Glass in the future – Corning’s Future Vision part 2
Following on from the success of their previous future vision clip, Corning have released a second video, this time with accompanying commentary. It is a bit lengthier than the previous one and goes into a bit more detail on the reality of each technology.
These videos are good for sparking ideas or discussions around what else could be done with these technologies, how to improve on them or even some of the possible issues that would need to be addressed.
One such issue is with the virtual window in the medical lab, which is an idea that has also been explored in Microsoft's future vision video. The issue is in how the mirrored image (in particular text) would be displayed for the user on the other end of the virtual window. Even medical diagrams may cause problems if both doctors are looking at the left side of the brain, but for one of them the image is flipped. This may not be a major hurdle, and there's probably plenty of solutions at hand, but it would be great to have a solution that maintained the effect of having the two people being in the same room, looking at the same thing, even though physically they are not. I'm sure these issues would have surfaced regardless but videos like these, because they are so visual, really make it easy to identify, like a working prototype would.
What I really like about this video is the applications of the technology in educational settings. I always loved field trips as a kid so I really enjoyed the scene where the park ranger uses the huge interactive surface in his presentation to the kids. There's so much potential in design for educational settings, and it seems like it would be both fulfilling and fun.