In The Old Days…

I hate to be the “When I was a wee lad” -guy but….

When I was a kid, if you wanted a radio controlled flying anything, you had to spend a year building it with materials that cost a year on a car note. Then you’d wreck it the first time you flew it. Rinse and repeat. Steep learning curve.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to play in an imaginary world, the most agency you could get for a long time was a choose-your-own-story book. You might stumble across a tabletop RPG group or you might get really into an 8- (or eventually 16-) bit computer game. Not super immersive, but that’s what imaginations were for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=437Ld_rKM2s

When I was a kid, there was no internet, no cell network, and the only way to make something was to gouge it out of something else.

But Today…

Times have changed. Technology is smaller, faster, and cheaper.

Today you can buy almost any RC, semi-autonomous, or fully-autonomous aircraft you can imagine off-the-shelf for about what you’d spend on a video game. You can even print most of the parts and buy the rest online.

And that little device in your pocket that does all the things? Well that’s clearly dark alien wizardry from an alternate dimension. There’s no other reasonable explanation.

We live in a world where, under the right conditions, you can have an idea on a Monday, have a design by Tuesday, a prototype by Wednesday, a sales deal by Friday, party about it on Saturday, and realize that your whole vision has been stolen and cartoonishly commoditized by Sunday.

But people don’t create for the money. They create for the awesome. And there has never been a time in history where creating awesome was so possible.

What You’ll Probably See More Of

There are innumerable directions for technology to take. I’m not a futurist. I’m just a curious student of science and behavior. I like to try to understand the relationship between people and their things and their world. So for me, speculation was an inevitable hobby.

Here are a few broad categories that I think will come to play a big role in our 3D lives.

Rapid 3D Environment Mapping and Object Modeling
Mike likes to say, “Everything in 3D.” And he’s right. We are moving into an era where we will expect there to be a virtual representation of most aspects of our lives, serving the function of exploration before application (something SSD has [link – demonstrated can save a lot of money and time]). The people who can do this the fastest with the highest quality for the least money in a commonly recognized format accessible to the most people will dominate the small (household appliance and smaller), medium (furniture to vehicles), and large (homes to terrain) modeling markets.

Telepresence
Or How To Be Somewhere You Are Not, because it’s cheaper, easier, and safer to send a machine instead of you personally. Whether that is sending a remotely controlled representative with your face on it…

… or a semi-autonomous rescue bot…

… or a planetary rover…

converted PNM file

… the ability to send an artificial representative in our stead will change the way that we connect to each other and to every environment that we explore.

Immersive Simulation
Also How To Be Somewhere You Are Not, but this environment is artificial. If you love first-person video games and flight simulators, then you already get why simulation is not only awesome, but also a powerful tool. From console games to the Oculus, placing yourself in a virtual world is not only endlessly fun, but infinitely variable and illustrative.

Additive Manufacturing
Also known as 3D printing (can we shorten that to three-printing or 3P or am I overstepping my nerd cred?), additive manufacturing is already changing our entire approach to production and support. It can’t print everything yet but, with houses now checked off, it’s getting pretty close.

You probably found that list hard to argue with. Most of those things are straightforward and seemingly inevitable at this point. More interestingly, many of these have deeply integrated destinies and should be thought of as overlapping in order to take full advantage of their potential.

– CG