From the celluloid to the reality
As it often happens when one dares to forecast something about the world of tomorrow in a literary narrative or a movie, even in Back to the Future the director and the screenwriter created some scenes that proposed their vision of the time to come, and of the innovative things that would have come with it. But, in the same way as in Space: 1999 (the English serie), where it was theorized that already in 1996 we would have had a lunar base inhabited by humans, while today we barely have the ISS wandering in the Space around the Earth, even in Back to the Future we saw things that amazed us, and in the reality they are “yet to come”.
It is evocative to try to make a list of what came true and what didn’t. Surely there are things today that the movie had forecasted and that we find today in the real world. The first one is video communication, that is enabled by video chat services, such as Skype; the second one is given by the security systems accessing biometric parameters, that is to say identification technologies that are based on the fingerprint recognition, on the face shape and iris recognition, etc. The third one is given by flat screens (LCD, OLED, etc.) and multivision or, if you want, PIP (Picture in Picture) technology and the same multiple view technology used in video surveillance.
The fourth invention is given by flexible displays, for example like the panoramic ones of the most modern curved screen TVs and the OLED ones of smartphones such as Samsung Galaxy.
And how could we forget to talk about the PC Tablets, a fifth prediction from Back to the Future? To them we may add the video glasses, an almost oniric vision of Google Glass.
The 3D holograms, that were by the way proposed by other movies (for example, Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger…) are now a possibility, thanks to the holographic laser. The eight innovation is given by the video games that, instead of a joystick, use a gesture recognition system: e.g., we are talking about the Microsoft Kinect, the Wii, and other systems having wearable sensors.
A ninth prediction that came true is the Slamball, a team sport inspired by basketball. They are distinguished since on a Slamball field there are four trampolines, placed under each basket, that enable the players to amplify their jumps and make some slam dunks. In other words, it is a sort of acrobatic basketball game…
At the tenth place we find high-tech clothing, of which a forerunner is the one worn by McFly: special fibers, sensors and actuators that enable it to adapt to the body and communicate the condition of the person wearing them, in the perspective of wearable electronics and IoT.
The Robotic dustbins that chase the Doc in one of the most funny scenes in the movie can be compared to the street cleaning robots, that have been introduced since a while in various research centres (for example, by the Sant’Anna School in Pisa).
A twelfth prediction that came true concerns the camera drones: in Back to the Future there are small planes that chase the news, shoot the facts and broadcast them (in the movie they also shoot the trial at the court). Nowadays drones are very much in use, and amateur multicopters, supplied with a video camera for aerial photography, are very popular.
The disappearance of the LaserDisc (a forerunner, albeit bigger, of the dvd format) was announced to Marty McFly: they were used in the video juke boxes and were available for sale until 1998.
In 2015, Marty and Jennifer McFly had a house in which everything was connected and could be commanded; this is something that came true, thanks to the always growing appeal of home automation, smart technologies and IoT. A similar situation can be made for the Homechat system, that was presented by LG during the last CES in Las Vegas: it enables the possibility to exchange messages with the household appliances, as if they were a person.
Finally, the hoverboard: the flying skateboard in Back to the Future, akin to a hovercraft, could become available for sale for real, by the end of this year. So it was promised by the company Haltek Industries.
Written by Boris Landoni and published at Open Electronics
[tps_footer][/tps_footer]
