Everyware has already staked a claim on our visual imaginary, which in turn exerts a surprising influence on the development of technology.
Before we turn to more material drivers, we might first want to attend to a surprisingly influential force that does so much to bolster everyware's aura of inevitability, and that is how often we've already seen it.
More so than in many other fields of contemporary technologic endeavor, in everyware pop culture and actual development have found themselves locked in a co-evolutionary spiral. Time and again, the stories we've told in the movies and the pages of novels have gone on to shape the course of real-world invention. These, in their turn, serve as seed-stock for ever more elaborate imaginings, and the cycle continues.
Beyond genre SF, where the eventual hegemony of some kind of ubiquitous computing has long been an article of faith, traces of everyware's arrival have already turned up in literary fiction. David Foster Wallace lightly drops one or two such intimations into his recent short story "Mister Squishy," while Don DeLillo captures the zeitgeist particularly well in his 2003 Cosmopolis; the latter's protagonist, a maximally connected trader in currencies, muses that the discrete devices he relies on are "already vestigial...degenerate structures."*
*"Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life...even the word 'computer' sounds backward and dumb." But for the punchy cadence, the words could well be Mark Weiser's.
Despite these surfacings, though, as well as the undeniable cultural impact of some other visions which have similarly never left the printed page—William Gibson's original depiction of cyberspace comes to mind—it's the things we see up on the screen that generally leave the strongest emotional impression on us.
Movies have certainly shaped the conception of ubiquitous artifacts before, from Jun Rekimoto's DataTiles, the design of which was explicitly inspired by HAL 9000's transparent memory modules in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to a long series of products and services that seem to owe their visual forms entirely to the influence of 1970's THX 1138. But for most nonaficionados, everyware's most explicit and memorable claim on the visual imaginary has been the 2002 Minority Report.
For Minority Report, director Steven Spielberg asked interaction and interface designers from the MIT Media Lab, Microsoft Research, Austin-based Milkshake Media, and elsewhere to imagine for him what digital media might look like in 2045. They responded with a coherent vision binding together: embedded sensor grids, gestural manipulation of data, newspaperlike information appliances, dynamic and richly personalized advertising, and ubiquitous biometric identification, all undergirded by a seamless real-time network. There is no doubt that their vision, interpreted for the screen, helped mold our shared perception of what would be technically possible, likely, or desirable in next-generation computing.
But before that could happen, a little alchemy would be required. With one or two exceptions, the actual prototypes submitted to the Minority production are awkward and unconvincing. They look, in fact, like what they are: things designed by engineers, for engineers. It took futurists immersed in the art of visual storytelling to take these notions and turn them into something compelling—and it was the synthesis of all these ideas in the vivid, if scenery-chewing, vignette that opens Minority Report that sold it.
True, the same ideas could have been (and of course had been) presented in academic papers and research conferences and gone little remarked upon outside the community of people working in human-computer interaction. But when situated in a conventionally engaging narrative, animated by recognizable stars, and projected onto megaplexed screens with all of the awesome impact of a Hollywood blockbuster, this set of notions about interface immediately leapt from the arcane precincts of academe into the communal imaginary.
This is partly a matter of the tools any film has at its disposal (emotional, evocative, environment-shaping) and partly a simple matter of scale. Unlike, say, the audience for this book, Minority Report's audience was probably not one composed of people inclined to think about such things outside the context of imaginings on screen, at least not in any detail. But over the course of their two hours in the dark, millions of moviegoers absorbed a vivid idea of what might be working its way toward them, a hook on which to hang their own imaginings and expectations. And where a scholarly paper on gestural device interfaces might be read by tens of thousands, at most, the total lifetime audience for such a thing is easily trumped by a blockbuster's on its opening weekend alone.
Closing the circuit, some members of that audience then go on to furnish the world with the things they've seen. The imaginary informs the world—not of 2045, as it turns out, but of 2005: Media Lab alumnus John Underkoffler, designer of the gesture-driven interface in Report, was sought out by a group at defense contractor Raytheon, whose members had seen and been impressed by the film. He was eventually hired by Raytheon to develop similar systems for the U.S. military's "net-centric warfare" efforts, including a shared interface called the Common Tactical Blackboard.
Thus is the fantastic reified, made real.
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