When I run, I have a piezo in my shoe. In conjunction with a wireless receiver, my height, weight and some very clever maths, my ipod can work out how fast I’m going by the force and frequency of signals from the piezo. I get a graph of my run at the end, which is automatically uploaded to the web.

I just bought a mountain bike. It was £100 cheaper than the one I rode a decade ago, but is of a standard I’d have paid about £800 more to have at that time. As I ride, I have a phone in my pack that tracks me by GPS. I can always find out where I am. My phone can show me the stars to within a few degrees in broad daylight. The stuff the screen is made from has been around for decades, but was nowhere near commercialisation when I first got a mobile phone.

13 years ago, I went through utter infatuation with the internet over a dialup connection, then again some years later with broadband. I went through it a third time with mobile internet last year. It’s now very, very rare for me to not know a lot about my friends at any given time of day, and vice versa. A single tiny device with sleek industrial design, more than six times as powerful as my first desktop PC, allows me to talk to people worldwide in all kinds of ways.

Boston Dynamics have built intelligently adapting quadrupedal robots. Festo are building an astounding array of prototype robots based on organic designs. The ASIMO is history.

Not only has gene sequencing continued to become cheaper, leading to the mapping of more genomes, one has been designed then built from scratch and had an email address encoded into it. Media rhetoric and prejudice that I remember from my childhood around IVF has faded away completely; I haven’t heard the term “test tube baby” since the late 80s.

Someone I know has built a Reprap Mendel and got it printing things in a matter of weeks. Gmail scans for the words “is attached” and warns you if you’re about to send something with no attachments.

As Matt Jones said, “Here’s your fucking jetpack”

Sorry for not posting here much. I’m still very excited about a lot of things. Recent ramblings are mostly on Pixel-Love, with the lengthy ones I’ve thought about a lot mirrored at Gamasutra.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 18:11 and is filed under Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.