Give It a Minute, Innovation Takes Time

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Predicting the future is a suckers’s game. Unless you’re in possession of a Grays Sports Almanac from Back to the Future Part II, you have no divine insight into what’s to come.

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That’s why the subheading in a recent New York Times article is disingenuous. “What do Google Glass and Pokémon Go have in common? They didn’t change the world,” it harps. Yet the article writer, Shira Ovide, is more circumspect.

“People mocked Google Glass after the company released a test version of the computer headset in 2013, but the glasses might have been a building block,” she writes.

Indeed, microprocessors, software, cameras and batteries have since improved so much that digital headgear might soon be less obtrusive and more useful.

Likewise, Pokémon Go’s augmented reality might not have been for everyone, she observes, “but they helped techies refine the ideas and made some people excited about the possibilities of more engrossing digital experiences.”

AR combined with next-generations of smartglasses or smartphones is widely viewed as a principal means with which we will interface with the 3D internet or metaverse.

Clearly the history of technological breakthroughs is littered with cul-de-sacs. It is on the shoulders of those “mistakes” or experiments that the new product emerges or consensus forms around the utility of others.

Ovide points out that in 2013 Apple CEO Tim Cook, said that gadgets we wear on our wrists “could be a profound area of technology.”

Wrist wearables haven’t yet taken off, it’s true. But Apple’s multi-trillion dollar fortune was built on Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs — alongside designer Jonny Ive — putting form and function plus content (iTunes) together into a phone handset. If more people had seen that coming (Blackberry, Nokia) then it would be them, not Apple, sitting on giant cash reserves.

“I think AR can be huge,” Cook told Apple investors in 2016.

And it will be. Just wait and see.

Senior executives at Google and Microsoft have gone overboard on the impact of AI. “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than electricity or fire,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in 2018.

He’s not right yet, but he wasn’t talking about an instant impact. His statement is hardly putting his company or his own reputation on the line. AI will be huge and likely to impact every aspect of society.

Stereo 3D. Now there’s a tech that’s had a checkered history. The latest run at it from 2010, cheer-led by James Cameron, has not changed cinema let alone the world.

Yet the intellectual concept of using technology to pull audiences into the stories with a vision more proximate to how we see the world in three dimensions, has been alive since the birth of cinema and is constant with the movement into virtual reality and the metaverse.