I will admit to attending this panel only because I wanted to see if and when my phone will be able to taste. Okay, you got me. I want my phone to taste my pasta sauce and tell me that it needs more oregano. So, I’ll be quick to dash your hopes – sight, hearing, touch – yup, talked about that; smell and taste – nada. Truth in advertising, indeed…

Now that the bandage has been ripped off, let’s get to the meat of the presentation. The speakers talked about the old paradigm of phone-person interactions (click on app, interact, click off, repeat as necessary) becoming outdated and being replaced with the new paradigm of a live view of physical world augmented by meta data. In other words, you will be on your phone at all times. Even when you are not on the phone, it will be generating information and interacting with your surroundings on your behalf.

The grand hypothesis was that the next iteration of your phone will not be something you hold in your hands, but something you wear (such as the lovely glasses i have on in the photo above. With your phone being able to see what you see, it will also let you see things that are not necessarily there – virtual objects, pets, avatars, grafitti ‘tags’, etc.

Moreover, combining your phone’s compass, GPS, and new seeing-abilities, in the near future, your phone will be able to label the building you’re looking at so that once and for all you’ll know if you are gazing at the Hitchcock or the Sears tower (given that you are in Chicago and are wandering around the Loop aimlessly). Your phone will also be able to recognize what paintings you’re looking at inside the Art Institute (you’re still on that hypothetical trip to Chicago, remember?) and point you to a Wikipedia page with further information.

OK, so your phone cannot taste your kitchen experiments for you just yet, but I, for one, look forward to these new developments coming very soon to an eyewear-enabled device near me!