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Star Trek universe without the peace, tolerance, lack of war on Earth, and eradication of hunger and poverty. Sadly.
I will never get my own holodeck.
I vaguely remember about 15 years back debating with someone that digital photography would never become mainstream. The cameras were be fine, but the average person on the street would never pay serious money for a PC to handle the photos on, never mind learn how to use paintshop, etc.
I was talking rubbish of course. Both cost and expertise problems were solved pretty quickly, by richer and more clever people than me
One day someone will find a really compelling reason to use VR but as yet, it has not lived up to the promise.
Modern VR is very very clever, but until we can fully "plug in" and feel like we're "there" (wherever that is) without getting tired running around doing whatever we're doing, I just don't see the point.
This of course also means that we're now totally dependent on the same technology...
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Augmented Reality on the other hand may yet deliver something of use.
we've done bloody well at micro technology but not so good on the macro side.
A couple of years ago the head of AMD said that for fully immersive VR we need 8K per eye at 200Hz which is several years of computing power off... headsets tend to be heavy and cause your face to sweat after a while making your face uncomfortable, and it's bloody expensive for even OK stuff ... all these things will be overcome, but I wonder if they will be overcome in time for VR to stay this time, or if it will be a further generation maybe 5 years from now - time will tell. We adopted mp3 when it was appreciably worse than CD (at the bit rates people used), we adopted streaming when unless you live in Netflix HQ the bitrate varies enough that poor quality picture doesn't make us switch off and buy the bluray. We flocked to tablet computers when virtually no one had a good use case for them*... so maybe the poor picture quality, long cables, heavy headsets and crappy implementations wont hinder widespread adoption
Tech might be coming along quickly, but we adopt stuff slowly when it's good, but adopt hard when it's marketed - whether good or bad... I'm yet to see decent marketing of VR
* People still try to explain how holding a tablet on your lap in bed is better than a TV in the room and a remote,sit on the train watching video vertically... we have found uses for the things we buy rather than bought things we need with tablets...
It is amazing how quickly technology moves on though.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/tav397/Memory-Card.jpg
This is a good example, a better one would be with a floppy disk next to its modern equivalent but that's the first image Google spewed up. A comedian, can't remember who, talked about how it was incredible that pretty much all the knowledge available to mankind was literally at everyone's fingertips but most use it to watch funny videos of cats.
When an iPhone for the first time I had an app which showed a virtually live stream of the world from space using satellites, you could follow weather and that. Ever so exciting waiting for a big hurricane/tornado to wreak havoc somewhere so I could look at it. Mind blowing stuff. I was bowled away at being able to play THPS2 as well, it was identical to the PS version from when I was about 13.
It's chock-full of this sort of stuff, from the first days of computing - they have a part-replica Colossus - via the first transistor and integrated circuit computers up to the present day. The size (physical) and capacity (miniscule) of early data storage is almost hilarious, and the rate of shrinking of it is staggering - not to mention the equivalent costs in today's terms.
They have a Cray supercomputer from the early 1970s - which has about the same computing power as an iPhone 4S.
The most important technological development in the history of the last hundred or so years I think - more than flight, nuclear power or space travel even.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
My grandmother died in her 50s, before I was born. She had a weak heart valve that eventually lead to complete heart failure. Nowadays they would've replaced it with a pig valve or artificial one. A simple and quick op that gives excellent results. Things HAVE moved on massively.
Sure it's not one of Donald Trump's Coke deliveries?
I found an old Canon SD card in my Camera Bag the other day, it said 16 on it and I assumed it meant 16GB put it into my camera and it couldn't even store 1 picture.