This is the penultimate post in a short series in which I've been looking at the immediate future of mobile, based on a speech I gave at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Berlin. Most of my writing so far has been looking at things we can use today and tomorrow, rather than in five year's time. But as we look at future devices, it's a little more interesting to see what's on the far horizon.
What that means in mobile device terms is that we'll be well into the post-PC era, where the desktop/laptop of yesteryear is, if not quite a museum-piece, certainly regarded as old and outdated technology by most people. The majority of our digital life will be via the mobile, or what the mobile evolves into and when we need better tools (like today's keyboards and larger screens for closeup work), we'll use plugin devices designed for that purpose.
While the Smartphone or handheld computer of today will be around for a while, I'd say that in 5 years, we'll be well into the next cycle of wearable computing, where commands will be given via haptics and gestures. If this sounds a little too scifi for your tastes, go look at what Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry are prototyping at MIT in their recent TED talk. SixthSense allows you to do things like take a photo by just imitating the action, check out product information in a supermarket, or even see virtual information about delegates at a conference. Take a look if you haven't seen it before.
The tools that the MIT people used are very much today's technology and get these kind of results. But with tomorrow's technology, what will the devices look like? I'd say that that the main interface will be some kind of contact lens, which gives you three views. One will be the digital world, or the descendant of today's world wide web. For practical reasons, you'll only be able to access this view when you're stationary - to stop you bumping into things. You'll then be able to see the analogue world, should you wish to do so, although most people would find that impulse rather curious. The final way would be the real world overlaid with digital information, or what we call today AR - Augmented Reality. Take a look at Layar for an example of AR live and working today on an Android phone.
So what we're talking about is contact lenses replacing the AR view, currently provided by a mobile device and commands made by gesture or voice, instead of today's keypad. Despite the early indications that this is the direction that the market is going in, you have every right to be sceptical. But then, just think back to 2002 - don't you think that the iPhone would have seemed impossible? I certainly would never have predicted that kind of functionality and if you did, maybe there's a nice living in futurology for you.
What'll this all mean for digital advertising? Well, the first implication is that PC based advertising is going to go into terminal decline. This means that the major players are going to have to go mobile or die. For Microsoft, it's a double whammy as their core business of PC operating systems is going to disappear and that's why Redmond are still soldiering on with Windows Mobile, even though it's never going to catch up now. Look out for some dramatic moves from Microsoft, as a result.
The other implications are many though. Interaction with ads will be completely seamless and User Interface design will be one of the most important skillsets of the modern ad agency. Consumers will have access to all the information in the world to hand, including scary information like reviews of restaurants annotated virtually on the restaurant itself - bad news if you own a restaurant that's anything less than perfect at meeting your customers' expectations. They'll also be able to see lots of information about the product in say, a supermarket, such a nutrition, ecological impact and employment conditions among the workers who made it.
My final thought is that in this scenario, advertising will have to rethink its role in relation to consumers and will have to really add value in a meaningful way to their lives. Most of what passes as advertising today will be as archaic as cigarette TV advertising.
