The sci-fi genre and series like Star Trek and Star Wars have captured the imaginations of audiences for decades, often giving a prescient look into the future. In the introduction to his book The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories, science fiction author Ray Bradbury writes: “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas … Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done.” Indeed many of the cutting edge gadgets, products and services we have today have their roots in the futuristic ideas of the sci-fi genre.
Back to The Future II / Metropolis – Video Conferencing
Video conferencing is a staple of science fiction, first appearing in the book The Machine Stops written by E.M. Forster in 1909, and the groundbreaking silent film Metropolis in 1927. However, its most accurate depiction came in 1989′s Back to the Future II when in the year 2015, a much older Marty McFly chats with colleagues on a large flat screen TV. Teleconference technology has been in the works since the 1960s but was not widely popularized until the availability of cheap webcams in the mid-1990s. Videoconference service Skype was founded in 2003 and Apple announced its popular “facetime” feature in 2010, now available on all iPhone 5s. Read the rest of this entry
