Future Visions – Corporate Utopia vs Sci-fi Dystopia?

There’s many views on how new technology will find its way into our lives in the future, in the last few weeks, 2 films have been released which paint future visions.

My thoughts on these films…

Firstly, from Microsoft – a vision of how collaboration could work, secondly, from Keiichi Matsuda with a vision of how our lives could be augmented with digital information. They’re films made with very different purposes and to portray very different outcomes.

There’s just over 12 minutes of film to watch here, I’ve put the Microsoft film first as for me (as with many corporate films) it shows an ideal and maybe utopian reality pitched in the context of working professionals and their (maybe perfect) families. Keiichi’s I’d watch second as for me, it shows an opposite reality to the corporate vision – what could happen when technology mis-fires, when someone’s life isn’t necessarily perfect, how similar technology could manifest itself in less producutive and maybe more obvious environments. For me, both consider how similar technological advances may manifest themselves in our lives.

There’s no right or wrong here. There is plenty of vision…

I hope that you can take inspiration from both films, and that these films can open the eyes of educated people to consider how we *may* interact with technology in the future.

Be good now…

Microsoft: Productivity Future Vision

Hyper-Reality

HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The Microsoft film is grounded in a sense of reality in that only products which have viable prototypes in existence are used in the film (check the list of collaborators at the end). I like the notion of ‘fluid mobility’. That’s a realistic goal that we (product developers) have been working on for a while now and are familiar with – mobile is not a device but a state of being. We (users of any technology) expect seamless experiences across devices, and that the work we do on our phones (regardless of platform) is carried across to the devices we use when slightly less mobile (laptops / desktops) – the notion here is that it is about the mobility of the experience, not the mobility of the device.

Keiichi’s film is his 3rd in a series which pushes a potential of holograms and augmented reality in public life. To quote from “Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.” So very different in the way they’re pitched, but equally interesting in their view of how we might be working in the not too distant future.

Thoughts..?

In the comments below or on the Twitters.