Gasgets Technology senses--- IT 2018

Gadgets: when technology senses what you are doing

Kevin Lynch of Adobe explains the power of gadgets that understand where you are and what you're doing.

It's tablets, whether it's in museums or on the sofa, that Lynch believes are set to transform both the company whose 'tech vision' he runs and the consumer landscape Photo: AFP/GETTY

Will tablets and new computers really have the impact that many claim? Is Steve Jobs actually right to say the Apple iPad will bring about a post-PC world? This week Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at software giant Adobe, demonstrated new ways that made those grand suggestions seem dramatically more concrete.

The example Lynch used, at London’s Open Mobile Summit, was set at Tate Modern. Imagine, he said, if you owned or borrowed a tablet computer as you entered the gallery’s enormous turbine hall: the device immediately senses where you are and tells you information about the venue, and offers details on the collections. Go upstairs, and it knows in more detail precisely what sculpture or painting you’re looking at. The level of detail, drawn from the whole web, is beyond anything ever available before. It puts those tinny audio guides to shame, and that’s before these new devices have been used to order and pay remotely for your lunch from the Tate café.

Unusually, however, Adobe built this new application without any money from the Tate, as a 'proof of concept’ taking advantage of the latest new technology. Lynch says it’s an example of what could happen in the near future. The aim is to encourage “people who create things that they need to embrace the mobile phone and tablet environment as the primary environment”. But if Tate wanted to do something similar, he reckons getting it up and running by Christmas would be straightforward.

So new technology is set to find its way rapidly in to places that have been unchanged for years. Key to that, as well, is media and magazines. Newspapers, already, have embraced this trend and Steve Jobs used the Telegraph’s app as an example of companies successfully using the iPad when he made an Apple announcement earlier this week. But it’s magazines and websites too that are

set to undergo an equally thorough transformation. Lynch uses the example of the app for the American edition of technology magazine Wired as something that is showing the way: a picture of Mars, for instance, can be touched and then users can spin the planet with a finger to see detailed information about it and man’s explorations so far. The quality of the pictures, the information and the animation are remarkable. And the costs, surely, are astronomical?

Lynch concedes that “publishing is going through a major disruption”, but points out that magazines want to improve their digital versions and make editions that can run across all sorts of devices, from iPads to Android tablets. That’s because they want more revenue as well as simply because it’s all the rage. “Film took about ten years for cinematographers to figure out what they could do and create a revolution in film. We’re seeing the same thing, but it won’t take as long.” And the Tate, of course, never had to build apps before either.

So it’s tablets, whether it’s in museums or on the sofa, that Lynch believes are set to transform both the company whose “tech vision” he runs and the consumer landscape. For now, however, he admits that reading magazines on an iPad can be a confusing experience: “a crazy world of interaction,” as he puts it.
Further into the future, Lynch says we should look forward to more screens everywhere, and more interaction between the screens too. “Roll-up displays, foldable displays, projection displays – all that technology is going to keep getting smaller. The world of the future is going to be a lot of screens,” he says. “So we’re thinking about tablets but we’re also thinking more broadly than that.”
In practice, that’s a vision that sounds a bit Minority Report, but it’s also one in which Adobe continues to provide useful bridges across a range of devices, from iPads to Android phones. When Lynch says “That can only be good for the consumer”, it’s hard to disagree.