Considering the Next Screen

My favorite candy of all time is Reese’s peanut butter cups, a perfect combination of sweet and savory. Years ago, they ran TV ads where two people would bump into each other and their snacks would collide. One would say, “Hey, you put your peanut butter in my chocolate,” and the other, “You put your chocolate in my peanut butter.” Then they would both taste the end result and simultaneously say “delicious.”

Forgetting for a minute the absurdity of someone walking down the street eating out of a jar of peanut butter, this ad loosely describes today’s digital device convergence: “You put your videophone in my tablet computer.” You get the idea. More and more, the proliferation of electronics on which humans consume information seems to mimic the intense phase of a Darwinian evolutionary process that is pumping out mutants left and right, in the long process of selecting the fittest. The number of SKUs for these things will soon rival one’s choice for candy bars.

Last January at the CoDev conference on Open Innovation (codevpd.org), Nick Lansley from Tesco Supermarkets in the UK discussed what he called the “4th Screen.” Tesco product development has moved through all the screen phases: television, computer, smartphone and now the 4th, tablets. They have focused development for customer interaction (online shopping lists, TV widgets, recipe apps, etc.) with all of these “screen” interfaces, and are keeping their eyes open for what comes after tablets. This, of course, begs the question, “what exactly is next?”

Tablet makers not named after fruit are of course infuriated that years of investment trying to mainstream screens with no keyboard were surpassed overnight by the iPad. This would lead one to believe Apple would be best to ask what is next. But if they do know, they aren’t talking. Besides, despite current popularity, it’s not even yet a given that the tablet market is more than a passing fad or maybe stepping stone to the next screen.

One obvious candidate for the next screen is the area of wearable computers. This is also in concert with the theory that our phones, or whatever the new device is, will be used to continuously monitor our biophysical states, pulse, blood pressure, etc. But we are interested in the “screen,” so what kind of screen do wearable computers use?

Current prototypes from labs studying this, such as at MIT, have incorporated heads up displays, retinal projection glasses, arm-based screens, and other solutions. One of the most pesky problems with this is input. Speech input is not a universal solution, and if a touch screen is on your arm, you are forced to type with one hand. “Thought” input can’t come soon enough. Wearable tech does seem inevitable, but fraught with usability concerns that constant innovation will have to solve.

What if we were to look at scenarios of use? Some studies show that when people sit down to watch TV, it is becoming more and more common to have not only a phone at hand, but also a tablet or PC running. It used to be that people would talk on the phone while watching TV, but today people text, chat, blog, tweet and Facebook while watching their favorite D-list celebrity attempt the cha-cha. This seems in concert with the rise of childhood and adult ADD diagnoses. Does this perhaps point to a screen or screens that can somehow provide all of these services in one device?

Of course, the screen of the future may be a physical surface. The previously mentioned multi-tasking would require a lot more display real estate, perhaps something only virtual displays could provide. Futurists are also certain that eventually we will augment our bodies with surgical implants to merge our entire selves with technology, so perhaps that “screen” will be entirely in our brains or we will experience computing far differently than we do today and not need a visual display at all.

The next screen may also come from somewhere nonlinear, meaning not descending directly from phones or computers. Apple and Android are currently trying to power up TVs with set-top boxes. Products that didn’t have computers (and screens) in them before may become Swiss army information tools in the future, like refrigerators, doors, maybe even desks and tables. Screens could be ubiquitous.

As we see from the Tesco example, some companies are as actively focused on the messenger as they are on the message and with good cause. The Android device world is often abuzz about fragmentation being a negative side effect of the open platform, with compatibility across all devices running different flavors of the OS creating a pesky problem. Not only is there hardware fragmentation and the resultant software fragmentation, on the customer side there is attention fragmentation. We now all receive so many communications from so many different sources and channels, clear pathways for your message’s signal is at a premium.

The next screen is something we know is coming, but uncertain about the form factor. Today’s smart phones and tablets are modern-day realities that had “echoes” from the past (Palm Pilots, Apple’s Newton, and Star Trek’s Tricorder), so what’s fictional or primitive today, such as holograms, virtual reality and 3D, could be glimpses into tomorrow’s solutions. Just like today’s situation, it will leave some people behind, propel others far forward and the rest of us will fumble our way and just get used to it. Until the next “next screen,” that is.