Here is why I am convinced that the future will be a plurality of the small touch screens. Personally, I will not accept being restricted to one giant screen, even if it covers an entire wall.
Like Gordon E. Moore, the father of the prediction about the increasing number of components on a semiconductor chip that came to be known as Moore’s Law, I am skeptical about the possibility of technological singularity to ever occur. I doubt that there is a point in the technological future at which artificial intelligences will become capable of augmenting and improving themselves, leading to an explosive growth in intelligence. However, like Jeff Hawkins, who is also a unconvinced about singularity, I strongly believe in the value of the machines.
”Machines will understand the world using the same methods humans do; they will be creative. Some will be self-aware, they will communicate via language, and humans will recognize that machines have these qualities. Machines will not be like humans in all aspects, emotionally, physically. If you think dogs and other mammals are conscious, then you will probably think some machines are conscious. If you think consciousness is a purely human phenomenon, then you won’t think machines are conscious.”
I think humans will expand the capabilities of their brains using several machines connected to the cloud and all sharing their personal data. With the birth of the iPad tablet, and its many Android and Windows clones, we are already in this era. The future is plurality. We now have access in our immediate environment to a multitude of small and easily portable screens. The context of the task at hand define which machine we use.
For many, the above statement may seem obvious and even trivial. With the extremely rapid rate of adoption of the tablet, it is a unavoidable that touch is going to dominate the next era of computing. Welcome to the future, here’s your … rectangle.
However, it is interesting to note that until recently few visionary envisioned the ubiquity of tablet in our lives. For nearly 20 years, Microsoft has had the Microsoft Home (also referred to as “Home of the Future”) in a building on its Redmond campus. In that facility, Microsoft replicates a home outfitted with technologies that it thinks will be in use five to 10 years in the future.
Until recently, this futuristic house was demonstrating a wealth of giant touch screens with almost no tablet or smartphone.
The omnipotent large touch screen has long been part of our collective imagination. How many science fiction movie perceived as realistic a giant screen that covers an entire wall? Almost no science-fiction movie except from the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey have adequately predicted the importance of the iPad.
Personally, I am not better than my colleagues to predict the future. When I had the initial idea of a slingboard during summer of 2011, I immediately thought that this innovation would be possible only with the advent of large touch screens (30 inches and bigger). So I did not start my business immediately. Instead, I committed in writing a book with Addison Wesley about agile software development. The book “Executable Specifications with Scrum” is the result of this commitment.
It was not until nearly a year later that I finally realized that the use of a slingboard was possible on a small screen factor.
One day, I looked at my daughter who was sitting with his friends around the family table. Nobody spoke directly. All were busy with their iphone / ipod. They had long moment of silence and then suddenly all were laughing in heart. Curious, I finally understood that each was consulting in real-time the same messages thread on their Facebook wall.
This experience was an eye-opener. I finally understood that teammates do not need to see the entire slingboard to work together. They just need to be able to have a view of the section that concerns them.
The giant touch screen is dead (at least as long as it will be too expensive). The future is the plurality of the small touch screens.
Mario Cardinal 