Beyond the Living Room

Ken Belson writes in the New York Times from Tokyo:

The lesson in the latest round of quarterly earnings seems clear: If you want to succeed, work your way into the living room, not the boardroom.

From "Consumer Electronics Surge Ahead of Office Computers"

Remember all that talk about the battle for the living room? Hot plastic on plastic action as Sony's PlayStation2 and Microsoft's Xbox entered the race to be the box at the heart of home entertainment. The PS2/Xbox struggle was just a foreshadowing of what was likely to be a paradigm shift in consumer electronics and personal computers.

It's a long term trend evident in the size of thinking machines. Starting with the room-sized ENIAC and now today with PDAs, devices for human mental augmentation have shunk rapidly. (see Tools for Thought). If you don't need to be at the tech lab to time-share on the computer, then you can work from your office desk. Or you could work from home! Or anywhere you carry a small bag full of technology.

Anyone who has edited PowerPoint slides from the first row seconds before giving a speech can speak to the white-knuckle thrill of modern business technology. As exciting as the business applications have proven though, the world is filled with people who are not as likely to file a report as they are likely to take and distribute a picture of their baby or their children.

So it makes sense that the living room is the medium term destination for technology growth. It's where people gather. Humanity at large seizes military inventions for casual use! Hurrah! But living in Japan, and watching the Xbox launch in South Korea, I realized that "living room" is a silly assumption. Many homes or hotels featured only a nice floor to sit on, and precious little space for gathering in private.

You could argue that all countries are headed in the living room direction, converging on a shared goal of couch-borne plenty where the fruits of capitalism elevate fattening legs in front of giant screens.

Or you could argue that the longer-term destination for technology is the human body (see Steve Mann). If technology augments us, we don't want to have to choose when to be augmented - we want the choice all the time. We don't take pictures of our girlfriends and boyfriends sitting at their desks at work, or sitting on their couch in front of their television. Why should we expect that all technology pleasure is best experienced in the living room? Some day, that will seem as absurd as imagining that computers belong only in an office.

Even if the living room is only a rest stop on the road to tomorrow, it seems fitting that the early battles are being fought with PlayStations and Xboxes. Extensive immersion in video games is the best way to observe the evolution of the technology business, the future of human augmentation, and the future of our shared reality.

Comments

[Bowler]

I've actually been doing a great deal of thought on this topic myself lately.

It seems that within ten to twenty years we should hopefully have a hand-held system that's so powerful that perhaps we wouldn't even need a living-room system.

And on a related topic to the eye-cam human-body computer, I was trying to think of where the next innovation in interface was going to come from. Computers started with the keyboard, and then Apple threw together the first mouse, but then what?

And then it hit me. It's already here: Tablet PCs and the PDA pen inputs.

[ClockworkGrue]

I thought the mouse was invented at the Xerox PARC, but perhaps I am wrong.

One story I _do_ remember, though, was that the mouse was created as a temporary stop-gap, never intended for public use. The technology they wanted to use was touchscreen monitors (though personally, I think the pen input is better because it's a finer point of control, and won't smudge up my screen as much).

Another input device that's "already here" in the some-guys-in-R-and-D-have-some-prototypes sense is body-gestural input, where you are watched by a camera, which interperates your movements to navigate (sometimes called The Minority Report Interface).

[Draigon]

I always thought the next big step would be more about technology portability or usability and less about where the user plants technology. *shrugs*

I do hope sufficient focus is placed on the "living room" in time for internet tv. Everything else seems primed for it except technology just isn't quite there yet. TV now intrudes with half-screen advertisements and animations during the shows, quality of seasonal programming has taken a dive, there are more repeat shows (re-runs) now more than ever, and internet radio has already become popular. I think the next logical step is a heavy competitor with tv, but really only if technology can get into the living room in a practical/seamless way.

[nanpanman]

I think we will create our own systems by deciding what to carry around. digital camera's, watches, highly integrated cellular phones, mp3 players, digital keycards and even digital jewelry. And network them on the body itself by using the body as a wet-wire (NTT docomo and IBM are working on this and have achieved 10Mb/s). This way we carry around an ad-hoc peer to peer network with the functionality of our choosing and with IPv6 everything will be a node including ourselves. this opens up the door for a truly ubiqitous environment. where we can interact with everything, and often in a natural way just by touching it. Interfaces will become natural, more liquid and not fixed to one appliance anymore. The context in which we act will serve as a wrapper for the media we receive and record in it so it becomes possible to google ourselfses and our relationship with other entities. Licklider here we come.