Near Future Film: Bring It On

The Challenge

How will we use technology that has not yet been invented to solve problems that don’t yet exist yet? Specifically, how will technology address future problems as more people live longer and who want to live on their own terms?

The Solution

Using our Innovation Storytelling approach, the team produced the four (4) The Near Future films to inspire innovators to create technologies and experiences supported by the broadband network. This film, The Near Future – Bring It On, shows what our homes will be like with fast networks with multi-gigabit speeds in 3 to 8 years. This film illustrates next-generation services enabled by high-speed low latency networks. Make no mistake—the technologies profiled are under development today, and coming to us in the near future.

Innovations In The Story

Some technologies we introduce in the film are :

Autonomous Car

Future autonomous vehicles will require significant daily data updates. The film depicts a self-driving vehicle pulling up in front of the house and automatically connecting to the home network for its update. Autonomous vehicles will likely require 200 to 300 hundred gigabytes a month, or around 12-15 gigabytes per day. This is a significant amount of data movement, which will demand a robust high-speed network.

Holographic Table

The scene in the film depicting the holographic Einstein represents what education in the future could look like. These kinds of media-rich lessons will transform a student’s ability to learn by providing educational material in new and interesting ways.

Holographic technology is not new, yet just in the last year, there have been very interesting advances in holographic displays. What the film depicts is a lot nearer than most people think. There is a great potential for rich media educational models, based on holographic interactions.

Local VR

When the father walks into his home and puts on his VR goggles, the entire world changes into a mixed reality experience. Virtual reality is overlaying the real world – the home’s furniture, walls, etc. This is often referred to as augmented reality.

These mixed media create the rich, vibrant, and compelling experiences depicted in the film. In reality, these kinds of experiences are three to five years down the road. They will, of course, require high-speed low latency networks and lots of local computing power.

Distance to Local VR

In the scene, at the end of the movie, the grandmother actually wins the game because of the power of distance to local VR. This remote VR allows her to take part as if she were local in the house, playing and interacting with the other players in the game.

Remote VR has very interesting applications for collaboration among teams and family members, as well as for one-on-one interactions—allowing individuals and groups to stay better connected and engage with each other even over great distances.

Distance VR

The film shows a young girl interacting with her grandmother using VR over distance. The little girl is in her bedroom and the grandmother is in her apartment – yet they feel like they’re in the exact same space. They have conversations; they show documents, and they play games.

This is VR not just confined to one person, or one person’s experience – but VR that supports multi-user experiences in which people operate from multiple distant locations. This kind of vibrant distance experience becomes possible with the advent of high-performing networks over distance.

Video Wall

A scene in the film shows the mother interacting remotely with colleagues using a video collaboration wall. This illustrates what working from home could be like in five to ten years. The film depicts a life-size, very rich, collaborative experience with very low latency.

It also depicts a future where people collaborate and interact with documents that are suspended on the display. There is no need for documents sitting on tabletops. They are replaced by a rich collaboration with team members scattered over great distances.

Our previous work on creating the Edelman Smart Wall inspired the video wall in the film.

Edge Compute

Low latency high-speed networks provide the ability to create everything depicted in this film, in particular, the real-time experiences over a distance such as the collaboration wall, and remote VR. Another necessary component is powerful local computing.

Edge computing is needed to calculate, render, and display all of that VR world, with the related VR experiences. High-speed low latency networking combined with powerful local or “edge” computing will enable people at distant locations to feel like they’re all in the same environment.

Innovation Storytelling

If you’re looking for a company that can help you with your innovation storytelling in a powerful and impactful way, contact us at hello@techtrend.com. We’d be happy to discuss your specific needs and see how we can help.