Josh & Thaer at PHD just sent this around... Samsung have used their face recognition technology to create outdoor advertising sites that change message according to who sees them...
"Samsung has developed an outdoor digital advertising system that tailors ads based on its audience.
There are three main components of the system: an LCD display panel, a dual lens camera and a processing computer, which runs the company's proprietary facial recognition software.
When you first see it the system looks like a
vertically oriented LCD display running an advertisement, but upon
closer inspection two cameras are mounted on top of the LCD.
They continuously captures images of passersby and the PC processes those images to figure out how many people are in watching,
their gender, if they're an adult or child and how long they're looking
at the advertisements."
Just in from PSFK, this news; the Star Trek Holodeck is coming. Woo-hoo! Apparently IDEO have been testing it out with a company called EON reality. Still very expensive, or course, but expect prices to plummet soon I'd imagine.
In the PSFK article, they say allude to something I've believed for a long time...
"...many hold Star Trek as an inspiration pool for future technologies"
Not just Star Trek, of course; I believe most Sci-fi can offer us inspiration for what actual real world products and relationships we're going to see in the future.
It's clear why too; take some creative thinking people (writers, fantasists, storytellers etc), and get them to invent a view of the world way off in the future, where they can innovate to their hearts content; creating technologies unbounded by the realities that face engineers, designers and the people who actually have to build stuff, and situations where society is changed beyond recognition.
My personal favourite is probably Iain M Banks' work with a future society he calls 'The Culture'. From Wikipedia...
The Culture is characterised by being a post-scarcity
society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically
limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having
all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome
almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death)
and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.
Now, that may sound quite a long way from where we are at the moment... but within it you start to see elements of today's world. Specifically in the case of The Culture, the notion of 'post-scarcity' where everything, and anything, is free to the members of society...
...with Chris Anderson's forthcoming book, Free is going to feature a lot in the conversations we have over the next five years I think.
