End of the screen age?

Since the earliest days of television and the subsequent introduction of personal computers, the visual display unit (we now commonly refer to them as 'screens') has been an integral part of the user experience. Families who previously gathered around the hearth to share their day's experiences moved their orientation (and their living room furniture) to face 'the box'. As technology has improved, and high definition television broadcasts and multi-channel satellite and cable TV have become increasingly available, we begin to see many more screens throughout the home, and a subsequent 'social atomization' of family viewing habits (For more on this concept read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler). If we add personal computer and laptop screens into the mix, we observe homes and workplaces that are replete with visual displays that can be shared or used individually for a multitude of different purposes.

As a multi-tasking society says Nick Shackleton-Jones, we spend a lot of our time looking alternately down at our laptop or iPad screens and then up at the television,  Wouldn't it be sensible, he asks, to integrate the two into one? There is some sense in what he says. The next move though, he suggests, will not be to have one single device which you can put down and lose, or damage by dropping and breaking (how many iPhones have been sent to the great beyond in this way?), but a technology that can project the images onto some sort of heads up display. This might be in the form of a visor, or a pair of spectacles which you can still see through into the real world. Some people might recoil at this idea, claiming that it is either hazardous (while watching a Lady Gaga video you could walk into a lampost) or even dehumanising. In his prescient book Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark argued that such increasingly intimate relationships with technology are a natural progression in the evolution of humankind, and that we adapt very quickly to new ways of using technology. This includes intimate contact with devices that are quite invasive, in for example, cochlear implants, plastic prostheses and organs, and cardiac pacemakers. It is already a common sight to see people wearing ear buds or blue-tooth ear pieces. How much of a step would it be to see widespread use of in-view visor displays.

In-view vision, whether in visor, heads-up, or projector form, would have the capability to lock into and exploit the full potential of applications such as augmented and mixed reality, where the onboard processor can generate and superimpose information about objects or people to give the viewer instant information about what or who they are looking at. This would be an important step forward for augmented reality tools, which currently rely largely on mobile phone cameras to function. A look at the TED video of Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense wearable technology may give you a sense of how this can be achieved and the positive (and possibly negative) effects that may emerge with this ambient approach to interaction with the environment.

If we went down this road, and began to replace static desk and wall mounted screens with handheld and in-vision systems, what might the impact be on our social lives? Would our perceptions of reality be changed? Would the dynamics of families and small communities alter as a result? If so, would these changes be positive or negative? Would personal in-vision technologies isolate many individuals from their communities? Will we see the end of the screen age in our lifetimes? You are invited to add your comments and views below.

Image by Jonathan O'Donnell


End of the screen age? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.