What do cell phones look like in the year 2144?

Obviously they won’t have a screen anymore. They’ll be pop-up displays. So if you’re sitting on a train and your romantic partner sends you a steamy selfie…guess who has an audience?

Has this annoyed anyone else?

If they’re tactical screens, that makes sense. But I still don’t think transparent displays on personal devices will be a thing in the future.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      1 year ago

      The expanse remains my favourite portrayal of future technology, it looks actually nice to use and seems very realistic if we assume we can become able to make those things.

      Like the fact that the main device is a dirt cheap mass-produced plexiglass phone that are just terminals and rely on servers, that some people have larger ones in a tablet format at home, the way it takes advantage of holograms to expand content outside of the device itself when useful, and my favourite part is how most of the interaction is entirely gesture-based, because who the fuck wants to go around shouting at their phone???

      Interfacing is such a pet peeve of mine in scifi, i don’t want to tell the room to turn on the lights, i want to make motion of turning a dimmer in the direction of a lamp and have it act like i’m actually turning a physical dimmer!
      Similarily i don’t want devices talking to me, i want them making intuitive noises and if they ever do have to speak to convey complex information i want it to be in a clearly artificial voice because otherwise it’s creepy.

      Voice interaction has a time and place, it’s useful for communicating very complex stuff quickly and without needing a free limb (that scene), but good god it just becomes annoying if you use that as the primary way of interacting…

      • Luke
        3·
        1 year ago

        Similarily i don’t want devices talking to me, i want them making intuitive noises and if they ever do have to speak to convey complex information i want it to be in a clearly artificial voice because otherwise it’s creepy.

        I would love to find some interesting voices of this type for my phone TTS. Everything is “natural” now, but what if I want a voice like SHODAN or something?

    • sky@slrpnk.net
      2·
      1 year ago

      You mean the transparent rectangle screens? I love The Expanse but did not like those. In order to view things on the screen the background needs to be opaque! I did like how the file transfer worked between devices though, with the swiping and all.