Page 42 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014WEARABLE DEVICES IN ALL SIZESAs well as the glasses, which have rapidly become popular, closely followed by the SmartWatch launched by Sony, other tactile devices also exist or are under development, smart wigs, tattoos and bracelets, while sensors are being embedded in sports shoes and even in underwear.i‐Air Touch (iAT) technology, for example, offers projectors of virtual images that can be “touched” and seen through special glasses. The camera is activated when it detects the user’s fingers a certain distance away, although unlike the Glasses it does not respond to voice commands. Devices of this kind are better classified amongst the tactiles. In the meantime, Disney is developing facilities that will not need any physical contact to achieve a Feel it in the Air effect. “A time will come,” says a Disney researcher, “when we will use telephones not just for seeing and hearing, but also for feeling”.The smart watches from Sony, Samsung and Qualcomm represent another new type of device to which we must accustom ourselves. Apple is not being left behind: it has announced that it will soon launch the Apple iWatch on the market and it has patented a new type of flexible display, the iCuff. We do not know whether this is intended to be used with the iWatch or in a new type of iPhone. Also, in November 2013 another maker of smart watches, Pebble, had already sold more than 250,000 units of a model able to receive calls and messages and to control music. Pebble has already announced that it will soon be capable of supporting popular applications such as Foursquare.Motorola Mobility has announced a tattoo that acts as a microphone, which achieves perfect clarity of sound, and not only enables wireless communication with a mobile device but also acts as a lie‐detector.Finally, Sony has patented a new, radical type of wearable that consists of a wig with a laser pointerAC/Eand GPS able to control other gadgets. The patent states that the wig is built to connect wirelessly to other devices and will be controlled entirely by head movements. Sony asserts that in comparison with the Glasses or smart watches the wig will have the advantage of being more discrete. While not denying that the patent is highly innovative, I confess I have my doubts as to this latter point!OPTIMISATION OF MOBILE CONTENT, MOBILE APPLICATIONS AND MOBILITY TECHNOLOGIESI stated at the beginning of this article that 2013 had also been the year of Responsive Design—and not by chance, but because of the proliferation of devices. We do not know how people are accessing, in our case, culture on the Internet, which may be from a browser, a mobile phone, a tablet, a watch or a pair of glasses, making the management of the content that is to be presented to the user a very complex matter. The so‐called adaptive mobility technologies are a response to this problem.New demands have been generated for the storage, transformation and presentation of content, particularly when it comes to designing experiences that will work well both from a desk‐top browser and from a mobile device. Should I make a specific version of my site for mobiles? Or would it be better to develop a mobile app? These are the questions that publishers, museums and online music companies are asking themselves every day. Another question it seems logical to ask is, “How is this new generation of devices going to affect existing technology?” and, what is more important, “In what form will it be used every day by the specialists who produce, manage and exploit digital content?”.There are, as usual, many answers: it may be that the best thing is for the website accessed from a mobile to be different from the one accessed from aWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 4: CULTURE IN THE CLOUD CURRENT PAGE...42