Future in review 2008: Sensory Overload

Future in review 2008: Sensory Overload

We visited Larry Smarr’s Super-High-Tech Broadband fun laboratory at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). The facility at Calit2 is the most leading edge backbone infrastructure available anywhere on the planet. I will write about it in more detail over the weekend or next week but my expectation and definition of broadband has completely changed as a result of the experience. We had a 10Gbps link to University of Melbourne in Australia and we talked with a team of professors and academics on a cinema screen sized screen.

We also saw some really cool demos like a 360 view of Mars surface, zooming into art masterpieces of Vinci to reveal what couldn’t be seen by naked eye, wi-fi robots, zooming and travel into the universe, and much more. The resolution was nothing like we have ever seen or experienced. Everyone left with just dazed and amazed by what’s possible and a lust to own the technology and a 10Gbps pipe to their homes.