A clean, Windexed world where yours is the only car on the road, and everyone takes meetings or goes shopping, and everyone is young and attractive until, like Mom, they’re imprisoned, General Zod-like, in an iphone.
Burgundy and blue as school colors?! If that’s the future, kill me now!!
Remote controls are way older than 20 years. They were common in the 80s (I remember! I must be old!) and available before that. They used to have “clickers” and even wired remotes before the current crop of IR based remotes came out. (And now I control my TV with an XBMC app on my smart phone which uses wireless networking. The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
Mr. Rogers Neighborhood goes back to the 60s and he used a remote to control his “Picture Picture” since the beginning.
But I remember TVs without remotes. That must have been in the early 90s. Maybe my TVs weren’t the latest.
Some years back, Montana State University (where I was at the time) was installing a big multimedia… something… in the atrium of the physical science building. The original plan called for electronic glass like this in the windows, so the atrium could be darkened to better see the displays. Then the head of the physics department asked what the default state of the glass would be, in the event of a power outage. We ended up with ordinary fabric blinds on rollers, controlled by little pullchains on the side.
Yeah, in the 80s and 90s, we definitely had at least one TV in the house without remotes, but even in 84 or 85, when we got our first color TV (a Zenith model that looked like a piece of furniture, with its wood or faux-wood housing), it came with a remote control. It was not an infrared remote control, though, but an ultrasonic one. I could actually hear different high-pitches tones when I would hold the front end of it to my ears and press the buttons. Actually, this is the remote I remember. Apparently, that’s from 1982, but those ultrasonic remotes go back more than ten years before that.
I can control my (tablet)TV by touch now… this winter - I might be able to control my computer without even requiring touching… In twenty years? My TV might be reading my mind to select shows I might like!
The best use for transparent displays I can think of are augmented reality glasses. Where each lens displays a slightly different image so that you see a combined image at a distance.
Same problem as HUD systems. You can’t just place the display in front of the eyes. There has to be an optical system so that the display appears in focus. This is usually done with a partially silvered mirror in front of the eyes, and other optics as needed. This gets you back to no useful case for the transparent display.
I’ve ordered one and am on their developer list. It is something our company would love to use if it works as promised.
Slowglass here it comes!
Never mind the glass - I want to know what magic technology allows this couple to wake up at 7:00am, both get dressed, cook breakfast, chat to his mother, get the kids organised and still have her in the car ready for work by 7:20am. Is Time Stasis Glass an option?