The future of mobile vision

I have been thinking a lot about the future of mobile, and how we are likely to move away from an over reliance on that little black rectangle we carry around.

There are many new developments that are coming to fruition that will allow us to greatly enhance the technology that we carry around with us,  far beyond the current phone.

Soon we will have far, far better visual sensing, way beyond simplle cameras,  and leading the charge will be the new (ish) distance and volume sensors that are starting to appear.
We already have the sensors for FaceID on apple devices,  and soon this type of sensing will become far more capable.  For example Voyant has made a lidar sensor that is far smaller than your fingernail. yes even the little one. And as techcrunch point out this type of sensor has a massive range of applications.  Imagine if not just your car but your phone knew and understood the environment around you,  great for people with impairments, local navigation through a building or a crowd.  Changing context of how the mobile tech responds or interacts because it knows that you’re sitting on a sofa, or a backseat of a car, in the cinema etc.  The device can not only sense distance, but also movement and acceleration.  Game changing.

No doubt there will be ways to have the devices modulate the light signal to allow for communications with devices in the immediate surroundings, relieving the main cellular or wifi networks.

I wonder if having many of these in one place would mean they would get cross signals or blind each other ?

However this feels to me like the start of a revolution in robots, appliances, phones, vehicles, and a myriad of other applications.

Exciting times ahead,  I hope Voyant can leap from lab to production as soon as possible.

Below* is a scan of a space, imagine how an app could make good use of this information, tied to AI to recognise the type of space, and the objects within it,  and you’re a long way to being a new kind of interaction with the world.

Taken from google images, with “labelled for reuse filter”