Microsoft sees the future and it's coming to us through a glass, ubiquitously. A new video from the Microsoft Office team that's making the rounds envisions a world of tomorrow where every conceivable surface is a computer display and augmented reality tech steers us through foreign airports to waiting cars, hotels, and meetings.
It's pretty cool stuff, if not totally original. We've been treated to futuristic visions like this since at least the 2002 film Minority Report, which featured Tom Cruise pinching, twisting, and flicking away digital eye-candy on minimalist interfaces just like they do in Microsoft's more ominously titled "Productivity Future Vision (2011)."
There's also more than a touch of Gattaca in the sterile display-scape of Microsoft's video (embedded below), which plays like an ad for technology that is on the cusp of being invented and which will not really change current tech trends so much as simply take them to their logical conclusions.
In other words, the future's still all about spreadsheets and Power Point presentations, only now they're in 3D (conversely, the office drones who manipulate these cool new tools actually seem to have lost a dimension in Microsoft's imagining).
This may not necessarily be a good thing, despite the surface appeal of language-translating sunglasses and refrigerators that show you cool holograms of the food inside them.
The world of "Productivity Future Vision (2011)" is one where a young girl can ask her digital bulletin board for help finding a recipe for her upcoming bake sale, and get 1,296 answers in return. Great if you're writing a cookbook, not so much if you just want to knock out a few cheap cupcakes.
(And like we'd probably do, Microsoft's little entrepreneur smartly passes the recipe-choosing buck to her jet-setting mom, who predictably Type A's back a ridiculous choice for an obscure and complex dessert that the kid's never going to be able to make. "What do you mean you can't find any Transvaal strawberry rhubarb in Newark? I don't care what the other kids are making, I didn't raise my daughter to be a second-rate loser!")
But such cynicism doesn't have much place in this future land. There are no homeless people in the subway stations, or any people older than 30 for that matter. Not that they don't exist at all—the quaintly attired senior playing his ancient stringed instrument is allowed to panhandle remotely on a digital billboard. That way everybody's happy—the old busker gets the occasional digital chit thrown his way without smelling up the joint for the worker bees as they check their paper-thin mobile devices for terse and joyless reminders that some unsmiling woman they haven't spoken to in 15 days is having a birthday soon.
Earnest young people work without ever slouching in the cheerless offices of Microsoft's future, diligently and expertly leveraging their awesome technology to whip up slickly produced graphical reminders for colleagues to approve some unspecified order for 40 liters of an ambiguous substance. And nobody ever writes anything original in the future, they just cut-and-paste existing text in visually arresting ways.
That's not to say that the future workplace of Microsoft's imagination is entirely devoid of character. For example, a small patch of ivy on one office wall is permitted to threaten the soullessness of the space with its organic unpredictability, if only because some higher-up has discovered that the presence of plants correlates with a reduced number of worker sick days.
Meanwhile, tomorrow's cube jockeys don't appear to actually speak to each other, preferring instead to communicate by manipulating futuristic data sets with sweeping gestures as they try to out-do each other in a blankest-expression-in-the-room contest.
Translated, one such exchange plays out like this:
Orange Blouse Lady: I am smooshing some unidentified bubble charts that have to do with Africa!
Unimpressed Glasses Guy: I am unsatisfied with your smooshed bubble charts and will now change them into bar graphs and then sweep them aside. Now I have no further use for you, so disappear from my screen.
Yes, the future's so bright, you're going to have to wear network-connected smart shades. Because if you don't, how's your boss supposed to get a hold of you during your vacation?
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