"I have seen things that you people wouldn't
believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I've
watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those
moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Time to
die."
This is probably the most famous monologue of fantasy pronounced
at the moment of death by Roy Batty in the movie Blade Runner. The movie
was made in 1982, and the novel by Philip Dick on which it was based
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", was published in 1968.
Almost
fifty years have passed, and seventy from the robots of Asimov, but things
went in a different way. Robots and androids remained on the pages of
novels while around us was developed "augmented reality".
Born in the '40s of the past century in the mind of
Vannevar Bush and transformed into technology in the labs of Wireless
RERC, it determined, thanks particularly to Nintendo and Apple, a present
in which the robot instead of developing legs and arms was distributed all
around us with sensors and actuators placing the heart and brain in our
pocket phone. Here we are in our car guided by the voice of a satellite
navigator.
We enter our home or office and the lights turn on thanks to
our movements.
We jump on the elevator and, without having to press a
button, we find ourselves on the floor on which we have a meeting with a
colleague. We shake the MP3 reader so that we can listen randomly to the
different tunes or seemingly drop it to a friend to transfer on his phone
a picture or a video. We rest the PDA on the printer in order to print the
message we were reading. A completely new ergonomy where keyboard and
video disappear. It's us, with the iPhone in our pocket, the cursor of the
mouse that instead of moving around between icons on the computer's
desktop is placed among the physical icons of our home, the city or
present wherever we are. The increased reality is all that, the invisible
wires of the wireless that connect us to objects of our every day life and
that react in harmony with our needs. Technology is all around us and we
contact it by phone. We use the iPhone to speak to colleagues, friends and
family members, but also to inform our car on the fact that we want to go
home and we get the answer that we had better stop in a florist shop
because it is our wife's birthday. "Do you want me to wish her happy
holidays on Facebook?"
This is Apple's intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. What is missing to services, shops, stores, public or private offices completely virtual with which we interact with only the phone? Is it science fiction, a 113 capable of escaping thousands of calls through Siri by Apple or Watson by IBM? In short, our portable with its desktop, its icons driven by the mouse are already history. We are the pointer of the mouse moving not in the windows of the closed operating system of the computer, but rather in the real environments of the domotic and urbotic systems around us. At MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), at Wireless RERC and in IBM and Apple's labs, they have not stopped at the voice or the gestures to interact with augmented reality. The iPhone's double telecamera can easily frame one who is in front of us and at the same time our eyes. It is therefore easy to understand from angulation of our pupils what we are looking at. We can then glance towards the interrupter, the television or the stereo at home to turn them on. Easy! It's also easy to think about prostheses and aids for the world of disability and, most of all, aids and prostheses in social network: the physical icons that are around us and with which we interact are also other persons. I am not an expert in accessibility or of disability-related problems, but I believe that I am optimistic in regards to a domotic system where the more important physical icons are me, my friends and family members and that enhanced objects of my everyday life. I am blind and today, on Facebook (probably the most well-known social network), I don't have excessive problems. I interact with friends who know that I am blind and they tell me naturally about the photographs and videos that they post there. Similarly, in the home of the computer science Steve Jobs had thought about, the wireless iPhone contacts people I know and links to objects that I distributed around me. I can stumble on a step in an area of the city that I don't know, but I will rarely hit a table that I positioned myself in the living room. On Google, I need the screen reader to read the results of a research and I have to hope that the Web pages selected by the search engine follow the rules of accessibility.
If instead to the question: "Where are the ski gloves?" I hear the
answer: "in the third drawer of the central door of the closet". I don't
need the screen reader to find the drawer, stick my hand in it and search
among the gloves and scarf right there.
Am I simplifying too much?
Probably so, and probably not everything that glitters is gold. To know
and to be in contact with things and people means to know where I am, but
it means that things and people know where we are. 
Welcome in the
aquarium!"
About what that means, I hold my opinion, but I will
conclude with a thought for which I let science fiction speak. I began
with a quote from the very famous movie and I like to conclude with a
quote from a much less famous book but which I probably love more:
"A
billion years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. [...]
He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like
a roof on top of the jail.
Nobody could go through the roof. And there
was this other fish, and he went through, and he died.
And this other
fish, and he too went through and he died.
But there was another fish,
and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills
were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun scorched his eyes,
and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn't die. And
other fishes wondered about that world. And they crawled up onto the muddy
shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And
taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with
the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs,
whatever they became [..] Let's go back into the ocean, let's be fishes
again, it's easier that way. Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more.
We're men. And so they don't go back. They keep climbing up. "Tower of
Glass", Robert Silverberg, Agberg Ltd 1970.