I was watching the Google co founder  Sergei Brin presenting Google Glasses at SF conference  . It was quite a presentation and here are some  incredible images shot by Google Glasses by skydivers. Other than the opportunities in filmed drama, I thought what if.

What if every person on this planet had Google Glasses ? With Google Street camera’s prowling the cities, and Google Earth Satellites snooping at us from the skies. What if Google Earth went live streaming,  and standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert you could wave to your girl friend in New York. Hold a placard saying you were about to drop dead of thirst in a few minutes, but your dying thoughts were about her ?

What if ?

What if there was no place to hide. Somewhere their was a camera looking at you, snooping on you? But not being a conspiracy theorists (Sergie Brin does not look like the Devil does he?), I was thinking about something far deeper. Somewhere , in some amazing date center, guzzling power needed for other, more life saving activities, all these images are going to be recorded. Thats an amazing amount of data.

What is the world going to do with this data ?  And how are you going to analyse it all to make some sense of it ?

In terms of futurology and technology that problem is of course, is already here, Google Glasses are already dated. In a previous post I had spoken about the future of the Camera.  The Camera is after all nothing but a data gathering device. It’s biggest drawback is that it can only ‘see’ and record date from one point of view. In the future a ‘Camera’ will be a device that will stream out millions of Nano Particles, each sensitive to different attributes : light, sound, color, shades, temperature, odor, shapes etc. Each of the Nano particles will bounce off every object and reflect back the information to ‘listening’ device that we currently call the camera, that will capture all the data.

Imagine a film maker ‘shooting’ a party scene. He/she will set up the scene with the actors and the production design and let the Nano Particles gather all the information. Not just dialogue and actor performances, but also what was behind the actors, the scene from every conceivable angle, their perfume, their body temperatures. Everything. Happy with what the film maker ‘saw’ he would go to his ‘edit room’ with all the data. Much much more than his senses could pick up.

How will the film maker now analyse and interpret this data ? I dont want to be in that film makers shoes.

The analysis and interpretation of data is a fundamental process of learning, of life, all necessary for survival, for social intercourse and for ordered behavior of any species. Without the instinctive ability to instantly sift through the data, to know what is important at that moment, neither a hunter nor the hunted could survive. Without this ability all actions with be random and civilization would be doomed.

I am sitting in a coffee shop at this moment. There are pretty girls walking through that catch my attention, the smell of coffee and food, the music in the background, people I know and those that I don’t, the TV showing the Pakistan/Sri Lanka cricket match. Thirst, hunger, the need for coffee, the conversation in the next table, the itch in my foot. All stimuli coming at me, while I am writing this. Yet I can almost instinctively isolate data that is important to me from instant to instant and yet make sense of the world around me.

I do all of this without thinking of how. I do it intuitively.

I do it for the needs I have for that moment. Those needs mostly driven by emotional impulses. Which is why I don’t have to think about it. Emotional impulses drive intuition that drives my ability to analyse and respond to specific data instantly. The greater the emotional impulse, the more acute the selection of data.

Of course artists and film makers have known this for a long time. We cajole the emotional impulse of viewers through techniques of close ups, wide shots, drama, dialogue, violence, sex, background score etc to drive the emotional impulse and therefore ‘data selection’ to where we want audiences to be.

Now back to all the data being generated through the internet. Far far more information beamed to us than ever before. Reams of business analysis now claim that the next big thing is not just ‘search engine’ but intuitive search engines. But how ? What is intuitive to you is not intuitive to me. What is intuitive to me at this moment is not intuitive to me the next. Simply because my need has changed. I no longer need to scratch that itch on the palm of my hand, so I can go back to smelling my food and realize I am hungry.

The contest between a hunter and it’s prey in the jungle probably has a far greater amount of information to process far faster than all the data that is being thrown at us currently. Because one is hungry and needs to eat to survive, the other needs to escape to survive.  Pure emotion of that instant. Need based.

How does one then develop tools that analyze data for us that are need based, emotion based. For only then we will come upon the next big thing in ‘Search’. In fact would it be ‘search’ at all ?  Would there need to be more provocation ? Will the future ‘Search Engines’ be less laid back and be far more provocative ? Entice us into emotional game playing that then leads us into ‘Search?’

Will Video Games and Search Engines be combined into one technology ? In fact, will Social Media, Video Games and Search Engines all be combined into one technology, driven by emotion ?

Ok, this is all free thinking, hoping all of you will come and contribute. The next in this series will be what form these SearchEngines/Video Games will take  …. Over to you guys.