Chip producer NXP has developed a chip for a car key. The chip helps you find your car back in a large parking lot. Holding the key near one's cell phone creates a connection with the car and then you receive the location on your cell which then navigates you neatly to your car. Furthermore the key lets you see which doors are locked and if they roof's closed. Useful for anyone doubting that when there are clouds drifting over when they're walking to the store.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands are going to coach us. They know much better than you which choices you can make, where you have to go and where you shouldn’t go. They’ll coach us in real time on the spot. It’s just a piece of technology, but it’ll be the most normal thing in the world.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

During the FPD International Show in Japan, Samsung has shown a prototype of a telephone with a fondable OLED colour display. The phone has a display on the front already, as is usual, but on folding it open a second display with a diameter of 6.5 inch and a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels is revealed.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Big mobile screens too are becoming truly useable now. Banking quickly? Sorting some nice music quickly? Make a comparison of the furniture you’ve just viewed? That all becomes possible with this. Brands will have to be at the consumer’s side on every available screen. That’ll be a great challenge. We’ve just got used to the computer and are still excited about the iPhone.

CarCade is a concept game you play on your laptop while in a car. A camera filming the environment is mounted on the wing-mirror and the moving image is used in a space-shooter-like game (think of Space Invaders of yore). The game responds to the behavior of the car.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Virtual and physical world mix. Currently complicatedly through a laptop, soon through special glasses or afterwards in our contact lenses.

Fuji FinePix Real 3D technology makes it possible to create 3D images directly on the camera. They can be watched without the use of special glasses. To do this the camera has two lenses which are combined into one. You can also still make 2D photographs. With the two lenses the quality of the 2D photo can be enhanced or an extremely panoramic picture can be taken. Cameras using the technology will be for sale in 2009.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

People think in 3D, think in images, think in the special placement of objects in regard to one another. Like we order nature around us. We’re getting technology that plays on this more and more often. We were used to making a 2D picture and printing it 2D. Now we’re making a 3D picture and can print it in 3D at home (such a printer only costs 5000 euros by now). In the long term, we’ll create 3d video and we let be played by programmable matter. Then we can replay everything completely. The way it was. The nostalgic human in tiptop shape.

Related trends

• More 3D
• More nostalgia

With Windows 7, the successor of Windows Vista, users can control applications through touch. You won't need a scroll wheel to scroll through a document, but you can do it with a touch of the screen. Users can touch the screen with their fingers in more than one place at a time. That makes it possible to, for example, zoom in on a picture by pushing two fingers apart.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The computer will be the next medium that will respond to our gestures. Currently through touch, soon from a distance. If we then make a circle in the air we can, for example, turn a 3D space. Coupled with our reaction with voice and facial expressions brands will be given a fantastic dialogue medium.

Trung Bui, a research assistant at University Twente has developed a system that can deal with the user's emotions. To illustrate the effectiveness Bui applied it to a navigational system for relief workers which takes into account the stress experienced by a user. The navigational system receives input from a loose 'stressmodule' which measures the relief worker's stress levels. When communicating with the user, the system will take this into account. In a situation wherein the user's stress levels are heightened, for example, the system will take into account the fact that the user is more prone to make mistakes and will ask for confirmation more often.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Step by step we learn to react better and better to humans. First to typing, then clicking, by now a little better to our voice, but this kind of development shows that it’s definitely not going to stay like this. Eventually ‘listening’, ‘observing’, will be the most normal thing in the world for brands.

The movie shows an airplame (the MC2) of 10 grams that avoids walls on its own. It's the research area of microflyers of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) of the Swiss EPFL.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The world won’t become bigger, but much smaller. Media technology will disappear from sight; robots will replace them in time. Small airplanes will ensure that we don’t have to go back to retrieve the apple we forgot for along the way; that’s taken care of immediately. Or they can hold things in the air that we now need someone else to hold. What to think of a light-weight screen (think grams) that’s held up in the air by microflyers on a clear day? Or a flag waving without a flag pole? With a lot of things we think it normally belongs on the ground. Soon everything can happen in the air. Soon. It’ll take a year or twenty yet, but it’s coming.

A research team from the University of California, Berkeley is working on the development of such small (image) sensors that they can be 'printed' unto any surface. This way a 'sensing tape' could be created, for example: a camera as duck tape so to speak. You tear off a piece, tape it onto the ceiling, your car or your forehead and you've gained a camera.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Everthing will react to us, but everything can only react if everything can observe us. Developments like this add to that. In this example it’s for visible light, but it’ll become truly interesting when we can observe very simple phenomena that pass human observation. Then we can train for that and get the best out of ourselves. It’ll take a while; we’re talking about 2050, the time of Pamper Planet.

Related trends

• 2050-2100: Pamper planet

The micro airplanes (roughly 30 centimeter long) in this movie can transport small packages extremely quickly, useful for, for example, emergency transports in health care.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

It’s a part of the development of the network economy. The economy in which everything is flexible, scaleable and especially realtime. Soon we can order something from a pavement and will have it delivered within an hour. Other methods will remain cheaper, but this is much faster, so you’ll really have something.

Engineers of the George Washington University have succeeded in using nanoscale fabricating techniques to create a flexible contact lens with a biologically safe electronic circuit and light source. This means the lens can be worn, like a regular lens, on the eye. Furthermore, it's capable of relaying information to the human eye which the eye otherwise wouldn't pass onto the brain.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

More and more screens which give us sight on the visual world are being created. It’ll be projected into our lenses how we have to walk, in our ear we’ll hear data about the person we’re speaking to, see things that aren’t really there. And all of that in 3D. We’ll have to wait a while for this technology, but eventually it’ll be the most normal thing in the world.

Related trends

• More 3D

Chinese researchers have made a breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis. With the aid of carbon nanotubes (falls under nanotechnology) they can reproduce an important part of photosynthesis that was hitherto not possible.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Most important about this development is that devices will start to disconnect from their power supply. At the moment we need electric cables everywhere. This means that cars recharge themselves in sunlight; this means that computers can be outside; that robots can recharge in the garden. For humans that means an enormous increase in our freedom and furthermore we’re relieved from the slumbering concern of energy supplies, something that will help especially the underdeveloped countries to reach ‘western’ levels.

Related trends

• 2025-2050: Roboworld
• More freedom

A robot that can think using rat's brains has been developed at the University of Reading. The robot can avoid objects without the use of additional support from humans or technology. The brains aren't physically located in the robot, but are kept in a food-rich environment. They communicate with the robot using Bluetooth.

Emily is an artificial character that moves exactly like a human being. She is, after all, based on the video recording of a real person. And copied so precisely that you can't tell the difference. As such Emily displays all the emotions that a regular human being would also display.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The virtual world is becoming more and more real. With this technology we’ll be able to pretend to be someone else in a year or ten: we’ll be recorded, placed in a model and shown as someone else. Including the changing of our voice! This way granddad can come to life again. Scary!

Brand agents, artificial employees that represent brands, won’t start to look like this until around 2030. Only when we can present the dialogue on an adult, human level will we be able to accept that brand agents also look like humans (that’s why I’ve picked the name ‘mensmerk’ or, translated, ‘humanbrand’!) And the technology to listen is developing very slowly, but steadily. And that’s what I’m tracking nicely on this website. For now there’s plenty to look forward to!

The technology to copy humans with animations is going ever further. In this movie you can see that movements are built up from the bone and onwards. This makes animation far more realistic.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The virtual world will become so real that we won’t be able to tell the difference. We’ll look at movies that have been completely animated, see friends perform who aren’t aware of any evil or we’ll have a video conference with granddad, exactly how he looked 50 years ago. It’s becoming more and more real. And in this world we’ll soon enter the dialogue with brand agents, artificial employees that speak in the name of the brand.

A Kenyan boy has developed a system with which he can prevent car theft. As soon as the car leaves unexpectedly a text message is sent. Then the owner can react and stop the car remotely.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This fits neatly in the trend of product activation: this connects products, through the virtual world, with the producers and the owners. This makes the product a subject of the discussion in the dialogue. The product loses the anonymity that it’s received since the industrialization.

Related trends

• Product activation

The Technical University Eindhoven is working on a device that can trace protein in blood extremely fast and then determines a person's illness. After taking some blood a diagnosis can be made within ten minutes.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

We’re making more and more technology to monitor people. At first we focused on what people point at (the mouse) or type. Now we can detect their fingers (touch screens), follow their movements (gesture screens) or analyze their voices. Soon (on a large scale) analysis will be added: then we can analyze our face too. But it won’t stay like that: we’ll start to measure the scents we give off and then we’ll start to looking inside the human body. Currently with a device, but soon with sensors in your body which measure emotions, tensions or proteins and furthermore pass this information on to the outside world.

With this companies, brands, can start new services that help us make the most of our lives. It’s a long term development; it’s the step after the dialogue.