Modern technology is amazing, but it’s hard to get excited about it because we are simply too used to it.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could experience that technology as though encountering it for the first time? There is a certain sense of childlike wonder that a little bit of distance might give us.
Imagine you had never seen a television, or an airplane or a smartphone. Think how delightful it would be to come across such a strange and wondrous thing.
I wonder whether there is any way we could recapture that sense of excitement and delight.
I recall the three demos that blew me away when I saw then:
1979 – Anti-aliasing. It was a simple “before & after” 3D rendering on a 512×480 frame buffer, but (as a high school kid) it was amazing to see such a quality differencing at the same resolution.
1986 – JPEG. How did all those pixels fit in that tiny file??
1992 – Cheap CMOS camera. Wait, that tiny LED is actually a camera? For less than $2?