TRENDS SHAPING TOMORROW'S MEDIA TECHNOLOGY TODAY - PART 1

Anyware

The dazzling science fiction films Blade Runner (1982) and Minority Report (2002) depict futuristic cityscapes in which skyscrapers display huge, interactive, personalized video advertisements over their entire exterior surfaces. In these movies, these “gestural interfaces” are often talking heads fifty feet high, on building after building, creating a dense Babel of sights and sounds that is mind-bending and disorienting. The technology to apply ultra-thin-film display screens over giant, irregular surfaces such as skyscrapers is being developed, but Sony, for example, has just announced the availability of Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays in televisions which, at their thinnest, are only 3 millimeters thick. They are so thin and flexible that the screen can be embedded into wearable clothing. OLED technology is still young, but it opens the door for ways to apply durable mega-scale display systems to just about anything. Buildings As Billboards (BABs) may be only 10-15 years away.

Talking Buildings Scene from Blade Runner

As depicted in Minority Report, video advertisements on buildings, subways, etc. could begin playing automatically in response to signals received from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, an automatic identification technology similar to electronic barcodes that stores and retrieves data from a distance using transponders, commonly referred to as just RFID tags. RFID technology was first used in World War II to help identify Allied Powers versus Axis Powers military aircraft and, after further miniaturization and refinement over the ensuing decades, entered widespread use in 2004. RFID tags consist of an integrated circuit encoded with a unique ID number and a metal antenna that is powered by a signal received from an electronic reader (passive) or contains its own power source (active). The RFID tags' radio waves send and receive data; when attached to or implanted into a person RFID transponder signals can be used to customize advertisements broadcast on buildings to match the identified preferences of a specific consumer. A consumer walking or driving past a building could initiate the automatic presentation of news, sports, advertisements and other programming precisely targeted to that person’s interests. RFID tags are in use now in everything from clothing to driver licenses to passports to food packaging. The most powerful RFID tags made currently are Class IV (Active), capable of sending and receiving signals from 300 feet or more, and are in use in car key fobs, animal tags and electronic toll passes. Super Enhanced RFID technology is in development, and will produce even more powerful, and more miniaturized, transponders.

BABs (Buildings As Billboards) and Super Enhanced RFID tags are part of the expanding trend toward ubiquitous computing that we see in many areas today, where smaller and more powerful microprocessors and integrated circuits are being embedded in ordinary devices like refrigerators, coffee makers, cell phones, automobiles, traffic lights, etc. to make them more interactive and intelligent. Ubiquitous computing depends on inexpensive, reliable networked processing devices, distributed at all magnitudes throughout everyday life and synchronized with our daily activities.The tiny implantable artifacts of ubiquitous computing can be called Anyware, and Anyware is gradually influencing our lives, transforming our comprehension of the places where we live, work and play, the communities to which we belong and how we envision ourselves. Anyware will be everywhere.

By Darrell Woody

Gazette Staff Writer

[Editor’s Note: Both Blade Runner and Minority Report are based on a novel and a short story by Philip K. Dick. The themes of the novel and short story include issues of humanity, free will versus determinism, environmentalism and technology, and offer dark, dehumanized, dystopian views of the “manufactured” future. As with any new technology, Anyware (Buildings As Billboards, Super Enhanced RFID, etc.) is replete with pros and cons, including concerns about social, ethical and logistical issues associated with an always connected, “Big Brother” computing world.]