Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 5, 1993)

Continuing our series of clips from the 1993 video Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future, today we have part 5. Practicing medicine over picturephone, personal computer assistants and a glimpse of the classroom of the future are just a few of the paleo-futuristic wonders featured in this clip and clips to come.


See also:

Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 1, 1993)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 2, 1993)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 3, 1993)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 4, 1993)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)

6 comments:

John said...

The most inventive line: "pass the savings on to the insurance company!"

Anonymous said...

It's interesting how some of the conference participants got larger when they spoke. I think that's how some people actually think of themselves in meetings: "maybe if I talk more, I'll look more powerful!"

I imagine that convention would get a little messy with a lot of cross-talk. You'd get dizzy with all the scaling up and down.

The permission-denial is interesting as well. I wonder if this system has any "authorize" feature ... some way for users to say, "I spoke to that user, and he gave me permission."

geoff said...

oh man, that future would have sucked if everyone in it was as annoying as they are.

John Gorenfeld said...

What about time zones? In the future, everyone around the world is awake simultaneously.

Scott said...

Is the mom in the AT&T "Vision of the Future" bizarrely familiar to anyone else? She certainly is to me.

I thought about it for awhile as I watched the movies and decided that she must be the mother of Morena Baccarin, the actress who played Inara on Joss Whedon's Firefly.

It might not be true, but it's certainly close enough that I'm going to just pretend I'm right.

Can anyone verify this?

henryb24 said...

Good comments. Especially about the people getting larger and smaller. But we had to do something to make the person speaking visible on a 21 inch monitor.

Permissions via voice print were a key part of the usage mentality. Remember Ian asks his wife's intelligent agent why she picked a handsome young man as her intelligent agent and he answered, "Sorry I am not permitted to answer that question." This was another concept from UNIX.

The woman who played the mother had appeared as a regular on a TV soap opera for years.

Finally the comment about everyone being awake all the time is totally accurate. Anyone who has ever worked on a project that involved the U.S., Europe and Asia, has seen this vision of the future come to pass.