Blog by Paul Golding

It is nearly year-end and people start to talk about predictions and so on. I felt in the mood to talk future, although this is NOT my prediction for 2009. More (sensible stuff, perhaps) on that later.

I formed a company back in 1995 to exploit the impending wave of Mobile Multimedia. Uh hum.... Yes, how we laugh at the mobile ambitions that we had back then. There are funnier ones. I submitted a patent in 1992 for "Location Based Advertising." It was duly rejected by my then employer - Motorola - as "irrelevant to the mobile industry" and defensively published in a corporate journal, languishing no doubt somewhere in the Library of Congress. I actually wanted to project the ads onto the nearest (electronic) billboard. Of course, Philip K. Dick probably had the idea way before then. I just suggested how to do it. (And now, ironically, I'm writing my first sci-fi novel.)

My interest in mobile VR was actually a commercial one. I believed in the future of networked gaming (which we were doing back then using HP-UX boxes over the LAN). But what I wanted to do was create an app that I dubbed Talking Heads. It would enable two people to communicate using animated avatars and selectable voices. I wanted to sound like Clint Eastwood and say - "Go ahead, make my day."

I know it all sounds crazy doesn't it. 

What happened is that the prestigious university department, to whom I was seconded from industry to conduct the research, suggested that I nail it on the head. Not enough prior art to guide me along (so the professors said). So I was talked into researching fuzzy logic for interference cancellation in wireless LANs. Huh?

In recent times, I flirted again with avatars on the phone, involved with various wannabe mobile avatar projects. I was very excited to finally see a demo of an avatar chat application (running over SIP) that used 3D accelerators (from Nvidia) on the phone to achieve a convincing experience. It was my original vision in the (virtual) flesh. As Motorola's Chief Apps Architect in 2007, I desperately tried to find operators interested in commercialising the idea. It didn't go too well. Here's one of my avatars, produced by my friends at Go Figure 3D (as shown on the cover of my latest book).

When I wrote the second edition of the book Next Generation Wireless Applications, I was cautioned by my peers not to mention anything to do with the future. "People are still trying to exploit 3G, so don't mention anything beyond that." So I duly took out any futuristic stuff, which wasn't much, and pulled a planned chapter called "Future Trends in Mobile."

I did, however, sneak in under the radar when my peer Stefan Bertschi published his interesting anthology Thumb Culture and asked me to write a chapter about ... guess what ... the future of mobile. I thought that I could get away with it, tucked away in the back (I think that it is the last chapter). In the era of start-up mania and short-term exit strategies, talk of futuristic ideas can be lonely.

Anyhow, I won't bore you with the details, but jump to the bit where I wrote about Perpetual Visualization. We had succeeded with mobile in achieving vocal immediacy, but the next phase, I argued, was to achieve visual immediacy. I couldn't resist my VR tendencies, which led me to write in Stefan's book about wearable displays i.e. 'VR goggles.'

If you've never tried the latest in VR headsets, then you really must. It is an awesome experience. The technology is already available to achieve economic mass production. The issue is demand (i.e. applications), not technology.

However, I know what you're thinking. "We won't be walking around with those things strapped to our head." Perhaps not. But here are two thoughts that relate to the future of mobile:

1. According to Philip Rosedale, SecondLife is on the same growth curve as early Web and will be bigger than the Web (to see what he means, and why, take a look at his TED talk)

2. For many kids today, they already spend most of their online time in virtual worlds using avatars - Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Spine World, Little Big Planet etc.

To me, it's obvious that these two are on a collision course with mobile. I am thinking of another start-up in this area, some 15 years after the initial ideas. Perhaps I should ask my wife to knock me over the head this time, before spending large chunks of time pushing the coins for somebody else's coin-pusher.