thatlarkin’s blog

Within 10 years, education as we know it will cease to exist.

Computer devices and monitors are getting progressively smaller.  When I entered the workforce for keeps in 1989, I played with text on a 24″ black and white monitor.  I am typing this on a laptop that displays its imagery across 15 inches.

But of greater import is the leap from the laptop to almost the same connection experience on a 2.5 inch Blackberry screen.

It’s important because it establishes the trend.  The next logical step in the progression is already upon us: wearable media. These glasses are about half an inch high but produce the effect of viewing a 40″ screen. Almost like sitting in your own private movie theater. Notice the earphones. This particular model is designed to plug into your iPod to view videos.

It is a small technological adjustment that turns this delivery device into one where the “computer” display fills the bottom left corner of the lenses, giving the user access to the data and the external world at the same time.

The next step is currently in development by a number of medical (see macular degeneration) and telecommunication technology firms: a contact lens that projects data and images directly on to the user’s retina.  Unlike the glasses here, the contact lens will be essentially undetectable to others, as undetectable as the quarter inch audio speakers attached to the inside of the users’ tragi.

All wireless.

Always connected to all the world’s internet-based information.

Always disconnected from large devices like computers and laptops (how small can a PDA get?)

This is a very different image of “virtual reality” from the documentaries, where white lab-coated computer science PhDs (or the journalists interviewing them) wore goggles the size of coffee cans and were attached by skeins of cables. One day very soon, users can be connected to “the cloud” and nobody will be the wiser.

IN OTHER WORDS, the need to take the time to memorize things like multiplication tables, directions to church, which tax form to use, who won best actress in 1963, the french language, will be obsolete.  Users will simply go online (NB: “going online” will be a thing of the past when users are always online) access the information (via retinal clicks, voice command, or wireless hand motion). Answers to Tuesday’s pop quiz at your “fingertips”.

And in a giant quarter rotation of humanity’s wheel of life, another industry falls.

But more important, what it means to connect with another individual, or with one’s world for that matter, will continue its trend of abstraction that began with the telephone and enter a paradigmatic shift upon the mass adoption of deviceless retinal projection connectivity.