Technologies That Never Quite Catch On
Why is that some technologies are perennially about to transform our lives, but never really take off. Do they have something in common?
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill, and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing technologies that never fully take off, and due to the lockdown, unusually, we're recording this remotely. Chris, why is this on your mind? Talk to me.
Speaker B:Well, we've recently been involved in a project looking at emerging technologies. In fact, we've got a few projects related to emerging technologies. And one of the things that occurred to me as we were going through this, is as I was looking back at historic information about technologies emerging, is that some technologies keep cropping up as being the perennial emerging technologies that are going to disrupt everything. So for decades, they have been about to transform the way society operates and so on. And then there are other technologies which are truly disruptive and kind of very quickly shake up the way we do things. So, I mean, I know we have talked previously about virtual reality before, and we're not gonna go into the details of virtual reality, but virtual reality is a classic that has been going to be transformative any minute now or any half century now. So, if you look back to when the sort of first kind of head-mounted display things were being developed in the late 60s maybe, but really they came to popular attention in the 90s with them being brought into video arcades and things you could go and sit in a VR machine.
Speaker A:It was so long ago that I remember seeing Kenny Everett talking about virtual reality.
Speaker B: ings would be transformed was: Speaker A:Okay, so immediately this brings to mind, first of all, I thought virtual reality was still a thing that was gonna be big and I, yeah. They will be. Yeah, and I thought Internet of Things was right now as well. But I've got a question, but Peter, before I, I mean, have you got something you want to say before I ask my question?
Speaker C:Well, I'm gonna take issue. Because I think these things that Chris have mentioned have really taken off. So I've got some figures, right? So virtual reality and augmented reality, an estimate in a research, market research from eMarketer, which is an online independent publisher, 13%-
Speaker B:They're not manufacturer of virtual reality kits, are they?
Speaker C: US population have used VR in: Speaker A:I still don't understand what blockchain is, but let's not go down that rabbit hole. Let's do that another time.
Speaker C: ications. Internet of Things,: Speaker B:Yeah, and I think Peter's right. So what I'm sort of saying is that if you look at smartphones, right? So there is a technology which has undoubtedly changed the world, right? And so the first kind of, the proto-smartphone, arguably, was IBM's Simon, which combined a touchscreen PDA and a phone in the early 90s, right? Here we are 25 years later, and the whole world has changed completely as a result of that technology. The internet, right? Another good example, a sort of workable prototype ARPANET being developed late 60s. There may have been precursors to that, but by the kind of late 90s, it had been massively transformational and has continued to be so. So those are ones, I'll give you those, they were proper technologies. It's just there's a load of other stuff that has been talked about in the same circles as those technologies that has made, has either been sort of, we've decided that it's really not worth bothering with anymore, or it's had like a tiny little effect for some random little group of users over in a corner somewhere.
Speaker A:Nick. I think there's a couple of things we're talking about here. One is technologies that for reasons of other technologies not being good enough are just not ready to work yet, right? So, and I think the problem is that, and you could say that the internet was one of those. I mean, the internet didn't really get going till broadband, all of the things that people use the internet for now, e.g. watching films and YouTube and social media. Exactly, completely impossible 20 years ago, because you can't do any of those things. All you could do is look at sort of static webpages. And so, the internet will probably, and I guess it's probably the same with mobile phones. I mean, without some number of Gs, and I'm not sure how many Gs that is, but without some number of Gs, most of the things that people use smartphones for would be impossible. So, I think that, and it's plausible to me, and I want to be a VR skeptic, and I'll tell you why in a sec, but it's plausible to me that VR's time is only now coming because only now do we have the sorts of processing speeds that are required to make VR actually genuinely immersive. You know, I remember seeing VR, there was actually in Common Garden where I used to hang out after school when I was a kid, there was a booth for some time where you could play a virtual reality game, and you put the helmet on, and you were like a kind of 3D polygon guy in a 3D polygon world. And it never looked to me, you could see what the person was doing on this screen, and it never looked to me like they had a clue what was going on. And I think that's to do with all sorts of things, lag probably primarily, and probably insufficiently accurate sensors and so on. So, you know, I think it strikes me that VR could well be like that, and it's too early to say. But on the other hand, but the thing is that we don't know. And so I would argue that you don't know until a technology has actually been realized in the form that it's meant to, that it's sort of the idealized form, i.e. it's done properly, it's as good as it's gonna get. You don't really know until then what people actually want and how people are gonna use things. It's very, very hard to predict in advance. And I think things like, I mean, 3D cinema, which is not quite VR, right? It's not the same thing, but it's a similar thing in that, you know, it sort of feels like an obvious improvement to 2D cinema. And yet for decades and decades, people have tried to introduce it and people don't like it. It just isn't popular. And I think often for similar reasons, you can think about VR and go, oh, imagine watching a film in VR. Well, no, I don't want that, right? Because I want the director to tell me what I should be looking at, for example. I don't want to be looking around. I don't wanna control what I'm seeing. VR really only has an application for entertainment in the kind of, you know, for games and for some sort of niche interactive types of experience. Even though you sort of think, your instinct is to say, imagine what VR could do for watching telly or watching films. But actually, when you give people that opportunity, they'd rather just watch what someone else wants them to see, you know? Because that's just a better experience.
Speaker B:Chris? Yeah, no, I was just gonna say, I think the interesting thing about, you know, enabling technologies then allowing, you know, the main technology to reach its kind of, its ideal form. I think in part though, you know, would there have been a drive for broadband if the internet hadn't obviously been brilliant and been, you know, bringing all of these services to us and people are like, oh, I can get video, but it's not very good. We need more, you know, capacity. We need more bandwidth. Likewise, you know, with mobile phones, again, you know, the device or the technology itself created the demand for the infrastructure to support it because it was good even when it was crap. And that's what, you know, that's where I feel with virtual reality. I'm sort of like, if there were an obvious demand for it, we would have been making all the things that would have enabled it to be good by now.
Speaker A:But Chris, that just makes me think something. I think the attraction of something like virtual reality is, as I perceive it, the ability to be transported physically to other worlds, let's say. And so one minute you can be skiing down, you know, the Crest to run whatever, and then transported magically to the tropics and then, you know, and then dancing and carnival and then going off and spending a great night with a load of showgirls or something. That's the attraction, but you can't actually do that because physically you won't actually feel anything. It's still all quite mental. It's a sensory thing is lacking. So I think what you're saying is that, well, the other stuff would, the other technologies to make it work would catch up. But I think there's definitely appeal there. And I just didn't think that technology, it's not technologically, it's not possible. And so I'm not going to give you- But it sounds nice, but are you actually in real life going to spend a whole evening doing that? No, you won't. You'll do it once. You'll get the VR thing and you'll go, this is fun.
Speaker C:I don't know. I think- I want to hear from Peter. Yeah, two things I want to cover now. So to answer Nick's point that you don't want to watch movies in VR. I think that's true for movies that are made how they're currently made. So when you try to introduce 3D TVs and 3D cinema, you impose a new technology on a tradition and not really alter the way that production happens. So if you could reinvent the way movies are made and give the director the sort of freedom of the technology, the capability and the technology, but also the audiences, the capacity for high quality headsets and everything, you could invent a whole new type of movie that is highly- Yeah, you invent a new thing that's not a-
Speaker A:That's, you're claiming this. And I'm saying that you can't. Why can't you? Like, why? We do it. We did it with movies. He's saying we're going to invent a whole new type of a narrative or something. No, but I think Peter's right.
Speaker C:When moving picture came along, that was a whole new way of doing storytelling. Yeah, but- Wait, hold on.
Speaker A:Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick. Listen. Nick, Mike. Listen. Because it's not like, Peter's right, because it's not like someone goes, hey, I've got this idea we can put stuff on the screen and we can see them. People go, but that's not the theater, that's rubbish. Film is just slightly, I mean, yeah. But the thing is that if you look at a theater or film or a book, there is no interactivity there, right? In terms of the story, you are being given the story. That is how people like to consume stories. And the idea, like, interactive fiction has never taken off, right? People don't like it as much as they like, now I read all the fighting fantasy books when I was a kid. So I really enjoyed them. But, you know, interactive, people either want to play a game or they want to, you know, watch a film. Now Peter's made this assumption. Peter's made this assumption that, yeah. But Peter's made this assumption that you can invent a new art form that will somehow deliver it to us through VR. And what I'm saying is, that might be true, but you can't just assume it's true. It might turn out, it might turn out that you can't.
Speaker C:No, I'm not saying a whole new art form. I'm saying a whole new way of making movies. So if you had a non-interactive movie. Maybe that doesn't exist. You're assuming that exists.
Speaker A:No, I'm saying that, I'm saying it gives you the capability to make it, which you can't have. Okay, but what I'm saying is people don't want to experience films like that. Or at least it's, I strongly believe that they don't. And even if you, look, take Bandersnatch, the interactive, like that's something you can do. You can give people the choice of endings in a trial. I'm not talking about interactive. I'm talking about. You are, because you're giving people a certain choice about how they're experiencing the film.
Speaker C:Yeah, so I can imagine the movies where, it's intrigue movies and sort of, like criminal investigation movies and crime movies where you are kind of immersed in the three-dimensional world. Now you are led around by wherever the action is taking different locations and different scenes. But I can imagine that a contiguous space that you move, so each scenes aren't, you don't cut the scenes. You physically move between scenes. And at that time there's conversation going on with the characters and things. I can imagine that as a type of, as a sort of genre of movie to be quite interesting and entertaining. And depending on where you are currently looking, you pick up more or less clues about what's going on.
Speaker A:Yeah, but that isn't going to become mainstream. Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. How do you know? Hold on, we're getting, guys. By analogy with all the other things that could give people control over their, the experience they're having, and they don't want it. People don't choose to consume entertainment in that way. Hold on, hold on. Right, let's pause for a moment, okay? Because I want to hear from Chris at some point soonish. There's a second point from Peter that I want to hear, but also just to round things off. I mean, I think you're just, just saying it. I think you're just being too restrictive about- I'm not. Just temporarily. Let me speak. I'm talking about the data, the history of entertainment. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It backs up what I'm saying. No, no, no, no, no. Let me speak. Because it's, I think you're being too restrictive because while you've got a point by saying people don't want their films or their stories to be interactive as such, there is plenty of evidence to say that people like role-playing, they like games, they like experiential sort of stuff as well. And I think there's plenty of opportunity for something like that in virtual reality if you can get the technology right. Anyway, I want to hear, I think Peter had a second point and then let's come back to Chris.
Speaker C:Just to round it off, the gaming market is growing faster than traditional movies and television market. I think that's because it's stealing parts of their, parts of their chips. So people, there is, people do want interactive storytelling which is what gaming kind of-
Speaker A:Yeah, I accept that. Totally accept that. But, I mean, that is an existing, millennia old activity that is, instantiated in a new form of technology. So I totally agree-
Speaker C:You have new genres which you can't achieve because of the technology that you've got. Yeah, but also something like virtual reality
Speaker A:can take it to a whole nother level and make the popularity suddenly eclipses films or things like that. Yeah, I want to make a more general point. Okay, you make your general point and then I want to hear from Chris because I've not heard from him for a while. Okay, well, it's just, it's just, and I think I've actually gathered quite a few examples of technologies that failed and tried to classify why they failed. Right. But I, which we can talk about, but in general, my general observation is that the reason that these technologies fail is because people don't actually know what aspects of a product or service or good are actually adding value and why they like it, right? And I'll give you two examples. So one is, well, one is computer games. Like for years, people invested in, you know, making better and better graphics. And actually, if you look at the kinds of games which are very popular on Steam at the moment, there's a lot of, and particularly take the, take in the lockdown type situation is there's a lot of quite simple multiplayer party type games, which are massively popular. And there's a whole, you know, swathes of games now, which have sort of retro graphics. And actually it turns out that the gameplay and the story and the characters that are in a game are more important than people thought. And the graphics are less important. The other example I would give you is eBooks, which, so sales of eReaders have now been declining for some time. And I have never gone with them. I had one that Peter gave me, which I never looked at. And I just cannot get off books. Books are really good. And the part of the reason that they're good is a thing that you wouldn't expect. It's not core to the concept of a book, but it's something to do with the physicality of the book, which turns out to be very important when you're reading. And the portability and other things like not having to recharge it. So the fact that you could instantly grab a book and start reading and not, for example, grab a book and discover it's run out of batteries. All these things are not things you would necessarily, and certainly a technologist wouldn't look at them and go. Nothing to do with technology. So what I'm saying is about these, well, it is, it's sort of somehow involved in the instantiation of that technology. But all I'm saying is that, you know, you can't predict, we don't know in advance until people are offered an alternative, what aspects of a particular experience or technology they really like and which are core and which things turn out to be peripheral and you can sweep away and change. That's all. So that's why I'm saying that Peter's making this assumption that VR will find a place in sort of films, but it's not to me a given, you know. So yeah, there we are. So, I mean, just on the issue of games, for example, one thing VR might not be able to do is replicate a physicality of experience in the same way that a computer game doesn't replace a board game because there's a physicality and being in the same room together, which it might be that if you had three people, even if they're all with VR headsets, they may not enjoy that experience. You know, it may not be as good as- But what drives people and what excites people about VR is the possibility one day that you might or you could with those sensory things, I think.
Speaker B:Chris. Yeah, well, I think just sort of reflecting on a few things really. One is that I think Peter's actually kind of convinced me a little bit that there may be a place for VR in storytelling because that interpretive element that is sort of devolved to the audience, reader, so on. I think there is a place for that because one of the great arts of a novelist is creating the space for the reader to interpret what they think is going on. So, giving them the opportunity in their head to imagine things or see things that another user isn't seeing. Likewise, live performance. You know, you think about live comedy and heckling and then responses. And that, you know, pantomime is obviously an interactive type of show that you go to. So, those little sort of interactivities around the edges, I think VR could play a role in. And obviously there are technologies coming down the line that look like they're gonna be pretty crap for some time, like haptics and so on, that will give you some other sensory experience within virtual reality. But coming back to technology more broadly and, you know, where we are, there's obviously the well-founded and in places dismissed idea of the hype cycle, you know, of technologies at the point of trigger and then, you know, inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment and so on and so forth. And whether or not that holds and is empirically backed up is another question. But, you know, what I'm interested in is how does some technologies get on that bandwagon of massively inflated expectations? What is it that causes some technologies to get there and others just kind of Peter along in the background and suddenly are amazing?
Speaker A:Talking of Petering along and suddenly amazing, Peter, you wanted to say something.
Speaker C:Thanks. Yeah, just to answer Chris's earlier, come back on Chris's earlier point about, was it the stuff on the internet being great and amazing that drove broadband or was it broadband that drove the stuff on the internet being amazing? I think it's kind of more, it's not that black and white. I think it's more iterative. So as more people could connect to the internet reliably, it created demand for new amazing things to be created on the internet, but also more people connected to the internet who could build their own things, which then attracted more people to it. So it's a sort of cycle of supply and demand rather than one thing driving the other. It's not, yeah, I think it's because it's year on year, your broadband speed has got better and better and better and year on year, more services have appeared and it's not one thing driving the other, it's both things driving each other.
Speaker A:Okay, we're close to winding up and there's a question I want to ask, but before we do, just to run things off, is there anything we've not quite covered, anything we want to circle back on?
Speaker C:Peter, I think. Well, Chris raised an interesting issue. Why do some things get swept up on the hype cycle and escalated with huge promise possibilities where other things don't so much? I think if you're comparing things like VR to say like the smartphone, the smartphone feels more mundane. It feels like a fairly, it feels like an evolution of an existing thing we already had, which was the not smart mobile phone, which was again an evolution of something which was the house telephone, the wired telephone. The jump from wired to not wired seems more exciting to me than the jump from stupid to smart, but they're quite sort of everyday items and we've had them around for a bit, whereas VR feels like a whole new thing. It's a whole new, it's similar to TVs, but it's like a TV that you put on your head. It's much more kind of out there than the TV. So what I'm grappling towards, I suppose, is that I think the hype cycle, although it leaves you feeling very disappointed when things are sliding down into the trough of disillusionment, I think it kind of, there's something in it. If somebody, if the higher the peak goes, the more ideas people are having about what cool things they could do with a technology. That I think speaks to some kind of core value in the technology itself. It's excited so many people and it's stimulating so many ideas. Now, the fact that most ideas don't come to fruition or take a very long time to come to fruition is by the by. I think the fact that having a high peak is not a bad thing about technology. In fact, I think it's a positive indicator that technology has such potential for transformation.
Speaker A:Yeah, and I guess it must necessarily be the case that with a new technology, you don't know the answer and that it's good to have a really good go at it. I mean, I remember as a kid, it was holograms. Do you remember holograms? They were massive. In the mid 80s, they came out, there was science museum exhibitions that I went to. People got holograms on their credit cards and people were like, well, this is just the start, right? Imagine what holograms. We're gonna have holograms everywhere. We'll have portable holograms that were just like Star Wars. You'll have a little mini princess Leia and everything. And they never, nothing ever happened. They just remained interesting novelties. But for a while, I assume people were trying everything they could with holograms.
Speaker B:Although you can go and see dead performers now perform in holographic form on stage.
Speaker A:I think, I doubt they're holograms.
Speaker B:They are holograms, 3D holograms.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:There's a company that specializes in entertainment and having, you know, well, not Michael Jackson anymore, obviously for various reasons, but other late performers who are less controversial.
Speaker A:Okay. All right. I want to finish off, but to finish off, I've got quite an obvious question to ask you all, which is, but also in a slightly style- I've never got a chance to tell you about my crap technologies. Oh, I really want to hear that. And it's actually very close to what I want to say. Come on, give us a quick tour of crap technologies. I tried, not very well. I've come to the conclusion that there's an Anna Karenina principle to do with technology failures, which is that, you know, a technology works, technologies that work do so for, because they combine a whole bunch of things all at the same time. But when they don't work, it's for different reasons. But I haven't really come up with a very satisfactory taxonomy of failure. But some of them are, I mean, one very common element of technology failure is simply like literally failure rate. The technology is not good enough and the products fail. And that's true of like the DeLorean hoverboards, the BlackBerry Storm, you know, quite a lot of technology failures because they just didn't work very well. And alongside that, they're actually just low quality. Like they're not as good as the thing, as they should be. So things like the Kodak disc camera and stuff where the pictures were just really bad. And so there's that, there's just, it's bad. It fails or it's low quality. There's, and then there's a whole category. So there's a bad idea, right? Where it turns out that even if the product is working really well, people don't want it. And you know, that there's not a price that people will buy it at. They won't use it. It's not, it's just a bad thing. And there were things like, I would say that, like there was a thing, I can't remember what it was called, but which was like a pair of sunglasses with a built-in MP3 player. And you think, well, that's worse. That's worse than sunglasses and an MP3 player. Sometimes you want the sunglasses and not the MP3 player and vice versa. And then there's a thing called the QCAP barcode scanner where you had to scan a barcode in a magazine and it would send you to a website and the website would have interesting stuff in it but you'd have to buy the barcode scanner. And that's a bit like QR codes. You know, it's one of these things where actually it's just worse. It's worse than what the system we have now. Like all the QR code does is direct you to a website. So you might as well just Google it. And then you don't have to download something and fart about with your phone. And then there's a whole category of categories of technology which are like before their time. And I think we touched on that a bit, but so things like the Sony NWH-HD1 audio player which was apparently a really good MP3 player but it just didn't have a big enough storage at the time for people to really have enough music on it to make it worthwhile. And Maxwell House's coffee in a box. You know, you can get iced coffee now in shops. You've seen that, the iced coffee. Frappuccino, you've seen that. You've seen iced coffee. Well, they brought it out about 20 years ago, I think. And, but they told, they sold it in cartons in fridges for people to take home and heat up at home. They didn't sell it as iced coffee because people didn't know about that at the time. People didn't, it wasn't a thing. And then there's technologies which come out which are after their time, which are really, really good versions of technologies that are just going obsolete. It's like the digital audio tapes, for example which came out when tapes were sort of already yesterday's news. But then there's a whole bunch of price related ones like LaserDisc and Google Glass, I think to some extent and the Aibo robot dog where they were just not worth, you know, the cost that they could be produced at. But for me, they're kind of interesting category where all the kind of really amusing technology failures are where you get a kind of palaver where it turns out the thing that you buy has an unexpected amount of palaver to it. And I mean, so things like the Evian water bra. What? That's right, the Evian water bra. It was a bra that you poured water into and it kept your boobs cool, apparently. That's what I think it's missing. So a bit of a plot. I need one of those. Do you remember Juicero? Do you remember the Juicero? The what, sorry? Basically, it's like this machine that you bought this machine for about $400 and then you bought a bag of fruit and you put the fruit into the machine and the machine would squash the fruit and the juice would come out. Now, It sounds like a juicer to me. Yeah, it's a juicer. But yeah, it's a highly evolved juicer. It was, that's all it was. It wasn't very good either.
Speaker C:As a sort of business model, it was a sort of engineered scam really because you buy an expensive machine and then be locked into buying the Juicero bags which cost a lot. So it was sort of, yeah, it was a cheeky punt at trying to corner a market when juices were a big thing.
Speaker A: shampoo, which was a thing in:
