FRIDAY THOUGHTS – Looking Through the Worm Hole

FRIDAY THOUGHTS – Looking Through the Worm Hole

8-Mar-13

One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to spend a good deal of time thinking about emerging digital technologies and how they may impact the world of Consumer Products and Retail in the future.  My hypothesis is that all of our human senses and systems will be digitally enabled in the very near future.  I will provide a feel for what I’m talking about by looking at our sense of sight.

Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.  However, it isn’t until last few thousand years that we have been able to do anything to enhance our sense of vision.  The earliest records of enhancing vision through magnification date back to the 1^st century AD when  Seneca the Younger wrote "Letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe or glass filled with water."   The first eyeglasses appear to have been made by Dominican Friar Giordano da Pisa around 1300 AD.  While there have been improvements of the past 800 years, the eyeglasses of today fundamentally are the same as da Pisa’s Italian models.  The earliest versions of contact lens as we know them have been around since the 1950s.

Now, let’s look at the advances in digital enhancement of vision made in just the past few years.

• ·       In 2010, Google released the Google Goggles app that provides digital enhancement to a person’s vision for items such as text, landmarks, contacts, books and logos.
•        The earliest versions of Google Glass were seen on Google employees in 2012.  Google Glasses provide a number of digitally enhanced elements to a human’s vision.
•        The Centre for Microsystems Technology at Ghent University in Belgium is taking things one step further.  They have developed a contact lens with a built-in, curved HD-LCD display that effectively acts as a heads-up display indistinguishable to anyone else.
•         Second Sight has developed the first commercial retinal implant prosthesis, fundamentally curing certain types of blindness.  They will likely solve broader causes of blindness in the near future.

All this advancement in just a few years.  I bet I look back at this Friday Thoughts in a couple of years and say, “Oh, that was so yesterday!”

Are you ready for the digital technology of the future?

The potentially interesting but unrelated department:

•        One inch of rain is equal to eight to twelve inches of snow, depending on the moisture level.
•        According to STR Global, there are 187,000 hotels offering ~17.5 million hotel rooms in the world.
•        The Guinness World Record for spinning multiple plates is held by David Spathaky, assisted by Debbie Woolley, who spun 108 plates simultaneously in Bangkok, Thailand, on television in 1996.

Random Closing Thought

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it"

-          Groucho Marx

Periodically, on a Friday of course, I will post a “Friday Thoughts” to my GreggClarkEY Blog.  It is a lighter-side-of-life look at my experiences and how I apply them to being a better person and leader.   Hopefully there will be something here for you.