It Just Gets Weirder
2012; American Library Association; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-4538
Autores ResumoAbstract Chapter 5 is dedicated to general trends that I see coming in technology and computing over the next three to five years, including a ubiquity of cameras, insanely high-density displays, autonomous flying robots, and more. Each trend is driven by a drop in manufacturing cost of specific components, which enables experimental and commoditized production of devices that were priced well out of the range of the average consumer. Once these costs drop just a bit more (as they are destined to), the library world will see the results, including finding ways to deal with massive data sets produced by our communities. There are a number of really interesting technologies coming in the next couple of years that may not impact libraries directly, but will impact individuals in society--which means that we need to, if nothing else, be aware of them. All of these are trends that I noticed at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, the largest such show in the world. It's where the personal electronics manufacturers come to show off what they are producing for the following year, as well as try to one-up one another with a variety of crazy future tech that may or may not ever see the light of day. Among the crazy things you see at CES every year are the insane demo televisions that aren't for sale, but just show off the possibilities of the manufacturer. This year, the companies that wowed were LG and Sharp, in two different ways. LG showed off an Organic LED (OLED) television that was 55 inches diagonally, but only 4 millimeters thick--just barely outside the thickness of a pane of glass. To see it in person was like seeing a magic trick. There were moving pictures on the screen, and when you stepped to the side the object appeared to disappear. It looked like an absolutely impossible object, and in ten years it's likely to be the dominant type of display for sale. Sharp debuted something that wasn't amazing for its physical characteristics, but for its imagery. The company was showing off an 85-inch display that it called the Super Hi-Vision TV due to its packing 33 million pixels into its 8K display. Everyone is probably familiar with HD television, which comes to us in two standard resolutions, 720 and 1080. Both of those numbers count the vertical lines of resolution, so that a standard 720 HD picture has a resolution of 1280 x 720, while a 1080 HD picture has 1920 x 1080. A 4K video, the next step up, measures instead horizontal lines of display density, varying in specific resolution by the aspect ratio, but for general use, a resolution of 4096 x 3072 is a good starting point. YouTube currently allows 4K uploads, and there are a number of commercially available cameras that can take stills and video at that resolution. In very simplified terms, 4K is roughly four times the resolution of what is now the highest end HD format commonly used. As you can imagine, an 8K display is a different sort of beast. The Sharp Super Hi-Vision has a 7,680 x 4,320 resolution, or roughly sixteen times that of a 1080p Blu-Ray disc. It's hyperreal, unbelievably clear--it's as if you have an 85-inch window into another world. Seeing it felt like a scene out of Harry Potter, where the pictures were alive and might respond if you questioned them. The picture has no discernable pixels at all, no matter how close you might look, and seemingly infinite amounts of detail no matter how closely you might stare at the screen. It was incredible, and Sharp has said it thinks the technology is probably five years or so from being commercially available. Video will be available even before that, as the BBC plans to shoot some of the 2012 London Olympics in super hi-vision. (1) So, with that brief journey into televisions of the future, here's a quick look at some trends that I see in personal electronics this year. Cameras Everywhere There is an effect in consumer electronics where, as Moore's Law drives the costs of individual components steadily downward, (2) the cost per unit for said component is suddenly so cheap that device manufacturers can just put them in everything. …
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