#future of x

[biglisbonnews]

Why It’s Finally Time To Stop Obsessing Over Counting Steps For Health Step tracking can be addicting but there really is no magic number of steps. https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/history-of-fitness-trackers

[biglisbonnews]

Meet the Scientists Who Want to Make Medical Devices Work for Everyone, Finally Can scientists fix the racial biases baked into medicine, starting with the ubiquitous pulse oximeter? https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/health-device-equity

[biglisbonnews]

Does the Best Workout Exist? Exercise Scientists All Agree on One Thing Researchers are increasingly understanding how exercise affects the body and, in doing so, finding smarter ways for people to exercise smarter. https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/best-way-to-workout

[futureofx-blog]

The Shopping Mall is Dead. Long Live The Mall!

When architect Victor Gruen designed the nation's first enclosed shopping mall in Edina, Wisconsin in 1956, his vision was of an indoor plaza reminiscent of the cafes in Vienna: "livable, lovable" spaces that encouraged newly relocated suburbanites to socialize in a large, welcoming shared space. Shopping was to be a secondary experience, meant to provide the impetus for getting away from the isolation of the suburban home and automobile. His creation was an unrivaled success; his vision was decidedly less so.* For almost half a century, the modern shopping mall dominated the model for retail sales ... that is until the Web. It's true that most people didn't notice the death of the American Mall until the Great Recession, but it was the Web that's done the most to disrupt retail (just ask Borders). The question now becomes what to do with all these dead malls.

The simplest and most common proposal has been demolition. That seems an awful waste of space. And property. And infrastructure. And you get the idea. Malls as community assets still retain a large segment of their value, they just require re-purposing.

One promising idea is to convert them into office parks. Enclosed office parks. The advantages of this are immediately obvious. Small and medium-scale businesses currently seeking rental space in low-rise office towers along the outer belt would bypass the built-in higher rents of new construction. Ample parking and access to major highways and public transit are pre-fabricated; the site's proximity to residential housing is also built-in. Large corporations seeking to establish satellite offices further from downtown could use the multi-floored space previously occupied by anchor stores. With current workplace design trends rewarding open floor plans that foster collaboration, anchor stores would require little structural reconversion. The smaller retail stores could be renovated to stand-alone business use that formally might've occupied a derelict strip mall or been buried anonymously on an upper floor of one of those afore-mentioned outer belt office towers. Because non-retail corporations are more immune to the economic volatility endemic to retail, tenant occupation rates would be more stable. Not only do the property managers win, so do the utilities no longer worrying about supplying service to dead business centers.

Vestiges of the mall's original purpose could still live on. Retail that caters exclusively to the needs of this new corporate population would be easily accommodated. The food court would continue largely unchanged, save for cosmetic upgrades. Employees from all the disparate businesses in the mall could congregate and interact over meals at Panera or Chipotle, same as shoppers currently do. Onsite facilities that cater to the more corporate needs of their new residents such as dry cleaners, urgent care clinics, and shared daycare facilities would nearly complete Victor Gruen's original picture of what the mall's purpose in the community could be.

  *Except for one, often unwelcomed demographic.

[futureofx-blog]

Reality (Augmented)

Reading the technocrati’s speculation about Google Glass this month, one gets the impression we will soon be visited by aliens among us; fellow humans in nerdy eyewear and no one, including the wearer, will be quite sure what to make of it all.  I imagine a lot of these pundits thought the same way when iPhones started to become a thing, or social networks before that. I chose those examples specifically. Because when AR apps and the attendant gear that run them begin to launch, the adoption of this technology will be so universal and rapid that some of those pundits will be the last to notice how quickly the world has changed.

It isn’t a question of how many people will use AR, it’s a question of what everyone will use it for. The answer is equally as immense. We will use AR for everything. It will change what we see in the world, how we see it, and how we relate to it. The information and guidance that AR will provide us in just about every function we undertake, especially the mundane things (driving, communicating, shopping, entertainment) will so transform how we perform those actions that we will feel naked and powerless without it in the same way we currently do without our smartphones.   And speaking of smartphones, Dick Tracy had it half right: we will wear our phones, just not on our wrists. AR won’t replace discreet mobile computing platforms, but for designers lamenting the ubiquitous slabs our devices have become ... smartphones in their current iteration are headed for extinction.

The Glass demo shows people traipsing about in parks and busy city centers, all while fed a unique stream of location-aware data to help them navigate and manipulate their environment. Advertisers are salivating at the opportunities this presents. But who will control what you see in these advertising augmented spaces? Will consumers be able to turn ads off if they don’t wish to be bothered? Will our newly augmented landscape be divided into premium classes? Pay the opt-out fees and corporations will leave you alone? I suppose the cost of being poor will go up again: the plebes will see their environmental Realities™ crowded by more digital pollution than the 1%-ers will.

Our surveillance state will become a true surveillance culture. AR will enable us to record everything we see and hear. Every conversation, every experience, every interaction. We will become infallible (Fair) witnesses to our own and anyone else's life stories. Even if I choose not to record something intimate, my partner might not want to be so discreet. That will make for some interesting relationship wrinkles. This will also add deeper layers to our conversation about expectations of privacy in public spaces.

I imagine many locations will want to institute limits on what AR apps will be permitted to run in what areas. This will require complex policies impacting not just personal privacy (like bathrooms or locker rooms), but corporate R&D labs and boardrooms. Employers who already monitor their workers for productivity will have snooping tools at their disposal that will be truly Orwellian. If you’re wearing something that records everything you see and hear in the office, will employers demand (and receive) the right to that data – will they own not just what you produce, but what you experience while there? Not only will our workplaces be transformed, so will the state of our security and police apparatus as we all become passive citizen watchdogs. What rights to our privacy will governments and corporations be further permitted to erode?

And when imagining the shape of these AR devices, who says they have to resemble personal appliances. Google took some good-natured ribbing about the chic-factor of those awkward-seeming glasses. Who says they have to be worn? The next gen of AR enabled devices will be us. We’ll be the AR appliances with electronic tattoos, ocular and brain implants, and (in a lazy analyst’s version of Godwin’s law) nanotech.

EDIT: A bar in Seattle has already banned the use of Google Glass inside its premises.

[futureofx-blog]

Book publishers, Amazon, and maybe even how we read

A lot of e-ink has been spilled documenting the supposed demise of traditional book publishing. It usually precedes lamentations on the dearth of reading in general and the doom that will inevitably spell for Western Civilization. Both arguments quickly collapse under even rudimentary examination. Thankfully, I’m not here to bore you with datasets and economic tables. The video below though, is very much tied to the future of publishing, how we’ll get our books, and even what role Amazon may play in all this. 

Many people will continue to read for pleasure in the future – written stories captivate us in a way that is irreducible by other means, and reading, like the creation of music, will continue to be an activity whose allure will be satiated by any with the will to do so. It is also inevitable that e-books will continue their climb in marketshare, and yes, at the expense of print editions. Amazon famously announced that sales of e-books had superceded those of bound editions back in Spring 2011. I hope, however, that publishing houses don’t regard this evolution with the same flailing panic the double –AA’s (RIAA and MPAA) have come to view the digitization of their media.

For those readers, and there will be many, who will still prefer their books to be physical objects that don’t require a battery or smell like plastic and glass, portable printers (or one similiar) in the video will come to occupy a huge piece of publishing and distribution real estate. If you can print any book, on demand, in minutes, stores can operate in a fraction of the space, with far less surplus stock and publishers won’t need to maintain warehouses of unsold inventory. This gives publishers the room to concentrate on marketing and discovery and eliminates the manufacturing and warehousing side of the business. Books can now exist entirely as data, to be downloaded to screens or on-site printers as ordered. Books, and the means they’re consumed, are evolving, not going extinct.

Where does Amazon fit into this? Amazon has distribution centers all over the country and their ultimate goal is same-day delivery for most orders, to every major city. Instead of warehousing and shipping multiple books, they can print any order as it’s placed in any center and ship it in hours with no costs associated to storage and stocking.  Enterprising bookstores can follow the same lead. (One near Harvard already does.)

Printed books will continue to hold their place on humanity’s shelves; what is changing, is what form they’ll take in this ever-new world, and how they’ll get into our ever-eager hands.

[futureofx-blog]

Videogames on the "Border"

Wired has a review of the new Borderlands 2 hybrid shooter that dropped this week, and the reviewer asks: "Does Borderlands exist in a little niche all its own, alienating both shooter and RPG fans alike with foreign gameplay concepts? Or is it a gateway drug, allowing nerds of both stripes to experience the joys of the other side, and ultimately leading to experimentation with harder stuff?"

The conceit of both Borderlands games is that you run around shooting things as in your standard FPS, but in an open-ended world where you take quests from NPCs, collect tons of loot which you equip for the boost in stats, and gain experience -- all to level your character up, to make him more powerful, so he can shoot bigger and badder badasses. The author in the article wonders if the FPS and RPG worlds would have a tough time blending, or whether devotees of one gameworld could coexist in another.

I would suggest what Borderlands accomplishes isn't so much the bridging of disparate genres, but the expansion of both (or to be honest, the evolution of the FPS). The hidden-in-plain-sight secret of RPGs is that people play them because: yes, they like to explore, role-play, aquire shinies, level up, etc ... but they also like to kill things. It's just in an RPG, when you kill things, you're rewarded for it. Not just the accomplishment of the kill but with the dice-roll chances of finding nice treasure or with gold, and usually a smidge of experience. This isn't to suggest that FPS players are satisfied with more witless entertainment; just that the reward options are a lot more diverse in the RPG world.

So will a hybrid be a gateway game, bringing the two, seldom mixed classes together -- sort of like the end of a 90s high school movie where the jocks and the goths got together in the parking lot for a musical number?  Maybe, but as an RPG fan who used to play of lot FPS and grew tired of them, it's more of just the feeling of eating your cake and having it too.  Maybe that's the future of these games ... a mashup of the elements from all that work the best.