Internet - as we understand it today - consists of a quantity of websites which are separated in space. Like moving between countries you can move from one website to another and find another world with its own design, content, and rules. However borders between different websites are diffusing due to OpenStack protocols spreading (and other DataPortability initiatives spreading). Soon internet will become seamless world thanks to “widgets” and “gadgets”. But one border is still quite strong.
This border is a monitor screen which divides our life on “real” and “internets”. A lot of people live a big part of their lives in the Web. They communicate, share their most important things over the Web, and even find such things there (for instance, due to “Facebook” or “Twitter”).
Let’s imagine future without this border. Information about people and things surrounds them at the very same place where people and things are, it covers them and is available at any time. Welcome to the future of ubiquitous computing and omnipresent information.
Digital Ether — intelligent air of the future
How could your life change if everything around you would be connected to internet and reality would be a mere part of the Web?
It is not easy to imagine, isn’t it? It is even difficult to say how we can distinguish object’s characteristics which we see and which we get from the Web. This future is too unusual for us. To understand and accept it we will search (or most probably invent) instruments to help us to live in new environment, like the cavemen invented a stick.
Searching artifacts from the future
What will be that “stick-from-the-future”? On the one hand it should be comprehensible and look customary in order to give us understanding how it would work.
On the other hand it should undoubtedly be a high-tech device made on the base of technology that nowadays is in the beginning of developing. This ensures that the device can be usual and at the same time can be used in absolutely different and unexpected way. It will become a door to the future culture of the times when such artifacts will serve mankind.
Origami. Electronic paper and a window to information world
Let’s imagine next generation of electronic paper. It is connected to internet and has a touch-sensitive surface to interact with its owner. It is something like i-phone but thinner, lighter, and cheaper.
Why would it be possible? Firstly, in ubiquitous internet world you won’t need any GSM-module. Secondly (because of the same reason) you won’t need memory device and high-speed processor. Finally, you won’t need heavy battery.
So “sticks-from-the-future” devices will be pieces of electronic paper — let’s call them “Origami cards” — which are by the way almost as cheap as a usual paper. So people will be able to have a lot of cards, share them with others, easily throw out old and buy new ones.
Origami card will become not individual thing but universal mediator between a man and information, between different people.
A mediator between a man and information, between different people
For instance, you visit doctor. He diagnoses and give you a card which contains not only all your case history (from childhood) but also official prescription that can be shown in drugstore. This card can also remind you to take your medicine.
Another example is next generation of visiting cards. Today you can already see RFID-cards (Poken, MyNameIsE) which allow making an exchange of contacts by means of light touches. Origami will help you not only make an exchange of contacts but also get additional information about a person like his resume in LinkedIn, information from Facebook, page in Odnoklassniki and so on. Certainly, in case if this information is open by its owner.
Origami cards are windows to the Digital Ether
The most important thing that will become possible thanks to Origami cards — that cards will be windows to Digital Ether world. Looking through the cards we will be able to know more about any real life object — either motor-car or packet of tea. Due to touch-sensitive surface Origami cards will become full-fledged interface for communication with ubiquitous information and real doors to intelligent air.
So, as soon as we start using the cards we start interacting with digital ether, with ubiquitous internet. We will be able to see what the Future Web is.
To touch the future right now
Is there any opportunity to touch the future world right now? Let’s play the game. Let’s imagine that all necessary technologies are already at our disposal so that we can create and use Origami cards.
Join our wiki-future game. In this game you together with other players will be able to describe Origami cards created by you, to tell stories about way of using the cards, to exchange ideas about future when informational world and real objects world will become one.
