Now, via TPMIdeaLab, you can see What Using Google’s High-Tech Glasses Looks Like (VIDEO). And the images, amazing as they are, are pretty close to what I imagined (except that Mike's computer has a Siri-like avatar he has conversations with).
This isn't the first time events have overtaken my SF. I wrote Brother Jonathan in 1983 and set it in the late 21st century, when people tote clipboard-size computers with (physical) keyboards and 3D screens. I knew about personal computers, but I was still writing on an IBM Selectric and couldn't imagine an iPad turning up in under a century.
And when Lifter, published in 1986, got a second life in 1992 I had to update the desktop-computer technology to match six years' progress. Now I've updated it again (but haven't got round to publishing it as an e-book), and that required ditching the public phone as a plot device and moving events through the kids' smartphones.
If I ever get round to finishing Henderson's Tenants, I'm going to have to move it from the summer of 2030 to some indeterminate time in mid-century or even later. And that means I'll have to wrack my too-conservative brains to imagine the consequences of technology still further advanced.
Interesting - I was just thinking about this very topic and google glasses was my main example. It all goes back to cell phones, I think, and how they killed the classic horror film "alone in the woods an no way to call for help" trope.
Posted by: Wil | March 22, 2013 at 01:42 PM