Video: The fragment of Proefkonijnen
Photo: The oPhone next to an iPhone
A couple of years ago I saw an item on a Dutch television show called Proefkonijnen, where two guys wanted to send an real apple through Whatsapp. Of course this was an impossible thing to do, so they made a construction of pipes through the house. In the end they succeeded to send it from upstairs downstairs. So of course we already knew it was an impossible job in the first place, but the idea is quite interesting. Could this really be possible one day? Last week I read an article from The New Yorker about David Edwards. He has been experimenting with sending scents through mobile devices. What? Exactly. That was my first reaction. The oPhone is a large, brick-shaped device mounted with two smell-delivery tubes made of white plastic. In the article they talk about many similar projects that all have failed. So what does that tell us? Is there no market for products like this? Are we not ready yet for a new innovation?
So what I wanted to talk about in this post is not the new product itself (which is really awesome, check the article), but more the fact that it seems we have an unstoppable hunger for new innovations. We want that everything around us is a part of our life in al possible dimensions. Nobody knows what the next step is, but I think we are walking ten steps ahead.
In the last decade we saw quite some radical innovations in the field of Internet, mobile devices and computer. Sometimes changes came even faster than we expected, the one even more innovative than the other. So what point have we reached right now? And what innovations are ahead of us? Here is one that caught my attention.
So I find it quite hard to determine the point we have reached now. I believe that when we are talking about innovation, one can never say that we are halfway there. Like everybody knows, innovation is a never-ending process. It keeps on going. We, humanity, will always keep looking for way to improve what we already have and enlarge what we already know. Anyway, what we do know is what we have right now and we can always dream of what the future may bring us. One of the things we do have right now and at the same time a thing that ten years ago we did not even dare to dream of, is a mobile smartphone 24/7 in our pocket. A device that makes it possible to hold the world in your hand. But now that seems not enough anymore and we are ready for the next step.
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