Fancy getting offered the job of your dreams that you never even applied for through an interactive bracelet whilst in the middle of a night on the town with your friends? Microsoft could be making these dreams reality in five to ten years according to a new vision-of-the-future video.
Paper-thin tablets, giant interactive glass panels and a flexible smart bracelet dominate Microsoft's vision of the future an impressive new video entitled Productivity Future Vision.
The six-minute short film from Microsoft Enterprise displays a host of impressive technologies not yet available that promise to make the future workplace run more smoothly. The video tells the story of a young marine biologist working in an exotic location collaborating with a corporate executive.
First up in the film is a James Bond-like interactive diving suit that allows the young marine biologist to analyze kelp samples and upload data in real-time to a interactive displays in a classroom full of children. A few hours later, between ordering a warm drink (tea of course) and worrying about bills, she refines her work with a fancy interactive pen and paper-thin flexible tablet
Meanwhile, somewhere across the world a middle-aged corporate executive who presumably just happens to be looking for an expert in kelp analysis finds the young biologist's work on an interactive panel like something from the movie Minority Report. The biologist then receives the job offer on a nifty interactive smart bracelet which she later takes off and uses as a flat remote control to pull up her research in at a shared futuristic workspace.
This all looks great and it's good marketing for Microsoft, but is any of this technology actually in the pipeline? Perhaps not, but Microsoft isn't pulling these products out of thin air either.
For example, the digital assistant that the corporate executive uses to find candidates could be a vision of where it expects Cortana -- Microsoft's answer to Siri or Google Voice -- to be in ten years or so. Gesture-recognizing screens and wearables of all shapes from the diving suit to the bracele,t and interactive earphones appear in the video, which is no doubt a clue as to the type of devices Microsoft is developing.
There might not be anything concrete in the video, but it's certainly worth a look.
