I grew up watching and reading a lot of science fiction. I’m not ashamed to admit this (especially since I work at a computer company and will never be the biggest nerd in the building no matter how hard I try). I have been waiting for flying cars and teleportation devices to become available like they are in many sci-fi settings, but it doesn’t look like they will be anytime soon. On the other hand, there have been some amazing technological developments in my lifetime that are just as exciting. One of these is the soon to be available commercial spaceflight from Virgin Galactic. For a mere $200,000 one can buy a sub-orbital spaceflight which includes around six minutes of weightlessness. The ships are named Enterprise and Voyager in honor of Star Trek (my favorite sci-fi franchise by far). Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson has even offered to send William Shatner into space for free. Shatner, 79, declined saying: “I’m interested in man’s march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me.” Perhaps he is waiting for a cushier ship that is closer to Captain Kirk’s USS Enterprise to be developed. Not all science fiction icons are so squeamish, though. Alien star Sigourney Weaver, whose character Ripley flew in the much grittier Nostromo, is already on the waiting list.
Branson also has some more down to Earth (but just as futuristic) projects that he is involved in. One of these is Project, which he describes as “the first truly digital” magazine for Apple’s iPad. The magazine focuses on style and culture and features Tron: Legacy star Jeff Bridges on its first “cover”. The magazine will have “a whole month’s worth of content, which updates over the month.” One can flip through an article by swiping up or down on the screen and move to another article by swiping side to side. The magazine also takes advantage of the touch screen capabilities of the iPad with an interactive title page for an article about farm-to-table restaurants which requires you to wipe away a layer of dirt before it is readable.
I think that this is the future of magazines. The tactile experience of flipping pages and holding something roughly magazine shaped combined with the multimedia content and internet links seems like a winner to me. Some bloggers have complained about Project’s confusing layout and user controls, but this is just a first draft. One might have thought that there was no future in digital movie effects when the original Tron came out in 1982. The MPAA refused to allow the movie to be nominated in the special effects category because they said that using computers to produce them was “cheating” and New York Times movie critic Janet Maslin described the effects as “loud, bright, and empty”. I saw the preview for Tron: Legacy this weekend at a screening of Harry Potter (okay, maybe I am the biggest nerd in the building) and the special effects are leaps and bounds beyond what anyone could have imagined 30 years ago. I can’t wait to see the magazines in 2040. I am hoping to be reading them on my iPad while my robot butler drives me to work in my flying car.
UPDATE – Apparently the flying car will be here even sooner than I thought! Read more here.