Tales from the Techside

Imaging IS king. There are plenty of audiophiles out there who will argue with me, and certainly humans have a remarkable reaction to coordinated sounds, and an even stronger reaction to smells (nothing can evoke powerful memories of a place and time quite like an odor).

At the end of the day, however, we are primarily visual creatures. The human brain didn’t just happen to develop in step with our bilateral visual acuity - it was of course a causal relationship. Our natural pattern and movement recognition capabilities fed the development and shape of our cerebral cortex, especially over the past 120k years.

Only the development of modern languages may have had a more profound impact on our brains development than our relationship with sight, and in many ways they complement each other (how often do you ‘visualize’ a word in your brain when you cannot remember how to spell it? virtual imaging in your brain uses the same neural nets as real imaging).

So what happened in the last 120k years that helped to drive this relationship between our brains evolution and sight? Tools, or more precisely the manufacturing of tools.

Hominids have probably always used tools, and even modified the raw tools that they picked up (chimpanzees do this today fashioning ‘fishing sticks’ for ant fishing and a host of other ’simple’ tool applications). But as our range of use for tools grew, so did our need to manufacture them. This required a precise relationship between our hands and our eyes that never existed before, and of course a thumb that conveniently opposes our other digits.

The fashioning of tools, whether Acheulian hand axes or later more complex weaponry and ’stitched’ shelter, tool use, and more importantly the visual acuity and feedback loop between vision and tool modification has been widely attributed with much of the reorganization that led to the fully modern brain.

In fact, imagery is so important to us that one of the first things we started doing with our new tool manufacturing and use capabilities was to begin recording a vision of our world on the only canvas available. Gorgeous, multi-hued cave wall paintings have been discovered dated back well beyond 50k years ago. While expressing the images of our world wasn’t the first thing we did with tools, it has been perhaps the most enduring. Imaging, after all, is king.

So what does this have to do with real estate and technology? Prepare for the surface revolution. I am not only referring to Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ gesture enabled system (picture an iphone with a 3×2 foot screen and immense image manipulation capabilities and you have the basic idea).
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I am referring to the convergence of this and tablet technology and software/browsing experiences which are all focused on more ‘natural and intuitive’ interactions between human and machine. Using a keyboard and especially a mouse are not intuitive - there is an inherent disconnect between the movements of your hand on one plane and the cursor/pointer on another. Being able to interact directly, naturally with the interface using that acute visual acuity and the coordination with our immensely agile hands is clearly the next step.

Think about writing with a pen compared with keyboard typing. I can type at least twice as fast as most people can cursively write or print text. I have 8 fingers and two thumbs that I can employ, compared to the one handed single character at a time pen method. Add predictive text completion and I am faster even than most people can speak intelligibly. Next add intuitive ‘gestures’ for functions and we will have a whole new ‘language’ for interacting with computers.

Now imagine that every surface you interact with during your day could become a connected, computing surface. Forget the centrally located ‘kiosk’ and think of all the places you currently see poster advertisements or lifeless two dimensional terminals. At the airport instead of squinting and scanning for your flight you will be able to rapidly interact and drill down on the information you want and a whole lot more (which you might not want - see my article on WiMAX and we can start to imagine the degree of advertising intrusion we are headed towards).

At the coffee shop you frequent you don’t need the local newspaper, your table is the local newspaper, and every other paper from around the world for that matter.

Looking for a home? Data syndication and normalization will have made it possible to search across artificial data boundaries, and ubiquitous connectivity has met a sublimely interactive computing experience right where you sit or stand, wherever that might be! If you are a consumer (buyer/seller) you will have a vastly improved ability to find information about properties or have others find you.

This puts Marks post about wireless MLS access in perspective. The ROI for that experience is questionable, but it is paving the way for a much richer, fuller interactive experience that allows the power of our vision to drive the way we interact with computers, with housing, with everything.

After all, imaging is king.

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