goldengod

NEC Japan has an excellent little gallery of future design concepts that you can take a look at. All of the products involve networking to some degree and are designed with the near future in mind.

What surprised me was how relevant a lot of these appear to be, even two years after initially designed. At the same time, they seem impossibly distant, as if they were being seen through the wrong end of binoculars. All manner of obstacles are currently in the way of any of these becoming a reality soon.

I think gumi suffers from this near/far dichotomy (from now on, referred to as the ‘Grover Perspective‘) the most out of the concepts in this gallery. This is partially because the current rise of interest in RFID chips and copyright management are such major topics for the tech & blogger worlds. Actually, they’ve been major topics for a couple years now. I keep expecting something more exciting to happen.

The distance of the design lays in not only the legal trouble associated with developing such a thing but also the technological issues associated with creating truly secure RFID chips. And let’s be honest, nobody’s going to really eat these things when they’re done with them. Maybe in Japan, but not here. It could even be a high-tech extension of the Bukkake and Paintkkake movements!

The dual screen laptop, duo-pc, is one that could easily be done today, created like a larger version of a Nintendo DS. The cost would no doubt be prohibitive, but the design appeals to me. You could use touch sensitive LCDs for both and just have a keyboard mapped to the bottom one by default when the unit is in hinged mode. Hell, you could probably get art.lebedev to help design the keyboard layout. They’ve delayed the Optimus keyboard yet again so they might have the spare time.

Flacon strikes me as an interesting concept but completely impractical and in many ways poorly executed. I’ve very much felt as of late that a lot of my photographs are neglected, considering how many I take, so a device like this appeals to me immensely. However, in its default mode, the images are far too small to be practical or interesting. Even when used in projector mode, it’s really a glorified LCD picture frame.

The concepts for tag, wacca, and nave aren’t even really worth addressing to me. They are neat to look at it, but have no real future or potential beyond that. A user over on diepunyhumans, where I posted this a while back, commented that p-ism was really the only one that interested him. That one was hard for me to categorize, having actually used and sold the little-known Logitech io Digital Pen. It sounds good, I won’t argue there. However, the actual practice of stuffing that many features into something that we routinely lose and treat poorly is probably not the best idea.

What do you guys think of these future design concepts? Can you do one better?