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When life imitates art...
May. 10th, 2006 11:40 amThe weird thing about being in the mobile industry is that you often see technology quiet a while before it hits the shelves - you also get told about the specifications of cool new things as they come out. In this case we're at the Windows Mobile Embedded DevCon.
Having just finished Rainbow's End, it is rather odd to come to event where they are starting to show off a bunch of the ubiqutous technology that Vinge uses in the book. There have been some impressive dynamic visual displays (driven by WinCE naturally), plus there's the launch of WinCE 6.0 which is getting just plain silly in terms of the multi-threaded functionality for an embedded OS.
Then, wandering around the exhibition, you come across fabric keyboards which uite literally could be on your sleaves. Actually, they're build a wearable version for iPod controls.
Nobody had glasses based HUDs but the prototypes were at 3GSM in Feb.
I suppose one of the problems that any near-future author faces is that technology probably wil beat you. Vinge used newsgroups in Fire Upon the Deep, he's got a good vision of wearable technology and messaging in Rainbow's End - however, some of the current technology is probably already ahead of his curve, especially with Instant Messaging Precence Services.
So Vinge set his book sometime in the 2020s, I suspect that the technologys that he was using will porbably be around a good deal before then, I saw some of them today...
Having just finished Rainbow's End, it is rather odd to come to event where they are starting to show off a bunch of the ubiqutous technology that Vinge uses in the book. There have been some impressive dynamic visual displays (driven by WinCE naturally), plus there's the launch of WinCE 6.0 which is getting just plain silly in terms of the multi-threaded functionality for an embedded OS.
Then, wandering around the exhibition, you come across fabric keyboards which uite literally could be on your sleaves. Actually, they're build a wearable version for iPod controls.
Nobody had glasses based HUDs but the prototypes were at 3GSM in Feb.
I suppose one of the problems that any near-future author faces is that technology probably wil beat you. Vinge used newsgroups in Fire Upon the Deep, he's got a good vision of wearable technology and messaging in Rainbow's End - however, some of the current technology is probably already ahead of his curve, especially with Instant Messaging Precence Services.
So Vinge set his book sometime in the 2020s, I suspect that the technologys that he was using will porbably be around a good deal before then, I saw some of them today...
