It’s 21 October 2015, and this is the future. At least, it is if you’re a fan of the hugely successful Back to the Future film franchise.
In Back to Future II, Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown leap 30 years into their future to fix a problem with Marty’s children. The precise day they leap forward to is today, 21 October 2015. This is the future they were coming to. Social media and news channels around the world have been buzzing with story, and mainly because of some of the cute technologies the original 1980s film envisaged would be available by now.
The crazy thing is that most of them are.
We have flying cars. To be honest, they’re more like driving planes, but Terrafugia’s car has been legal for a few years already. Check it out here.
We have virtual and augmented reality. In the movie, the shark sign on top of the diner zooms down to snap at Marty. This is what we can see today with VR helmets. I’m most looking forward to Microsoft’s Hololens, due out any day now, but we already have a number of these headsets available. Click here to see Hololens in action.
Google glass has already come – and gone – and is exactly what Doc Brown’s crazy glasses were supposed to be.
And famously, Lexus brought us the hoverboard earlier this year. It’s still a prototype, but using quantum physics, it’s a reality already. See a video of it in action.
Probably the most anticipated item from the movie is Nike’s self-lacing shoes. They’ve been hinting at this for a few months now, but haven’t quite perfected it. However, earlier today, Michael J. Fox (Marty McFly) was given a pair of his own. He tweeted a picture, and announced for Nike that they’ll be in stores sometime next year. See the story here.
So, yes, these are just the geeky fantasy of some movie nerds from the 1980s coming true. But it is a small sign of some quite big news. We really ARE living in the future.
In fact, the technologies that we DO have already are a lot more impressive than Back to the Future II anticipated. 3d printers, real time translation, smart phones, the world wide web, Siri, driverless cars, graphene, Facebook, Uber, smart watches, iTunes, email, WhatsApp, Viagra, the Internet of Things and the list goes on and on.
Our team believes that we’re living at the very beginning of a technology golden age.
Whatever you believe, as of today we are all officially living in the future. Great Scott. What a thought.
It’s official: We are living in the future
