Automated 3D world mapping

Starting to mature, the Apple acquisition of C3 is possibly to do with heir own back end database creation, however the technology could also make its way into future consumer products.

Kinect uses an infrared laser and CMOS sensor, mainly commodity. Accurate real time 3D mapping is an enabling technology for workable AR without markers. It needs significant miniaturisation before it fits into smartphones and things like Vuzix SMART Glasses AR sunglasses, but there's a lot of movement by big players, that I think ensures this is coming in the next 5-10 years.

Falls under the general heading of machine sensing, and applies to robots, self driving cars, and many other application areas.

Trend 6: Portfolio Education

Portfolio Education

A portfolio career is a career made up of several different jobs, typically the term is used by non-exec directors and freelancers.

Education is quite broken at the moment, it costs a lot, and doesn't really deliver very much, into a market that changes very fast. Home education is growing, online options are expanding and traditional schools are teaching to their assessment targets, pretty much.

Learners will become more choosy, looking at their interests and work aspirations and choosing a variety of options to get there. This becomes a lifelong process for those that engage with it. It also places those that take all the default choices at a disadvantage, so wealthy middle classes are going to be more likely to take advantage of the new options. However, many are cheap / free (iTunes U, many online sources), so the possibility is there.

I think this is one to embrace, continuous learning, including as adults, is more or less a requirement in order not to get left behind. So, portfolio education, using school, home ed, online and other resources. Mainstream education seems to be in crisis, but individuals need not be.

My eldest is currently 11, she's been home ed until 9, privately educated for two years, into state secondary, but looking at doing extra courses they don't offer. The 10 year old is very keen on moving to Japan as an adult, and is learning Japanese from iPad apps. We're looking at doing city break visits to give them a flavour for foreign university cities, rather than UK based, while they still have time to become fluent in another language.

The larger trend here, is more options due to globalisation and global networks. It applies in other areas, which I'll try to delve into.

Trend 5: Digital ownership and inheritance (among other things)

Digital Curation, passing it on, cloud owners

You buy music for your kids, then give it to the when they leave home. You die, leaving all your software, books, movies, music to your next of kin (or to charity). When your stuff consists of cached copies and permission to redownload, how does that work?

There's not any mechanism at the moment to pass your stuff from one account to another. I'm talking about Amazon and iTunes here, and they seem to be the model that everyone's copying. Expect these systems to get more mature, coping with the whole life cycle of families (births, deaths, marriages, leaving home, divorce) more explicitly than they do now.

Different formats are more amenable to transfer than others - music can all be rendered back to unprotected formats, even in iTunes, but movies and books are still fully DRM protected, as are Apps from at least the mobile app stores.

The plus side, of course, is that media was never permanent anyway, due to obsolescence, but once the process of giving it away is worked out, digital versions, especially cloud based, are liable to stay up to date (e.g. iTunes Match using the current "best" format, regardless of whether your copy is a nasty low rate MP3 from the turn of the century).

The dynamic in this market follows the now familiar "winner takes all" model common to consumer network based services. We simply don't want to manage 15 repositories of stuff, one, maybe two is enough.

I think this means Amazon first, Apple second and Google struggling.

Normal market dynamics, whereby companies fail will have a big impact, if consumer's access to their stuff relies on that companies key servers or PKI being available. I expect to see a niche for escrow of that stuff and established IT players working out how to monetize running the authorisation / DRM infrastructure of dead companies.

Trend 4: Servers - Multicore, Big RAM, Flash memory

We are approaching another inflection point where the commodity components of servers are becoming cheap enough that alternative architectures become possible or necessary.

Ten years ago, most servers had one to eight CPUs, with a single core, and memory measured in single digit gigabytes. Disk drives were broadly simile, although smaller. Today's servers have up to eighty cores, low single digit terabytes of RAM and solid state storage far faster than any disk drive can possibly be.

Solid state storage appears in lieu of disk drives, in storage arrays, in cache cards in arrays, in PCI cards in servers, just about everywhere. The relative speeds and sizes of server components are shuffling, and new architectures will be tried, no single one seems dominant yet.

Today it's possible to buy 10 core processors and 32 GB memory DIMMs. A commodity server in 2013-5 will have multiple terabytes of RAM, close coupled flash storage, tens to hundreds of cores, with hardware virtualisation and be capable of running very different workloads to the gear we have today.

So. How best to exploit these things? VMware farms with Windows/Linux images maybe not be the best way, who knows?

Trend 3: Games Consoles and VR

VR / Games Consoles

Games Consoles and AR are creating the enabling technologies for low cost Virtual Reality, being cheaper high quality head mounted displays, tracking based on movement recognition or video, and AR type recognition of the physical world.

One of the big disadvantages of VR is that the user is blind and vulnerable (and funny looking) in the real world. AR needs to understand where you are in the real world, overlaying this information into a VR world makes it much safer in a home environment. Buy still funny looking.

Expect VR to surface again in games consoles within 5 years or so.

Trend 2: AR and QR, merging real and digital worlds

AR / QR

Augmented Reality, overlaying digital information on the real world, and Quick Response codes, creating physical hyperlinks to digital data in the real world. These are smartphone technologies, but are currently emerging in niche areas.

Vuzix and Nokia are working on AR glasses, shipping to the military in 2012 (contracts signed) with consumer coming in 2013.

Trend 1: New forms of computing

Smartphones and the like, app stores, new interfaces

Expectations and experiences about what a computer is (and is called) are changing very rapidly. Costs are lower, many more users, application delivery, updates are much slicker. Built in obsolescence is a given (at most two generations of the software platform will run on given hardware, for some hardware - no updates).

Penetration of smartphones is shooting up in developed countries (iPhone or iPhone style).

App stores are the special case for cloud based digital archives accessed by accounts. Your account on iTunes, Amazon, etc is a username, password and list of stuff you have access to download again. The small print covers how many devices you can download to, and the whole lot is covered by PKI infrastructure so you don't cheat.

Your house, computer, phones, tablets only hold your locally cached or streamed copy. The "original" is a database entry giving your account permission to that app, film, book, whatever.

Games consoles lead interface innovation outside of touchscreens - Nintendo Wii, Kinect, etc. Touch and gestural interfaces are going mainstream, with the conventions still evolving.

What's it all about

The blog that is. Basically an extension of my notebooks, observations, thoughts and hopefully some patterns in emerging trends, both technological and social.

Technology, society, future.

First Post

This is just checking the gear works. Bloggerplus on iPad and blogger.com.

Here goes.