In the early 1990s, AT&T launched an eye-catching ad campaign that predicted future technological innovations (imagining, among other things, online libraries, videoconferencing, and smartwatches).
In 2011, AT&T paid homage to that campaign with a similar video that attempted to predict the technology of 2020. Now that the year is finally upon us, check out their video below (or click here) to see how it held up:
Check out this slick video that Microsoft produced in 2009 to showcase their vision of 2019:
As Boing Boing points out,
They did well with the software aspects of touchscreen interfaces and machine vision, but overshot the runway on bezel-less devices and the general ubiquity of touchscreens themselves. There’s a touchscreen coffee mug! All the depicted applications (such as flexible high-FPS color e-ink) are shown without a batteries or other power sources. This is a mandatory omission in all such future fantasies.
Of course, they’re a bit nearer to the mark than many other portrayals of the present. Blade Runner, after all, is set in 2019 and features synthetic human replicants and space colonies. Although we’ve got more than eleven months still ahead of us…
