This Movie Predicted A Lot Of Today's Technology
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Disclosure
cyguration — 10 years ago(February 08, 2016 02:57 AM)
Some of the things this movie predicted and how close it managed to replicate them was kind of crazy.
Portable flip-phones. At the time you had to carry around those portable battery packs with the cord attached to the phone or you carried a beeper/pager.
Skyping. Video messaging wasn't possible in that resolution back then due to the piss-poor speed from dial-up. Some companies had LAN connections and later there were T1 lines but the movie made it like video conferencing was a regular thing.
VR headgear. Back then the closest thing to consumer VR products was Nintendo's nausea-inducing Virtual Boy. Today we're just getting VR consumer products on the market, including Valve's HTC Vive, Sony's PSVR and Facebook's Oculus Rift. It's amazing because we've just hit a point where you can get frames buffered at 120fps with VR gear in today's consumer technology. This movie was 20 years ahead of its time with this one.
3D image scanning. We don't have a widely used consumer version of this tech but many 3D imaging companies, visual FX outlets and video game development studios utilize portable 3D scanners along with full room 3D photogrammetry technology to capture real-to-life images in a 3D space. The closest thing to this tech that they showcased in the movie is utilizing the two Kinect 2.0 camera devices on a Windows machine and using something like iPi Soft to capture 1:1 motion. Unfortunately it can't instantly render an image of the person while capturing the motion, but give it a few years and we'll get there.
VR motion capture. This was probably the one thing that blew my mind when I saw it in this film just recently. Whoever their tech adviser was on this film was scarily spot-on. The motion device they used to walk around in that 3D corridor demo is identical to the Virtuix Omni. The only difference is that the Omni treadmill has the walking support so people don't easily and readily tip over. But it utilizes the exact same concept with the low friction, inertial sensors. This is a product also coming soon to the consumer market.
It's crazy to think that a lot of movies in the past have some silly futurist technology in them and are usually way, way off. However, Disclosure was spot on with just about every "futuristic" piece of tech they featured in the film.