1AR, 2AR, 3AR: Will the next decade be the Decade of Ubiquity?
December 9th, 2009 by Hugh Kennedy
The first time I heard Robert Rice’s name, I thought someone had said Reich, and thought to myself, “Wow, from the Clinton Administration to Augmented Reality guru.” Then I realized my business partner was talking about Rice, the guru of Virtual Reality and the coming decade, which he calls The Decade of Ubiquity in a phenomenal post from March of this year.
Hey, it beats The Bubble Decade, which I have heard thrown around as a way to describe what ends in 22 days. You could do a lot worse than Rice’s expansive short essay on how the nice laptop-grounded experiments of today will become, as Rice puts it, a period when “every aspect of our lives will be permeated by digital, mobile, media, data, information, augmented, virtual, and so forth. It will be everywhere and accessible almost instantly. Everything will be connected, labeled, monitored, tracked, tagged, and interactive to some degree or another. We will break away from the desk, we will throw away our monitors, and our children will laugh at how large our iPhones are. They will struggle with how we ever managed to get work done with “windows” “webpages” and keyboards. They will be unable to fathom the concept of vinyl disks, typewriters, and landlines. But it all starts, and accelerates, during this next decade. Imagine everything that happened in the last decade, and multiply it. You haven’t seen anything yet. The next decade will make the last one pale in comparison.”
And to think, it all starts in less than three weeks!
