Virtually There

The days many people have been hoping for since the 80s seem to finally be arriving. Holograms aren’t just fantasy anymore, after a rocky start and…erm…rocky middle virtual reality seems to have bounced back into the mainstream, PDAs have evolved from a small wallet sized block or a super complex phone into an everyday device almost everyone seems to have and recently the likes of Dexter’s Lab computer, Tony Stark’s Jarvis, Team America’s I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E and on a larger (and more evil) scale Aperture Laboratories’ GLaDOS have gone right from the storybooks/film/games right into your own homes.

But is are all of the new revolutions really as new as people think or are they merely more successful advancements of technology that’s been around for a while? Let’s have a look at a few of the recent big hitters and the long unnoticed road many of these products have been on to just about get here.

The Smartphone

After being in the mainstream for over a decade now, these don’t really feel as new anymore, yet with extra features being added to them, companies continue to excite us with these curious little companions. Monday saw the 10 year anniversary of the  announcement of the iPhone by a certain Mr Jobs inciting prospective users with a 3 in one device. Whilst it’s true that Apple put the smartphone firmly in the public eye for all to see, they weren’t the first to bring one out.

Blackberry were pushing out their famous QWERTY keypad phones starting with merely push-email capability in 1999 moving up to a more recognisable smartphone level circa 2001.

Palm also stepped into the market with their Treo 600 smartphone (released 2003) containing popular evolved apps from their wide range of PDAs (memories of my Zire 21 and LifeDrive PDAs at School and College surfacing as well as my Centro Smartphone at Uni) and previously their PDAs all the way back to their first “Pilot” in 1997.

Apple themselves also brought out much of the smart technology in the first PDA to feature handwriting recognition, the financially unpopular Newton (shame really) released all the way back in 1993

The iPhone was one of the first to combine the elements from it’s ancestor as well as building on popular features within many current millennial smartphones (the concept of apps, organisational tools, multimedia playback, internet and email access) along with the features of their iPods (which in turn helped predecessor MP3 players become more mainstream) with multiple points of touch on the screen and in turn spurred on many competitors to push the operating systems they were building up at the same time further and create the competition we have today.

Holograms

Last year, Microsoft announced one of the first units available to display holograms within our world. The process is known as Mixed Reality – a combination of Virtual Reality style headgear but with an Augmented Reality experience. However the world has had holograms for a while, though they’ve been in the hands of scientists for most of it.

Studies into Holography have been going since the early 40s with the early holograms coming out as much as 20 years later. In the run up to becoming more consumer accessible, holograms have been used in a number of functions from security and verification (check your ID card) to art installations. A great selection of examples can be found here for anyone interested in these eye popping applications.

Voice Recognition

Voice recognition has exploded in popularity in the last couple of years with assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Google (in many forms) and Alexa recently fighting for the top spot. But many quieter characters have been serving a small number of people for years.

Speech replication has been developed since the year 1000, with Audrey becoming a popular character the the early days of speech recognition Whilst DARPA’s SUR program certainly wasn’t the first, it was certainly one of the largest early automatic speech recognition systems, designed crica 1971 to understand continuous speech, with other colleagues at Bell Labs and IBM helping to fund research into getting computers to understand us.

Before speech recognition went mobile, popular programs such as Dragon’s famous Naturally Speaking dictation software dominated the desktop computer market with speech recognition such as Nuance and Speechworks becoming the sucess stories of research for the telephone market.

Incidentally, Siri has been in development since the original creators founded their company by the same name in 2007 with the initial version being release on the app store before Apple’s rendition of it appearing on the iPhone 4s as part of the iOS experience.

So What’s Next?

Who knows? Could another innovative product spring from the whirl of recent creations?

With technology such as Driverless cars slowly emerging, drones taking off (yes, I went there) in popularity and everything having “smart” technology applied to it, there’s bound to be a few new innovations taking of this 2017.

Got any ideas of your own? Or know of key technologies that could be included in another post? Feel free to share your observations in the comments below.

 

Mike

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