May 1, 2004 12:00 PM

NextFest: The Shape of Things to Come

A celebration of the cars, spacecraft, gadgets, drugs, and TV of the future, including: William Gibson on extreme ads & TiVo tribes • Nanobombs & microbots • 5 designs for the dream machines of 2014 • More!

Dream Machines

They're as small as your cell phone, more powerful than your desktop, and packed with 10 years of future tech. Five design giants build the supergadgets of 2014. – Jessie Scanlon

Charm Bracelet Created by Springtime-USA Springtime-USA boss Tucker Viemeister is best known for helping develop the OXO Good Grips line of household tools. For Wired, he and his crew turn their attention to a world of ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks and interconnected devices. Result: the Charm Bracelet – a flexible, foldable gizmo that includes a screen, a microphone, a multipurpose camera, a biometric thumbprint scanner, and a tactile control panel. Users can reshape the band for different functions. Encrypted with your digital ID and account access codes, the Bracelet can also communicate with nearby devices such as PC monitors, LCDs, or landline phones, letting you access data from any convenient device.

[EYE]D Created by Nike Design The ultimate gadget from Nike Design offers myriad sports-related features on top of the basics like telephony, messaging, email, and Web surfing. Central to Nike's vision is [EYE]D's so-called coaching engine, which analyzes everything from vital signs to body movement and makes adjustment suggestions in real time. This information is collected by MEMS sensors embedded in clothing and equipment. In addition to being an invaluable workout tool, this system also lets spectator [EYE]D units accept data from wired athletes, allowing fans to experience sporting events from the perspective of players.

SensEye Created by BMW Group Designworks USA Designworks was once the go-to design firm for BMW – that is, until the carmaker bought the company outright. When imagining the �bergadget of tomorrow, the Designworks team wanted to do more than store all your digital bits – it wanted to solve the larger problem of how to navigate them. The SensEye captures information like a personal TiVo, tagging your events with what, where, and when metadata. Trying to remember what movie your friend told you about last Thursday in the park? Search by the friend's name, the park's location, or Thursday's date to pull up the conversation. One button starts and stops recording.

o2m2 Created by Antenna Design Antenna's sleek new Bloomberg terminal and JetBlue kiosk earned the firm this year's Wired Rave Award for industrial design. For its gadget entry, Antenna took an elegantly minimalist approach, creating what is essentially tech origami. The semiflexible ultrathin OLED touchscreen (and integrated flat components) can be folded into different configurations for phoning, gaming, or full-screen movie watching. The device automatically adjusts to the appropriate function based on how it's folded.

CanCam Created by Motorola Advanced Concepts Group Motorola's concepts team is charged with looking over the horizon and spotting long-term social, technological, and design trends. In imagining the do-everything device of the future, Motorola chose the digital camera as a starting point. The CanCam's specialty: videoblogging.

Next Steps

| Milestones in communication, space exploration, entertainment, transportation, and medicine. 2006: Samsung releases a smartphone as thin and light as a credit card, thanks to advanced hard drives and processors the size of postage stamps. 2008: It's a wireless world: More than 700 million users are plugged into Wi-Fi worldwide, a sevenfold increase in less than four years. 2009: Digital identity cards are issued to all citizens – not as an antiterrorism measure but to fight spam. Email not linked to an ID is universally ignored. 2011: On-demand music, movies, and television programming make cable and broadcast networks obsolete. 2012: Cars are officially smarter than people: XML programming lets a BMW call a mechanic and explain what's wrong when it malfunctions. 2014: Paper 2.0: Organic LED screens become cheap and available, replacing traditional magazines and tourist maps. 2017: All phone calls – cell and landline – route their calls through the Internet. 2019: 300 channels? 1,000 channels? Wrong. There is only one channel on television – yours. 2024: Media consumers no longer own discs or even bits – all they buy is rights. Reason: Authorized music and movies can be streamed anywhere, anytime.

Watch This Way

Extreme advertising. TiVo tribes. Googlevision. A conversation about the anytime, anyware TV of tomorrow.

– moderated by Chris Anderson and Jennifer Hillner

WIRED: There's an audience drifting away out there. Men in their twenties and thirties are watching dramatically less television. They spend 10 hours a week playing games, more surfing the Net, and just six hours watching TV. And the gap is growing. What sort of entertainment does tomorrow's audience want? Rob Glaser, RealNetworks: Everyone wants more choice and control – to be able to watch what you want when you want, which is what's behind the whole rise of personal video recorders and video-on-demand. That and interactivity. Yair Landau, Sony Pictures: Interactivity is being driven by the audience. It's being driven by people who want to play games and use their TVs as interactive devices. Grand Theft Auto is a very satisfying interactive experience for a significant portion of the audience. If you grew up with a PC and a TV, you don't have that sort of mental segmentation – this is where I lean in and this is where I lean back. It's just how I entertain myself. Glaser: The first time I saw that was in a good friend's 2-year-old. He didn't get the concept that streaming video on a PC wasn't television. When everything is available concurrently, you don't differentiate between distribution systems. You just think of them as the screen in the living room that's this big versus the screen in the den that's this big. William Gibson, author: For a lot of people, it's just stuff on screens, and how it gets there isn't an issue. How it gets there is just a bunch of business. Glaser: When I read Neuromancer, I had the same reaction that a lot of people did – that this concept of jacking in was so fresh. But now kids can't jack out. For those of us developing new services, we have to make sure that we're not creating artificial dichotomies. Landau: When you think about it, we're artificially limited by historic business models of creation and distribution. But if you approach it from scratch, you say, Why do I care what channel it's on? Below a certain age, people don't think about the first four networks versus the other 60. They don't distinguish between ABC Sports and ESPN sports. It's just sports on TV. And by extension, it should be sports on any screen they want to watch it on. Ed Zuckerman, TV producer: It's still two different kinds of experiences. There are things you watch where you play and drive the action. And then there's scripted programming, where you sit back and it comes to you. I don't think you want to be watching Law & Order and vote on whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. Part of the pleasure is having an artist tell you a story. Landau: There are three basic human entertainment experiences that go back to the cave: storytelling, game-playing, and music. People are looking for a hybrid of those things. Glaser: There's a fourth – which is being part of the tribe. A lot of the power of reality programming is not simply about the storytelling; it's about the global switchboard. The fundamental social desire to have a common context is still there. Landau: But reality programming is not going to eliminate storytelling. Zuckerman: Right. Everyone's going to watch the final episode of Friends to see if Rachel gets married or whatever. Landau: But reality programming does provide community in a way that some people are more comfortable with than Law & Order. Online gaming works and continues to grow because it provides people with a community in a way that they want. It's hard to come up with scripted programming that grabs a community on the scale that used to be possible.

Why does reality programming create more community than Friends? Glaser: Because of the artifice of unpredictability. It makes you feel like there is a specific reason to be there at that appointed time. We've learned about which reality shows work well on the Internet, and which ones don't. Look at Survivor and Big Brother. Big Brother gets worse ratings on television than Survivor, but on the Internet Big Brother is a phenomenon – 70,000 to 100,000 people pay to watch it. Why? Because there's a 24/7 camera that allows you to get raw, unedited, unscripted, unmediated programming.

Is there something fundamentally disconnected between storytelling and interactivity? Zuckerman: Remember the movie Clue? People voted on the ending. It was in theaters with multiple endings. It was a bomb. You can't have people tell you what kind of show they want. They want to be told. They want to be surprised. Gibson: There's a section in the online version of Final Fantasy where people write really elaborate and passionate biographies of their characters. It's not required, but there's a group of people who are really into it.

That's the open source storytelling crowd. They show up mostly in slash fiction, where you take characters from Star Trek, say, and then write alternate stories where Kirk and Spock turn out to be lovers. Gibson: They almost always do. Why is that? I encountered it about 15 years ago with Star Trek fans at a science fiction convention. I thought it was the weirdest thing. The same thing happened with X-Files.

How come there isn't more science fiction on television? Zuckerman: The network is terrified of the term "science fiction." We're not allowed to call it science fiction. We say "futuristic." Glaser: The Sci Fi Channel is successful, but as a niche channel, not a broadcast channel.

How has audience taste changed in the past decade? Landau: People respond negatively to stuff they see as packaged. They see through it because they've been inundated with media since they were really young. Today, by the time you're 18 you've seen hundreds of films, and you're as visually literate as only cinephiles were 20 years ago. Glaser: Look at The Daily Show. It deconstructs the media in a way that would have been a Marshall McLuhan book 25 years ago. But how many times can you be winking at yourself, winking at yourself, winking at yourself? Landau: This audience has grown up with media that's been deconstructed for them. The Daily Show has to continue pushing it beyond the level that you can do yourself.

We now have an audience that's savvy enough to see through advertising and has the technical capacity to avoid it. Will there be advertising in the future? Glaser: In terms of ads per hour, how much has it gone up in recent years? Zuckerman: A drama show today is 43 minutes; five years ago it was 48. Glaser: The notion that the advertising industry is whimpering on its last legs is wrong; advertising is increasing. Even though consumers say they don't like the ads, they seem just as happy watching the 43-minute dramas with 17 minutes of commercials and the promos around them as they were watching the 48-minute dramas with 12 minutes of ads. Landau: People don't necessarily want to watch ads, but nobody's saying that they respond emotionally less than they did. In fact, products become mass phenomena much faster now than they used to.

So advertisers aren't worried? Landau: Advertisers are always worried, 24/7. Glaser: It's the old adage: Half my ads don't work. The only problem is, I don't know which half. It may be the case that 80 percent of my ads don't work. I just don't know which 80 percent. The stakes are higher.

Eighty percent of the ads don't work? That trend is unsustainable. Landau: Two years ago, people were writing off Yahoo!, saying online advertising was overblown. Glaser: That is so telling. What is the biggest controversy in online advertising today? It's the Google versus Yahoo! approach to paid listings. It goes to this issue of authenticity. Google will use the word evil to describe the paid inclusion service. Part of what the Google brand represents is a clear separation between the ads and the listing services that represent the semantically closest thing to what we asked for.

Google sees the breadth of content, knows what you want, and is able to connect the two. We don't have that two-way channel for television yet. Glaser: The biggest barrier to that is a cultural sensitivity issue: How do you characterize your preferences, when you're in a passive experience, in a way that allows you that depth of relevance that doesn't feel like invasion of privacy?

I thought that this generation doesn't differentiate between screens. Glaser: No, the issue isn't differentiating between the screens; it's differentiating between the overt expression. When I type a query into my computer, I am willing in the moment of that query to have results come back that would reflect the fact that I asked about Viagra, say. But when I'm watching TV and I'm thinking about Viagra, I don't want the TV to know that. That feels like the thought police.

OK, no mind-reading TVs. What type of advertising would you prefer? Gibson: What if people could choose from, say, three or four advertising channels while they're watching? Because if I'm passively – but happily – watching a television show, and there are ads for feminine-hygiene products back to back to back, I feel like, Am I really supposed to be watching this show? Zuckerman: Maybe that could be a requirement. Instead of paying in the HBO model, when you turn on the TV, it won't deliver the programming until you answer three questions about your age, sex, and income.

TiVo already profiles us. My TiVo thinks I'm into cooking and independent films, that kind of thing. Glaser: Rather than have personalization be systemwide, tie it to a particular program. That's more relevant. Because households have many different people, and the problem with the TiVo model is you don't stress who you are at the time of watching. The key is finding a language for letting people express themselves that's not answering 50 questions or otherwise slowing down the experience.

Walk us through a scenario of that. Gibson: You turn on your TV to a specific show, and you're not able to watch it unless you select from a menu of styles of advertising. In my ideal consumer universe, I'd be able to choose something like extreme advertising. I would be able to choose Japanese advertising only. And I would be totally entertained. It would actually be fun to watch. If you're a mother at home watching with your children, you can choose a kind of fuzzy, friendly level of advertising – cartoon advertising only. If you're a male 18 to 34, you can choose advertising with sex and muscle cars.

What's the delivery mechanism for all this entertainment? Zuckerman: A single device that does everything. It's a phone and a PDA, it's where your money is stored electronically, where you can watch TV and listen to music. Glaser: There will be a feature in your phone that knows all your media preferences, be it your Rhapsody playlist, be it what you TiVoed, so that rather than tying your media preferences into a physical device, you access all of this programming as a function of subscriptions. It operates like a Visa or library card. The model today is device-bound, which is clearly a necessary phase, but you want a network-centric approach because you don't want the physical capacity of the storage devices in any one location to be the limiting factor. Gibson: So you have your little card, and any screen that happens to be in your vicinity, you insert the card and you're in your universe. Glaser: It's wireless. It just beams. Gibson: OK, yeah. You don't have to insert it. That's great. I'm up for that. To what extent would there then be a commons if everybody had one of those, if everybody was constantly preselecting for who they were and what they were interested in? Maybe it would put the commons back where it always was. Maybe we're talking about the end of a 60-year technological window in which it was possible to broadcast television and advertise really heavily on it.

What would your device be? Gibson: I don't think I could do any better than Rob's. I want one right away. I might actually, though, prefer if it wasn't wireless because I'm not sure I'd want my preferences registering on the flatscreens in the hotel lobby: Wait a minute, who walked in? Actually, that's a good scene in a science fiction film.

Presumably, your device would have neural implants to stick with you. Gibson: In real life, I'm more like a keychain kind of guy. I'd like a little thing on my keychain that when I plug it into whatever I'm dealing with, I can just settle into my own cozy, messy, digital universe.

Next Steps

| 2006: TV viewers opt out: A quarter of US households have a digital video recorder and choose to watch 15 percent fewer ads. 2007: As HD-DVDs hit the market, Blu-ray compression technology means more bits per disc. Forget bulky box sets. 2009: Sony and Hitachi team up to unveil 3-D holographic gaming systems. 2010: Legit online music retailers are responsible for half of all music sales. 2011: Downloading a DVD-quality feature film takes only five seconds. 2014: Broadband Nation! Eighty percent of all US households have broadband access. 2020: The decline of film continues as a majority of movies are shot and screened digitally.

Fast Forward

Fasten your seat belts: The long-awaited future of travel gets real.

It's always been just over the horizon: a world of flying cars, levitating trains, personal helicopters. Now it's here. Almost. Around the globe, engineers and dreamers have been building fantastical – if sometimes impractical – ways of just saying go. Consider Guy Negre's zero-emission car that goes 100 miles on a tank of air. Or Neil Cummings' maglev train, which should hit 300 mph on its Nevada desert test route. In the air, there's Rob Bulaga's one-man strap-on helicopter. Even the flying car has gotten off the ground: Paul Moller will test his M400 Skycar this summer over a lake with flotation gear in tow. A little caution goes a long way.

– Joshua Davis

Next Steps

| 2005: Price for hydrogen fuel cell car drops below $100,000. 2006: Eclipse Aviation delivers first air-taxi – a submillion-dollar jet that services regional airports along the East Coast. 2015: Computer-navigated cars account for 50 percent of vehicles sold in the US.

Hello, Neighbor

NASA's hot new rising star, Alpha Centauri A, gets ready for its 25 trillion-mile close-up.

Location: 4.36 light-years from Earth

Attraction: Alpha Centauri A is the brightest star within the closest stellar system to Earth and offers hope of terrestrial life. For the Trekkers: Alpha Centauri is also where Star Trek's Zefram Cochrane headed after inventing the warp drive on Earth.

First Glance: In 2009, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will send a spacecraft armed with eight telescopes into orbit around the sun – in roughly the same plane as Earth's – as part of the Space Interferometry Mission. Arranged in four parallel pairs, each scope will sit precisely 30 feet (measured to the picometer) from its partner and 6 feet from its neighboring pair. Their combined light will enable astronomers to see with incredible precision – the equivalent of discerning a human hair on the Empire State Building while standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. By training the telescopes on Alpha Centauri A and measuring the changes in its position, scientists hope to detect any minuscule gravitational tugs caused by small Earth-like planets orbiting it.

Further Inspection: Astronomers will use the interferometry data to design the Terrestrial Planet Finder, scheduled to launch in 2015. The finder will carry four more orbiting telescopes (set 200 feet apart) to create one giant virtual scope with the power to determine the size, surface temperature, and atmospheric composition of the planets in Alpha Centauri A's solar system. NASA will start receiving in-depth images as soon as 2016.

– Patrick Di Justo

Next Steps

| 2006: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft heads for Pluto, the only planet in our solar system that we've yet to explore. 2013: The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter takes off. It uses nuclear propulsion to travel between Jupiter's four large moons in search of signs of life. 2015: The Crew Exploration Vehicle ferries people from the International Space Station to the moon, where the first human touches down since 1972. 2020: An unmanned satellite carries a nuclear-powered sub to Europa. The sub melts a hole in the icy surface, and wondrous critters emerge. 2034: A multinational project involving the US, Russia, and Europe lands six people on the surface of Mars for a monthlong stay.

The Cure

Nanobombs. Microbots. Vaccine pills. A report from the medical frontier.

by Josh McHugh

Cancer Cause: Broken DNA, mutated either by external agents like radiation and chemical carcinogens or by hereditary factors, triggers out-of-control cell division and growth, destroying surrounding tissues and organs. Death toll: Cancer is the third-leading killer in developed nations, accounting for one of every 12 deaths. In the US, it's second only to heart disease. Big advance: New chip-based DNA microarrays let doctors pinpoint the genetic expression behind a mutation; gene silencing, also known as RNA interference, is a naturally occurring process that researchers are harnessing to shut down culprit genes. Scientists are testing inhalable nanoparticle "cluster bombs," which infiltrate tissues and destroy cancerous cells.

Heart Disease Cause: Cardiac muscle tissue thins or dies, valves stiffen or leak, or the cells responsible for coordinating heartbeat rhythm misfire. Death toll: Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly one in four fatalities in developed countries, almost one in ten in developing countries. Big advance: Artificial hearts now in trials are expected to rival transplanted hearts for longevity. Microrobotic tools let surgeons use minimally invasive techniques for bypass grafts and valve repair, which once required open-heart surgery. Regenerative techniques like growing new cardiac muscle and blood vessels from implanted stem cells are in the pipeline.

HIV/AIDS Cause: The AIDS virus cripples the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to every pathogen. A shape-shifting target, HIV has subdivided into variants A (East Africa), B (North America and western Europe), and C (Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), each requiring specialized approaches. Death toll: Number five on the developing world's cause-of-death chart, and rising fast. AIDS is ravaging sub-Saharan Africa. Big advance: Pricey drug cocktails keep AIDS suppressed for ever-longer stretches. But a cheap, easily administered HIV vaccine is the real goal. Berna Biotech has developed a second-gen pill vaccine that contains HIV DNA encased in bacteria. Tests in Uganda and the US began this year.

Alzheimer's Cause: Protein structures called beta amyloids clump into plaque deposits in brain tissue, destroying neurons. Death toll: With lifespan increasing, Alzheimer's has become maturity's most feared health problem. It affects 4.5 million people in the US. By 2050, that number will hit 13 million. Big advance: Scientists are working on compounds that inhibit production of a peptide called abeta-42, the main building block of amyloid plaques. The Mayo Clinic is collaborating with biotech firm Myriad Genetics on testing the resulting Alzheimer's treatment. Eventually, researchers hope to derive a vaccine from the drug.

Aging Cause: Tissues become brittle and begin to break down, gradually losing specialized cell maintenance and defense functions, leaving the body increasingly susceptible to both genetic mutations and outside threats. Death toll: No one actually "dies of old age," but cell deterioration weakens the body to the point where other causes of death can do their thing. Big advance: UC San Francisco researcher Cynthia Kenyon has spent the last decade tinkering with the aging process of Caenorhabditis elegans,, a kind of roundworm. By disrupting hormone-based aging signals in the worms' endocrine systems, Kenyon's group caused them to live six times longer than normal. Coming soon: increasing lifespan with age-retarding compounds.

Next Steps

| 2007: First cheap, pill-based HIV vaccine widely available. 2008: Stanford scientists begin untying knotted proteins and finding cures for everything from Alzheimer's to Huntington's disease. 2009: Alzheimer's vaccine passes Viagra on all-time top-drugs list. 2010: Home stem cell cardiac treatment kits on sale. 2011: Number of global AIDS cases declines for first time. 2013: Artificial-heart recipient finishes NYC marathon. 2015: Cancer occurrence rate down 40 percent from 2005, cancer-death rate down 80 percent.

Wrist-top hub features:

•flexible OLED screen

•thumbprint scanner

• camera lens

• navigation and control buttons

• microphone

Training assistant features:

• Lens: A hi-res still and video camera also performs retina scans for security authentication.

• Supplemental power: MEMS-kinetic cells integrated into the housing capture energy from body movement.

• Smart screen: The edge-to-edge display with NXT clear-audio film functions as both loudspeaker and next-to-ear speaker. Users navigate with touch-sensitive surface and customizable buttons or via voice commands.

• Accessories: Advanced Wi-Fi allows users to stream content to other devices such as armbands, earbuds, or large screens.

Life recorder features:

• Piezoelectric screen: Pulling the touchscreen out halfway activates phone mode: A numeric keypad blisters up on the display. The screen can also be fully extended for watching movies.

• Search interface: The SensEye�s filtering system looks for what, where, and when info.

Personal navigator

Multimedia handicam features:

• OLED Display: Labels and icons shift according to mode, from filming to editing to videoconferencing.

• Telephony: In telephone mode, the caller uses wireless earbuds (not shown), and a photo or videostream of the other party appears here.

• Jog wheel shuttle: This controller detaches from the body, allowing it to be comfortably used.

• Pull tab: The flexible screen serves as a camera viewfinder and display for text messages and video calls. The screen can also be pulled from the canister like a window shade for on-the-fly computing, emailing, Web browsing, and even video editing.

• Security: Biometric-sensing film automatically recognizes the user, ensuring that no one else can use the device. This authentication can also alert the phone network to the user�s whereabouts.

• Microphone: Software-controlled directional mike array can be used for targeted audio capture.

• Lens: Rotating optics switch the lens focal length between normal, macro, fish-eye, and prismatic.

• Upload Presets: Layout preference cards slip into Edit Decision List (EDL) expansion bays. These cards set image and text autoformatting preferences for Web uploading.

Sticky cam:

• Sold in six-packs, these cheap wireless lenses can be stuck on any surface and feed video back to the CanCam. Each contains an integrated digital imager and optics, a printed antenna, and a zinc air battery � all mounted on a flexible bed with an adhesive backing.

Left, Rob Glaser, Chair and CEO, RealNetworks; right, William Gibson, Author of 10 books, most recently Pattern Recognition David Ash