What do cell phones look like in the year 2144?
Obviously they won’t have a screen anymore. They’ll be pop-up displays. So if you’re sitting on a train and your romantic partner sends you a steamy selfie…guess who has an audience?
Has this annoyed anyone else?
If they’re tactical screens, that makes sense. But I still don’t think transparent displays on personal devices will be a thing in the future.
Obviously they won’t have a screen anymore. They’ll be pop-up displays. So if you’re sitting on a train and your romantic partner sends you a steamy selfie…guess who has an audience?
What we expect a new tech to deliver and what it actually becomes are two very different things.
Eg: Video calls.
When 3G (first video call capable network) was rolled out in the early '00s every telco and tech pundit was talking about the coming age of the video phone where everyone would video call everyone else.
What happened?
Voice call traffic fell off a cliff (and video calls died for a decade) as everyone was texting rather than calling on their phones.
2023, and I HATE video calls. I mean, I don’t like audio either, but video is just… Please let me just do my work. At the very least don’t make me come on camera to talk to people who also don’t want to talk to me.
Same. It’s one thing if I’m calling my 7-year old niece that lives 100 miles away but I miss her and want to see her face. It’s something else entirely when I’m on a call I don’t want to be on in the first place, listening to people I don’t need to hear from who aren’t even talking to me.
My favorite part is where nobody is making eye contact because they are all looking at the screen instead f the camera.
Well, that or the one person who is having some weird technical issue that keep blasting the whole meeting with strange noises.
I suspect it’ll be neural implants. embedded on the optical nerve somewhere, injecting hologram-like images into our field of view. Maybe toss in some sort of marking system for our fingertips for the implant to track as an interface device.
this could also conceivably provide tactile feed back through weak shocks to the fingertips, mimicking touching something, giving you the floaty keyboard and private conversations.
Adverts piped directly into my brain? Oh joy
You can be sure that the day someone invents ads that get piped directly into your brain is the day before someone invents an adblocker for them.
don’t worry, they’ll be so relevant, you’ll just think the real content is… just a really clever add. (Okay, so maybe all you’ll see is just advertising. but how is that different than YT already is is?)
The same reason I avoid YouTube like the plague 🤦♀️ I can barely open the app without watching an advert
Hmmm… can you imagine if they figure out how to start pumping other sensations? Dr. Sasquatch soap… making you think you smell like a mangy dog. the not-as-itchy socks company… giving you the sensation of itchy socks.
whatever iteration of as-seen-on-YT wonderbra they happen to be on… only to realize, your manboobs aren’t actually that large…awkward.
You can choose between a pair of nintendo power gloves or tattooing your fingertips and little qr-codes on the fingernails.
I was thinking some sort of IR reflective ink. or UV reflective ink tattooes… on the pads and behind the fingernails (ouch)
Dude it will be an illusion existing only in your mind via some implants. Other people will see that you’re looking at the palm of your hand and assume you’re watching your phone
They just see you flexing your fingers, they won’t know that your squeezing tits on a post on milfgonewild.
They’ll know.
hahaha, yes probably, but you can always deny.
Let me think about the future, how it will be. How people will… You know, while we’re at it, do you hate it when your thoughts get blocked by country barriers? Let me know introduce you NordVPN, it integrates nicely with your cerebral implant and you can access data sources from all over the world. NordVPN also contains a secret stash for all your very private thoughts. Subscribe now and get 20% off, or 40% if you bundle them with the new RayCons cerebral implants.
Don’t worry, everything will be owned by a few companies, and privacy won’t even be an understood concept.
“What’s privacy? Is that something that evil terrorists do?”
-Kids in the future
We’re kinda already there. I’ve noticed the generations that grew up after 9/11 when state surveillance and collecting and selling our personal data have been normalized, they think those of us who yearn for privacy are the weird ones.
I realize that’s also true of people my age who have been immersed in the slowly boiling pot, but I try to imagine not remembering a time when we switched to Google because they promised not to sell us out to advertisers.
How times have changed…
The only future I can imaging is the same as today but worse.
So many movies and shows have phones being transparent rectangles that look like a piece of glass. It’s impractical for so many reasons from privacy to even being able to hold the thing.
Honestly I don’t think cellphones will change that much going forward. They will get more powerful. Maybe they will continue to replace other computing devices for people such as laptops, desktops and gaming consoles, but the form factor is as practical as it gets.
Yeah, from an actual usability and privacy standpoint, that’s horrible design. It does make for good visuals with the actor and the display in frame at the same time. No more “closeup of a message on a phone display”
I’m personally hoping for smart stuff to get a bit more distributed. A phone-like CPU unit in my pocket streaming display content to my watch and AR glasses or a full size screen on the seat in front of me on the subway. Simple visual and vibration notifications from a smart ring.
This is my bet as well. I think at some point, foldable screens will get good enough to get mass market, and then it will be about how thin/light they can make those so they get bigger screens but the device remains pocketable. Not to mention, screen tech matches/exceeds today. That’s the practical appeal of things like holos outside of just being aesthetically “future looking.”
I’m also very interested in the idea of AR glasses that can be worn normally, but that’s pretty limited by physics right now (battery and camera tech especially.)
In the futuuuuuuure, the concept of privacy has become obsolete. You share everything with everyone and the thing is, no one cares. Everyone has seen everything. Nothing is embarrassing any more. Until one day, the Cringelord is reborn…
In fact, the only way that you could pray to make impression,
On the era ahead is that instead of being notable,
You make the data describing you undecodable.MC Frontalot, “Secrets From the Future”
This is just Unimatrix Zero from Star Trek Voyager, isn’t it?
Honestly, probably Star Wars’ fault for the popularization of the blue kind of glitchy hologram specifically. Would be interested to hear if anyone can name any pre-SW hologram effects.
In film, sure.
Holograms we’re around in one way or another. What’s her name in the Naked Sun (Asimov, the victims “husband”…) produced holographic art. That was first published in book form in ‘57.
Star Wars may have been the first largely because they were special effects pioneers.
What seems most off to me is that they’re holograms but aside from that basic fact, they look like shit. Monochrome line drawings… really? A hologram of that is better than a high res, full color picture? Why can’t the holograms be full color and high quality?
Take Star Wars communication holograms, for example. They’re fucking freestanding 3D entities that walk around your room and sit in chairs and shit. But they’re grainy, with washed out colors and static distorting them constantly. Why???
The Expanse actually made immersive 3D holographic interfaces that looked great and seemed useful. They filled the room - you could walk into them, grab them, zoom them around, pan, etc. This is really the only compelling depiction I’ve seen.
I think the Star Trek holodeck went much too far with this - holograms indistinguishable from reality? How is this meant to work with the characters constantly interacting with their surroundings?
Yeah eating drinking and fucking holograms… really?
I always saw holograms as a cinematic device rather than something we’d actually used, much like the superbright monitors that would project what was on the screen onto the the actors, which allowed the fourth wall audience more information about what’s going on.
It’s much like the Star Trek transporter, less a plausible technology, and more an instrument of the medium.
OK; that’s starting to make sense. Thanks.
Holograms are my gripe as well. Three dimensional holograms have at least some use, but those 2D holograms are always worse than just having a regular screen. They’re washed out, sometimes not even full colour just greyscale (or blue, yellow, whatever). You’d need hard light holograms that can produce solid objects like in Star Trek for them to be useful. Like, in that case you could hide displays while not in use, easily carry the small holo emitter around and adjust the size to your liking.
Another non-favorite of mine is the sci-fi bend. Where everything just has a 125 degree bend in it for some reason. Screens? Just cut out a bit at the corner with a 125 degree bend. Door? Seam down the middle will have a 125 degree bend in it. Wall panels? Random 125 degree bend in the line.
Shown in what? Movies and series? In those holograms and transparent screens are used because it allows the audience to see what’s happening, trading realism for improved visual story telling.
As for realistic where mobile tech is going, my guess it will be pretty much what we have now, just more compact and foldable.
Eventually advances in AR and brain interfaces might make the “rectangular slabs” be replaced by something more discrete which no longer requires physical inputs. Doubt they’d be called a mobile phone though.
I really liked what was used in The Expanse series.
The expanse remains my favourite portrayal of future technology, it looks actually nice to use and seems very realistic if we assume we can become able to make those things.
Like the fact that the main device is a dirt cheap mass-produced plexiglass phone that are just terminals and rely on servers, that some people have larger ones in a tablet format at home, the way it takes advantage of holograms to expand content outside of the device itself when useful, and my favourite part is how most of the interaction is entirely gesture-based, because who the fuck wants to go around shouting at their phone???
Interfacing is such a pet peeve of mine in scifi, i don’t want to tell the room to turn on the lights, i want to make motion of turning a dimmer in the direction of a lamp and have it act like i’m actually turning a physical dimmer!
Similarily i don’t want devices talking to me, i want them making intuitive noises and if they ever do have to speak to convey complex information i want it to be in a clearly artificial voice because otherwise it’s creepy.Voice interaction has a time and place, it’s useful for communicating very complex stuff quickly and without needing a free limb (that scene), but good god it just becomes annoying if you use that as the primary way of interacting…
Similarily i don’t want devices talking to me, i want them making intuitive noises and if they ever do have to speak to convey complex information i want it to be in a clearly artificial voice because otherwise it’s creepy.
I would love to find some interesting voices of this type for my phone TTS. Everything is “natural” now, but what if I want a voice like SHODAN or something?
yeah, personally i want something like VEGA from the latest doom games, so good.
You mean the transparent rectangle screens? I love The Expanse but did not like those. In order to view things on the screen the background needs to be opaque! I did like how the file transfer worked between devices though, with the swiping and all.
Me too
That far ahead it’ll definitely be neural implants. Beam it straight into your eye or brain.
Have you ever been in a takeaway place or a waiting room where someone is listening to music or watching videos on speaker? What about a lunatic who is walking through Target yelling into their speaker phone? Or, my favorite, some dumbass who decided he needed to have a video call with his girlfriend in a locker room.
People would have zero issues looking at risque pics or having loud conversations into their phone.
That said: Many sci-fi lore books will explain that those are usually representations of what the person is seeing. They aren’t holding up a hologram. They are holding up a device that beams that directly into their eyes so only they can see it… that they are still holding at a weird angle so that the camera doesn’t get a weird shot.
Yup, see through screens too. Like in the future people would rather show off than have privacy. Actually with the ubiquitousness of apple and Samsung products it’s probably true.
100 years from now? All technology will be wearable or implanted, screens won’t exist anymore for personal devices but data will be either projected or beamed directly. Woeln’t be at all surprised if by then it’s largely organic and implanted at birth.
