
10 Sci-Fi Connected Objects that came true - liam_boogar
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/04/18/10-sci-fi-connected-objects-that-came-true/
======
dalke
As is often the case, these examples existed in some form before the cited SF
sources. In this case the list compiler uses very recent examples, when most
of the examples were well known in early SF and in the general culture.

Google Glass: Steve Mann in 1980 used wearable computing with a display. He
was limited by the technology. Before then, there was Sutherland's experiments
in augmented reality in 1968, and before then Vannevar Bush's "As We May
Think" described a head-mounted camera, though in that case just as a camera
and not as wearable computing.

Driverless cars existed in reality before those SF examples, and of course
existed in popular culture long before then. Disney's "Magic Highway" from
1958 portrays a driverless car, for example.

The smart watch example Dick Tracy actually shows that the list maker uses a
very broad definition of science fiction that seems to include anything with
futuristic elements. By that definition, nearly every James Bond series is
also science fiction.

"Stress detectors" have been around for many decades. Here's a 1982 criticism
of stress detector products from the 1970s "marketed for law enforcement and
forensic science purposes."
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7047675?dopt=Abstract](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7047675?dopt=Abstract)
.

"Connected sex toys" is known by many terms. The one I use is "teledildonics"
from Ted Nelson in 1975. That's several decades before the referenced Matrix
Reloaded.

"pretty similar to Ipads. Weirdly enough, they were called… PADDs". That
'coincidence' is almost certainly because the idea is at least as old as the
ubiquitous computing project at Xerox PARC. Mark Weiser's Scientific American
article in 1991 talked about "tabs, pads, and boards", where "pads" are about
the same size as an iPad or PADD.

In the replicator description, the author is reaching for anything in modern
life like a replicator. Unfortunately, the example is 3D printers. The term
'stereolithography' dates back to 1986, which is a year before TNG. It's hard
to say that it "came true", when it was already true when ST:NG used the term.

