The Death of Consumer Electronics is Near

Posted on July 29, 2012 by LenKendall • 1 Comment

TVs. Computers. Video game consoles. Consumer electronics with a screen or a speaker are inevitably going to disappear as products when the scenario illustrated in the above video becomes a reality. Augmented reality is still mostly constrained to our smartphones, but as wearable computing inches us closer to a fusion of man and machine, the famous brands we all know that produce electronics, Sony, Samsung, Canon, and so on must already be planning radical changes in their business models.

If our consumption of media ultimately takes places directly on our eyes, in our ears, and potentially in our minds, the consumer electronics producers will likely find themselves orienting their business towards software and even more-so, biology.

Pixels, inches, and battery life will become specifications of the past. Instead, we’ll be more interested in comfort, ease of use, and how data is displayed in the most contextually relevant way possible.

Apple and Google are very publicly moving us forward in this direction. Smaller players are trying to leapfrog incumbents. Regardless of which companies emerge as the purveyor of these devices, in our lifetime we will see the death (or at least a massive redefinition) of what we consider to be consumer electronics.

http://twitter.com/benkunz Ben Kunz

I think we are entering the third age of cyborg technology. In the first, humans (unknowingly or not noticing) became part-machines with improved vision (eyeglasses), digestion (fires that heat and pre-digest food, then tooth fillings), strength (levers) and speed (the wheel). Once we became robots in the first stage (sitting in rolling cars each morning), we then moved on to primary sense, vision and the mind, and how to augment that. This brings us to today, the second age of cyborgism, with flat panels surrounding us from far away (55-inch Samsungs) to tool level (iPads) to whispered love (cell phones), all backed by augmented memories (books and Google search). You are right, this second age is ending as panel design becomes, well, panels, and artificial memories become seamless (hi, Siri). The third age of cyborgism will be one of true virtual reality, 3-D imagery floating in the air around us. As that takes off, the design fights will leave the tools with QWERTY keys behind to joust over the floating applications in the air. It’s a bit surreal, to realize that soon we will emerge ourselves entirely into virtual worlds that make Second Life look like a 2001 Microsoft tablet computer. Haptic gloves, body sensors, and eyeglasses or contacts that put a fake reality in the air around us will lead to a new form of progress. Apple already has a patent for glasses-less 3-D that picks up ambient shadows in the room to make the stereoscopic images seem completely real. Somehow, I suspect not many people in that new world will still have abs.