The online world has been a wiggly progression, but always toward a “higher” form of connectivity/ and presence. The human face is amazingly flexible and forms highly varied emotional pictures that we project and receive during interaction with others. Today, during an enforced localization inflection point of online presence tools, we continue on that path of progression and are very much still in the sorting out phase.
First we had room size computers too costly for “consumers”, then we had ubiquitous desktops, then we had new mobile capability which emphasized something we could fit in a pocket. which also became mobile TV cameras. Tiny screens, tiny keyboards, but with us anywhere, and cheap enough that today, over 4B people have a smartphone – 75% of the earth’s adult population. As Benedict Evans reminds us in another recent PSA post.
But tiny isn’t everything, and despite the huge smartphone/camera presence in our lives, there remain other forms of computers that we desire and use, from the “old style” desktop with it’s ever larger monitors, to laptops, tablets and still out on the fringe, coming forms of AR and VR.
LFH, WFH, Health from Home (HFH)…has changed the equations for screen size, keyboard size, and video conferencing. If we don’t need mobility at home, and if we want to see our connected faces with more clarity, and thus more intimacy, as well as more of them on one screen via video conferencing, we need nice big desktop monitors. Which suddenly seem like a more than viable competitor of the mobile devices again.
Along with larger screen sizes come the software extensions that make video online possible, such as Codecs, and video conferencing software, and networking improvements. Lets not forget 5G coming along, or routers moving to WiFi6, and other parts of the “string of connectivity” being incrementally boosted, such as download/ upload speeds from the ISP.
This link …kudos to Gary… talks about Google’s new Codec, and as Gary says, reflects the current intense tech competition to move into the LFH, WFH, HFH, space.
This would be a good time to recall that even more in-depth connectivity is “coming soon” with AR and VR tools for the consumer and enterprise. *Is a consumer, who WFH for an enterprise, using consumer electronics or enterprise scale electronics?
And big screen smart TVs are bringing high quality online imagery, streaming YouTubes, and streaming live events, to the living room. We might be moving some of our connectivity for WFH, LFH, HFH back to our home’s largest screen with the most real estate for video conferencing.