It's ironic. In the Middle East, they use "porn" of you as revenge. In America, the government uses porn you look at to shame you.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25118156

God I miss Totse.

I don't get it. Decades of science fiction depicting Heads-up-Display glasses and wrist-strapped laptops, with people wishing and wishing we lived in such a world.

Now here we are and society isn't going in for it. Bluetooth head sets, smartwatches, Google Glass, none of it is sticking. Even though smart phones are becoming cumbersome due to size and inability to use hands-free or even one-handed well.

Are we ever going to see a cyberpunk future?

Bluetooth headsets made you look like you were talking to yourself, breaking essentially all social norms. There's a reason they (and those who used them regardless) were widely mocked.

Google Glass was obscenely expensive, invitation-only -- circumstances around its availability made it clear it's a tech demo for technology 'futurists', and not a product within reach (or intended for) the general public. Naive defaults about it recording everything caused a privacy storm; behavior on part of its users led to widespread derision.

Smartwatches in their current form are solutions looking for a problem. It's obscene that notifications and fitness are the only two use-cases most makers were able to identify.

All these devices are plagued by voice control: speaking to your device in public is neither very considerate to those around you, nor privacy-preserving. The fact is, even if speech recognition systems are working well, most people are uneasy issuing content-rich commands, like entire bodies of emails, in public earshot. Until someone solves this shortcoming reliably, none of these devices will see widespread public appeal.

The limitations of power have put a choke-hold on the future you and I read about in science fiction. After the power issue is solved the next problem will be heat I think.

Solve the power problem and we'll see a huge jump in technology. Right now they are trying to solve it by making more and more efficient processors that use less power and perform better over the same amount of time.

Could it be that smartwatches and google glass don't have suitable input methods yet? They're adequate for displaying information but not great for extensive input or manipulation of data. Most people also don't want yet another device to recharge each night either.

I have a Nexus 6 (one of the larger phones) and don't find it cumbersome at all. It's certainly more practical compared to trying to do anything meaningful on a smartwatch.

I think there is more to your comment than initially meets the eye. I've been watching "Black Mirror" the past few days, and the one thing that all episodes share in common when it comes to their futuristic UX is the tremendous expressiveness that they derive from unbelievably simple and quick input methods, where you can clearly see that the user communicated far more intent than even the number of DOF that their supposed input device even allowed. The only thing I can think of as helping to bridge that gap is AI

My Nexus 4 was (at the time, 2013) huge to me because I had just switched from a tiny little qwerty flip phone. Getting used to it took forever, but my number one problem was making it fit on me without being bulky or getting scratched up/damaged.

Mind you I had a blue collar job at the time so there was a lot of opportunity for phone destruction.

> Are we ever going to see a cyberpunk future?

You mean, crypto wars and threats of civilization impacting DDoS don't count?

Don't forget corporate mercenaries, militarized police forces, private space exploration, and virtual reality! All we need now is brain augmentation and cybernetic limbs and we'll be living in neuromancer.

> Are we ever going to see a cyberpunk future?

We didn't get to see a steampunk future starting with the early 1900s even though books like Jules Verne's were quite popular at the time (and quite some time after that), so I don't think we're going to see a cyberpunk future anytime soon, if ever. The best that we can do is to re-watch shows like "Akira" and think about what could have been.

I hate to tell you this, dude, but "Akira" might not be a palatable future.

It's almost like fantasies aren't a model for real life... nah, that's crazy.

I wouldn't really equate Google Glass with Heads up Display glasses as most people imagine them. I'm not sure if you've used it, but it sounded super cool until I tried it. You don't see the image on Glass on the lenses themselves but on a little transparent rock that's attached to the glasses.. it was a pretty underwhelming experience to me

I think it's because we haven't thought of enough interesting things to do with them. Sci-fi HUD displays are mostly cool because of the applications, not just their existence. If you only use something a couple times a day, it needs to be absolutely seamless or you're going to take it off and forget about it.