As we prepare for the future, we look to emergent innovation, not just continuous innovation. To help understand what’s coming, we hypothesize on the near term, mid term, and long term timing of a few concepts worth watching a video about (below). While emergent vs. continuous could be argued for the concepts below, all are capable of changing the way we do things.
Near term – Mainstream visual SEARCH technology for anything
Visual Search Technology. This concept is already here and having Google behind it will propel its growth into the future. As the engineers suggest in the video, “visual search technology is in its infancy.” Its on its way to greatness as Google indexes user pictures, then connects all of its aggregated information with the picture. We’ve already seen the power of scanning bar codes and images with our phone’s mobile apps to get additional pricing information, reviews, and more, but what if you could take a picture of anything and get additional information and insights. As our devices continue to get more sophisticated cameras along with standard GPS technology AND as Google crowdsources location-based pictures from us (another example of The Machine is us/ing us), we envision visual search becoming mainstream for anything anywhere… especially as we travel.
Midterm – Smart visual COMPUTING applications and devices
The concepts shared by Pranav Mistry at TED illustrate demos of several new tools that will help bring the physical world and the digital world together, helping us get out of sitting at the desk to get work done and to get information. Creating screens out of anything and enhancing our physical objects with creative digital overlays appears to be breakthrough technology and we envision practical consumer products being on the market in a few years.
Long term – Morphing Nano TECHNOLOGY that adapts to its visual surroundings
This video produced by Nokia illustrates the breakthrough innovation nano technology could have on the way our future technology morphs into its visual surroundings and provides fresh value through morphing.
What binds all of these concepts together is how they ALL interact with your VISUAL surroundings. Is that random or is their deeper meaning to that?