Even when new things that look good come along, you quickly often see how full of hooks, suckers and catches they are for secretly extracting something from your life and activity.