Back in December, the Pew Internet & American Life project penned a study called the Future of the Internet III. There are a number of items that won’t surprise you from the study: cell phones will be the primary access to the Internet worldwide (dur, iPhone), copyright technology will still be a battle between the corporations and the “crackers”, AR (Augmented Reality) will be commonplace, and non-traditional interfaces will be used to access the Internet. I’ll elaborate more on that last item.
The area I thought was interesting was on page seven of the study. I’ll quote the important line: “A notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”–think.” Whoa.
I know I made a post a couple of weeks ago talking about the Neural Impulse Actuator and how it could be used for controlling your computer, but I didn’t expect to see a serious study suggesting it would be possible as soon as 2020. Once a lot of these technologies come together to form a full integrated AR Internet (or The Digital Sea), then things are going to get pretty strange.
