Corning Incorporated, the American glass manufacturer, has a pretty amazing vision of the future. The company issued a video about the future of glass on YouTube 3 weeks ago (called “A Day Made of Glass”), and it has now gone viral with 6.9 million views as of this writing (you can see it here).
Apparently, “display glass” is one of Corning’s big bets for the future. In shots reminiscent of the Tom Cruise film, The Minority Report, the Corning video shows people going through their daily routine, using hand gestures to manipulate computer data on glass computer screens. Apparently, in the future you will be able to send text messages on your bathroom mirror while brushing your teeth.
Flexible glass is also featured in the video (and you can read more about it on Corning’s website at: http://www.corning.com/displaytechnologies/en/products/flexible.aspx). The idea here is to have glass that you can roll up, carry around scroll-like, and then unroll to use as a touchscreen.
The video also features some cool business and government applications, including dynamic street signs (with moving text and graphics) and large advertisements with video. These applications are not too different from existing technologies, but the use of glass and high-resolution graphics could be an advantage for Corning.
My favorite innovation in the video is the ability to sit a cell phone down on a glass counter and instantly have the counter start displaying video and data from the phone. For the most part, that would probably be a privacy problem (if data can be transferred so easily from your phone, people are going to steal it), but in certain settings it could be very convenient. If there is demand for this technology, I am sure Corning or its partners will deal with the privacy problems somehow.
So is this glass vision of the future a utopia or a dystopia? It is too soon to say, but I do not necessarily like the idea of reading e-mail while flossing. There is no harm in Corning’s developing the technology necessary to display computer screens everywhere, but I doubt very many people will want access to their computer more often than we already have it. I enjoy my morning shower each day because it is a time when I have no access to information technology; once my shower wall turns into a computer monitor, I don’t know how I am going to get any thinking done.
Still, Corning’s technologies seem promising; they will undoubtedly unfold in ways that even Corning cannot foresee.
