Institute For The Future

New IFTF Report Forecasts a World of Ambient Communications

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Institute for the Future releases a new report about the technologies of the coming decade that describe a future where network, artificial intelligence and media technologies converge to envelop us in a cloud of data and communications

June 13, 2017, Palo Alto, CA – A new report out today from Institute for the Future explores what technology holds in the coming decade and details a world where the convergence of the Internet of Things, immersive media and advances in network speed will envelop us in a continual stream of information, seamlessly merging our digital and physical worlds. The report, When Everything is Media, describes a future of “ambient communications” that will create an information-rich media environment extending well beyond television, smartphones, and computers to include objects, our bodies and other living things.

“As billions of objects such as toys, speakers and food packaging come online, our world is becoming increasingly programmable,” said Rod Falcon, Program Director of Institute for the Future’s Technology Horizons program. “We’re moving into a world in which every interaction can be captured, stored, displayed, and mediated by digital communications—a world in which everything is media.”

The report lays out nine possible applications of this future tech and the current technology that is leading us there, including:

• Expanded Sensorium: Our sensory organs are becoming wirelessly connected to our networks in ways that will allow us to deploy our senses nearly anywhere. Telepresence robots will send our eyes and ears into the air, under the ocean, or places that could make us sick, like radioactive areas. Eventually, wireless sensors will transmit multisensory information that will enable us to smell and taste cuisine being served on another continent.

• Digital Speciation: Imagine calling your kitchen and asking it to prepare dinner, chatting with your car about the day’s news, or asking your mattress to tell you a bedtime story. It won’t just be mobile devices that can converse with you and “feel alive,” it will be everything. Eventually, each of us may have an omnipresent AI of our own. Biomedia: Eventually, our own bodies and their most basic biological functions, from body temperature, perspiration and saccadic eye movement, will become data points that can be transmitted in real time to marketers, musicians, urban planners and others, who will analyze them to better understand what we’re doing, where we’re doing it and why. The results can be used as feedback to change our experiences.

• Animation and Reanimation: Get ready for bots and other lifelike media forms to take center stage in advertising, marketing and more. “Humagrams,” or human holograms of living, deceased or fictional characters, will populate our advertising and marketing workforce, and bots will become increasingly central to how we interact with and understand brands.

• Shareable Presence: Over the next decade, haptics, augmented reality and processing capabilities will enable us to break free from the flatness of virtual space and experience digital overlays physically. New ways to experience mixed reality will emerge, enabling us to experience a shared physical presence across time and space, giving our finite physical spaces the vastness of virtual reality.

• Searchable Matter: Advances in computer vision and machine learning are automating the process of tagging people, places and objects in photos, video and audio. In the future, machines will be able to identify real-world phenomena, making the world searchable and sortable in new ways.

• Machine Orchestrated Entertainment: For decades, data have informed the creation of entertainment content. As algorithms get better at inferring what people like, and why, we’ll come to use them much earlier in the creative process to illuminate what elements to add or remove to a story or song to appeal to the widest audience. Eventually, algorithms will become collaborators in content creation. The writer or composer will define a set of parameters, and the computer will create an endless supply of new and unique work programmed to please a specified mass, or niche, audience.

• Machine-Curated Memories: Over the next decade, we’ll see the rise of wearable cameras and systems that go beyond simple capture to actively curate cherished moments of our lives, including emotional responses of the wearer. However, this will create new questions about how we capture, author, curate and share our memories.

• Body Rights Management: As wearable computing enables more information to be captured from and communicated directly to our bodies, we’ll need to manage our personal data and carefully control permissions for how, when, and what kinds of information get embedded and communicated through and from our bodies.

The report also details how our emotional responses will change as as these new technologies emerge and mature.

“Social media is a huge part of nearly everyone’s life now. But what comes next?” Falcon said. “The technologies of the next decade will evolve into an all-encompassing communications infrastructure combining wireless networks, embedded sensors, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to add layers of meaning and responsiveness to our world. We’ll be completely enveloped in technology, where everything around us is gathering and processing data and feeding it back to us.”

View the full report at: www.iftf.org/wheneverythingismedia

CONTACT

Erin Musgrave: (530) 864-7014 | [email protected]
Jean Hagan: (650) 233-9551 | [email protected]

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About Institute for the Future

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent, nonprofit strategic research group with almost 50 years of forecasting experience. The core of our work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. We provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. Our research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity. IFTF is based in Palo Alto, California. For more, visit iftf.org.