COMBATSIM.COM: Future Shock

Future Shock

by Jim "Twitch" Tittle

Article Type: Feature
Article Date: January 29, 2003

Same Old

Ok so it won’t be like Star Trek’s Enterprise with holo-decks for leisure fantasies and replicators to manufacture your meals, but your home of tomorrow will be quite a leap ahead.

Most homes in Southern California don’t have a central heating/cooling system with even a rudimentary thermostat much less a Lennox or Honeywell computer controller. The turn-on, turn-off knob on a gas wall heater is barely a step ahead of the hearth in the olden days. They are pretty much about the same as the houses we see unearthed from ancient times on the Discovery Channel. They have walls, rooms, windows, doors and roofs plus a singular heating source—fire. It’s sobering to think that our home is basically the same as the reconstructed replica of Viking house found in Newfoundland from 1,000 A.D.

Over ten years ago, Radio Shack began selling modules and controllers that you could control with you PC. What did these things do? They’re mundane but useful devices for turning on and off electrical devices, thermostats and lights. There was a module that accepted commands from the telephone when you called home too. They could be used as part of a home security system. Neat ideas but not essential. The kernel of the concept is valid.

A decade ago in Radio Shack

Let’s fast forward to 2003. You have a PC that entertains you, assists with work, has creative programs and can communicate with computers anywhere on the planet. The whole term of the PC—personal computer—was born from the era when computers were big. In hearing the word “computer” even in 1980 the average person’s mind evoked an image of a refrigerator/freezer sized machine in an office spinning reels of magnetic tape.

The definition is probably going to be illustrated by something besides the oblong box we’ve come to know. The next PC will be a device that will be light enough to carry or attach to a belt with a screen that projects onto glasses and be voice controlled. You’ll see the “screen” via short focus eye adjustment the way you do now when you see a dirt spot on your sunglasses. Its “size” projection will encompass the user’s full range of vision so it will appear very large to the eye. Of course it will access the web wirelessly.

Soon all devices will communicate wirelessly

I can hear it now from the naysayers. “3-D glasses are limited and voice programs are quirky.” That’s now. Think of the aircraft of 1923, only twenty years after the Wright brother’s first flight, compared to now. You get the picture. Just as aviation forged ahead through trial and error to be ultimately refined, so too goes the “twenty-something” year old PC. These things exist now and will be honed to marketable perfection. And progress is being made at an exponential rate in the technology due to the fact that we’ve achieved a high techno-industrial level already. When the atom was split it opened up myriad possibilities in a rush forward.

Flight sim on 1.5-inch screen?

Cellular telephonic technology is just a bit older than PCs and it has rapidly advanced. A new one is infinitely advanced in size and weight reduction plus features and capabilities over one from three years ago. Sure, I believe anyone that thinks it’s useful to use a 1.5-inch LCD screen to “trade stocks,” wirelessly as the marketing blurb went, is goofy. And who wants to scroll through junk e-mails on one? Who wants to play games on even a 1.5-in color screen? A 19-inch color screen is much better for all these things. But the concept is good. Bulky phones that directly access satellites exist and are expensive but can get a signal anywhere in the world! In reality they are smaller than the first Motorola “portable phone” a couple decades ago.

Wireless, cell phones are voice activated. A “Call home” vocal command dials your residence. Sure you must dab at tiny keys to program the numbers in now, but wait. We’ll soon have a wearable headset/microphone that is fully audibly activated including programming.

When Technology Collides

Can you see the collision coming? The combination of PDAs—personal data assistants—and cellular phones has already arrived. Several models can be purchased today. You’ve seen the phones that take and transmit pictures. They’re here now. It’s like an astronomer watching asteroids barrel towards a planet. The collision is imminent. The day is rapidly approaching when you’ll be on vacation in Paris wearing your PC and you'll call your aunt Martha in Iowa and wow her with real-time images of the Eiffel Tower fed from the micro-miniature video camera on your glasses and bounced off a satellite. She and uncle George will see what you see on their 60-inch plasma video device as you narrate. Technically, if you had the bucks you could do this today!

Video device prices will plummet

The PC of today will become a mainframe tomorrow controlling accessories in your home. You will call it from a remote location on tomorrows PC and verbally tell it things such as “Temperature 75 degrees. Lights on. Turn on oven.” When you arrive the house will be warm, lit and dinner will be nearly ready. Motorola’s breakthrough advance using crystal-based microchips over silicone has produced a 70-Gigahertz chip in the lab.

Once home you will tell the mainframe what DVDs, music CDs or MP3 selections to play and to record the History Channel program about “The Carrier War” for later viewing. All this will all be wireless, of course. Your mainframe has surfed the web to upgrade and download programs and find things your interest profile matched. You’ve told it that once a CPU or RAM of certain specs drops to a pre-determined price to automatically order it so it shows up at you doorstep ready to install after having sought it out on the web while you were at work. The term “home computer” will someday really mean just that. Yes, it will talk to you. You may even want it to respond it to a name like “Norma Jean.” Personal computers will be something else.

Are we going too fast for you? Wait. This stuff is in development NOW! Companies with names like Sony, TiVo, Envisioneering Group, SONICblue, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, Toshiba, Samsung, SnapStream, Tonight’s Menu and many more are making these things happen. Wireless Internet pioneers such as Dave Hughes is trailblazing the “fixed wireless” services that beam data at broadband speeds directly to subscribers be they in rural Wisconsin, the Mongolian steppes or the Puerto Rico jungles. Far out? He’s already “hooked up” the above geographic locations! Once the government overhauls airwave regulations this will happen widely.

Future Gaming

Well, what will gaming hold for us in the future? It will never be like the Enterprise’s holo-deck but wrap-around 3-D interactive will come. We should be able to enter a virtual 3-D world, perhaps using eye wear at first, and be able to physically interact with objects there via gloves that mimic real world mechanics. Verbal commands will be acted upon too. You will pick up the virtual M-16 and say, “Forward, slow” to advance. Turing your head will produce an infinite vista 360-degrees around and up and down. You’ll say, “Stop,” shoulder your rifle and pop off the bad guy on your right. Tilting your head left or right as you move will change the line of travel from straight ahead when you say, “Run fast.”

If you take your wireless PC to a locale and use its video camera to record an interesting geographic location you will be able to create a custom program for you virtual soldier using that terrain. Of course you’ll be able to trade terrains with gamers all over the world since some French chap has geo-files for the Bavarian Alps that look cool saving you a physical trip. You swap him for your terrain files of the Guatemalan jungle where you went two years ago and everyone’s happy.

Combat flight simulations will still have joysticks but once you enter the virtual world you’ll be sitting in a cockpit created by game producers that video-scanned a real live P-51’s office. No more whimpy, fake, user-friendly instruments. You’ll have to learn the actual ones. There’ll be all types of skies, terrain oceans and weather recorded from real planes’ cameras. It’ll be an Imax experience in the home as you bank and pan around to look down on things. With CGI—computer generated images—they will have created a column of Panther tanks moving along a road with WWII-era buildings in today’s terrain of France. You see, the lay of the land hasn’t changed just the modern autos, buildings and such.

Sadly, we don’t know of any company actively pursuing any of the above. We have resolve that they will but when is unknown. Until that time, no matter how fast a CPU, how much RAM or how hot a graphics card exists, the comparisons to today are applicable as long as we’re being entertained via a Cyclops-like CRT no matter how large. While you’re shooting down that enemy plane you’re still going to see the traffic out the window in your peripheral vision lessening the immersion factor.

How Much?

So what does it all cost? Something as basic as fast broadband Internet service is relatively expensive considering $50 per month. Put another $40-50 in for cellular service with web access. You got cable or satellite TV. There’s at least $50 per month with a movie channel pack like HBO. More if you want more programming. TiVo subscription is something like $15 a month after the hefty purchase price of it and the big-screen TV you bought. Satellite radio in your car costs $15 per month with receivers still at a lofty price, though cheaper to “add-on” to your radio.

Way back a long time ago the first VCRs cost $1,200-1,500. $60 VCRs and DVD players are found everywhere now. Video cameras were $2,000. Today’s advanced generation of tiny, hand-held camcorders are about $250. “Small” cell phones were $600-800 with airtime going at 70¢ a minute or more on top of $50 a month for service with voicemail. Cell phones with myriad features are free with as little as $30 per month service including 500 minutes and free long distance, plus text messaging. PC modems ran at 14,400 bps and cost $100, $200 if you wanted a 28,800. A 56k modem can be found at competitive stores for $15 today. Devices are soon coming that will make the PC like TiVo for $50. Ten-foot satellite dishes that once ran for over $3000 now are 18 inches in diameter and are free with subscription service.

Free is good

While we saw the consumer getting more for the same money and more for even less money, it took time for production quantities to force prices down. It’s been something like twenty years since VCRs were well over $1,000. In 1996 they were still going for $400. For the same quality machine today expect to pay $60. From the time DVD players debuted at about $400 just three years ago we’re down to less than $60!

So while the techno goodies have dramatically plummeted in price we pay for all these subscription services. Besides primary access cost the Internet is free. It was meant to be free. That’s where all the rest of the hodge-podge needs to go. It is conceivable that ALL satellite access could be covered with one monthly service fee to include satellite television and radio, program recording service along with all wireless communications—cell phones and PCs also accessing birds in orbit.

Just as the pioneers and innovators in aviation saw future advances in their minds' eyes, technology had to catch up. So it is with what we’ve described here. But we are at the Me 262, first jet stage, at least. The space shuttle stage is, relatively speaking, just around the corner!

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