Signals of the Future: From Assisted Dying To Trying On Clothes Virtually
Here is a bumper crop of my latest signals of the future from last month’s Friday Futures Insight.
Visualise The Future
Most of us will have experienced the amazing virtual worlds created for gamers. Now industry leader Epic Games are collaborating with Autodesk to rapidly create immersive real-time experiences for architecture and urban design.
By enhancing visualisation and collaboration through ‘extended reality’, the companies hope that designers can communicate to project teams and clients with a new level of realism. They can show how projects will look and feel when completed — and also how they will age over the course of years and even decades.
Bringing gaming software closer to city design will benefit the industry, through smoother, cheaper, and easier to produce 3D and immersive visualisations. It should, in time, result in better schemes. For me, there could be a further big win if the technology is used to increase participation in planning and development. Neighbours, communities, future-tenants, and hard to reach groups can experience schemes before they are built. and collaborate in the design and approval process.
Try It Virtually
Walmart, the world’s larges supermarket chain, is rolling out a service that allows customers to try on clothes virtually, that ‘brings the in-store fitting room experience to online shoppers’.
Using AI and software developed for topographical mapping to image the body, ‘Be Your Own Model’ allows a realistic try-on of 270,000 items.
When I was at Forum for the Future, we predicted exactly this in our Fashion Futures scenarios for Levis, back in 2009.
Augmented reality will be convenient for online shoppers (as I can attest having just sent back a third pair of ill-fitting football boots for my daughter) and potentially brings big efficiency and environmental gains with far fewer returns.
But, when it’s perfected and fully scaled, the virtual fitting-room could be another nail in the coffin for physical retail. Shoppers will no longer need to go the the store to see if something really fits and check how it looks from various angles.
In the future, store owners will need to combine these digital tools with the personal touch to heighten the physical shopping experience and keep people visiting.
Choosing To Die
I was talking in a futures session this week about the inevitability of population ageing in this country, the challenges of dealing with it, and the fact we are not planning adequately as a nation.
Then I saw that acclaimed French film director Jean Luc Godard had died this week of assisted suicide. Now, I know there are a lot of very valid religious, ethical, and practical concerns about assisted dying. But I also know a large portion of health resources are expended in the last years and weeks of life, and that some people would like to be able to make a choice about when is the right time to go.
So, what would happen if assisted dying — with all the appropriate safeguards — became a more mainstream choice? Would it be popular? What impact would it have on how we look after our elders? Would it change or reduce the buildings, facilities, jobs, and funding we need?
This is a very contested issue, but in a future where we live longer, and care and health provision is increasingly stretched, will society accept different choices?
Pay With Your Hand
Amazon is testing technology at 65 Whole Foods stores in California that allows you to check out and pay with just a hover of your hand. Customers need to pre-register their palm print and payment details, and then they are good to buy.
An increasing number of companies are using digital technology and biometrics to make everyday life frictionless. Some places in China — a leader in facial recognition — allow you to pay with a face scan. Similar technologies speed you through passport control when returning to the UK.
In a very few years we’ve gone from cash, to chip and pin, to contactless, to pay with your phone or watch. It looks like biometrics — meaning you don’t need to carry or wear anything — will be next. This will raise questions about privacy, who holds what biometric data and how. And it won’t be good news for makers of purses, wallets, and cash point machines.
Distracted Pedestrians
How often have you nearly come a cropper whilst glued to your smartphone? In Hong Kong they’re testing traffic lights that project onto the pavement in the hope of stopping distracted
phone-users walking out into traffic.
Cities around the world face this problem with their smartphone-carrying citizens: engrossed in their social media or chatting to friends, people aren’t looking where they’re going. Hong Kong is testing new traffic lights at crossings. LED lamps project a bright red light down on the pavement curb when the ‘don’t walk’ sign is on, bathing the pedestrian, and the screen they’re staring at, in red light.
With everyone constantly on their smartphones, will we see more signage at ground level — directions, advertising — to reflect that people are looking down, not up? Or will the instructions come directly onto the phone instead — a visual and audio prompt to stop at a crossing? Or will smart glasses — or that Sci-Fi favourite smart contact lenses — mean that pedestrians can look up and still consume their chosen media?
Digital is already heavily mediating how we move through cities — where we go and how we get there. In a hyper-connected future, expect more novel interactions between the physical and digital worlds and more augmented reality layered over the urban experience.
