Videos of the future

I have mixed feelings about concept videos ('real artists ship'), but I've found myself referencing these two videos quite a lot recently.  

The first is a Japanese music video that makes the concept of 'mobile first' pretty much meaningless. Best watched on a smartphone, and preferable an iPhone. This is interesting to me, beyond the pure creativity, because it plays with the physicality of a smartphone multitouch screen. A PC monitor shows you things behind glass, but a smartphone somehow becomes things. Windows, file structures and abstractions fall away (move mouse here, pointer moves there) - the screen is the message, and lots of different kinds of message. Until the band jump through it, obviously. And the camera is increasingly an even more important input than multitouch. I wrote a little about this here. 

Second, augmented reality. Where VR seems to me to be a branch off the main strand of computing, a little like games consoles were a branch off the PC, mostly, AR (augmented reality, sometimes called mixed reality) can be your main screen. It can be the next multitouch. Forecasting what that would look like is a bit like forecasting the music video above in 2006, before the iPhone launched, but this concept video has a go from a dystopian angle - this is what happens if you install too many toolbars in Internet Explorer, so to speak. 

What this really gets at, I think, is that after a decade in which phones swallowed physical objects, with cameras, radios, music players and so on turned into apps, AR might turn those apps back into physical objects - virtual ones, of course. On one hand cameras digitise everything, and on the other AR puts things back into the world.