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If you asked me back in the year 2000, what 2012 was going to be like, I’m not sure I could have gave you a good answer. So you could imagine how wrong people back in 1899 were about the year 2000. They thought there were going to be flying firemen!
It’s funny to see people’s vision of the future mostly because it’s ridiculous but also because it’s constrained by the reality of their present. People in 1899 didn’t know that touch screens and tablets would be a thing, the just imagined more complicated and automated versions of what they already had. They weren’t completely wrong though, they knew we would figure out a way to find an electric floor scrubber and invent awesome bathtubs.
The pictures were made by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. The first series of these pictures were produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. [Public Domain Review via Explore]
Barbers aren’t quite there yet.
Roomba!
Now we do it with LASERS.
This cracks me up so much.
I think every generation dreams of flying cars.
Rest, relaxation and robots.
They look like dragons.
Look, they foresaw google digitising books. Great stuff
But it does make you realise that most people’s visions of the future in today’s age are still constrained by the current technology. The best thing I can envisage is holographic video playback. Forget, stereoscopic 3D, this would be real 3D
Aside from the technology, I’m not sure how a director would even begin to make such a video. They have a tough enough job trying to convey the story from a single view point at a time, to do this with an infinite number of view points seems a complete nightmare. Didn’t DVD support a feature of having multiple camera angles for specific scenes that the user could control? That would be great if it could be more mainstream.
Simples, you put the camera ABOVE the field of view!
As long as the lens or lenses capture a wide enough angle, or there are say 5, one above and 1 at each compass point, you can capture something like a football or tennis game.
Air Pinch to Zoom In.
(You read it here first.)
#lookdown #downshot #holovision
This article is sooooo 2011…
http://gizmodo.com/5778537/flying-fire-fighters-and-other-things-that-didnt-come-to-pass
I guess it was a slow news day so they tried to disguise a recycled article lol
Seems to me they weren’t too far off.
1. Electric razor
2. Vacuum cleaner etc
3. Machine garment manufacturing
4. Firefighting aircraft
5. Aero-cabs = airlines
6. Electric curlers etc
All these things exist. While the precise realisation of these ideas is slightly off, they have all come to pass in some guise.
Absolutely spot on in the bottom picture – the combined oven-hob that the lady is attending to while she does her make-up is almost exactly what they look like today, plus it looks like they predicted the woman being in both the bedroom and kitchen at the same time, which really would be progress!
Looks about right.
I think we’ve probably gotten to a point now that we can predict future technology with reasonable accuracy. We know how so much works and can be improved and have great theories of how stuff should work (quantum computers for example). It would be really interesting to see some serious research put into predicting how far technology will advance in the next 50-100 years.