What's interesting is that for most of my childhood (80s and 90s), aside from a few wow moments I was pretty underwhelmed by the standard of the tech. It was like it was trying hard to be something it wasn't yet ready to be. I used to walk into television shops and think they all just look crap. Computers used to frustrate me so much - crunch crunch to do anything, and 256 colours was deemed good (!?). The first music players where you might be able to get one whole album onto a memory card that was too expensive to put a price in the rs catalogue (or perhaps too volatile a price). Anyway, tech was crap. Then around 2005 or something, it started becoming what it was meant to be. You could buy a computer and it could do everything you needed it to do; of course you always wanted more number crunching, but you could see where it was only just right the corner. Then GPUs started doing computation, and computation stopped being thought about. Memory was super fast and copious. One now felt limited by programming capability, not hardware. I'm now genuinely excited by technology. As much as it pains me to say it, the television departments are places of wonder.

It's in that context that this post feels like another step towards achieving some promised vision. If this is realtime, it is truly fantastic.

Now to hope we can deal with climate change and despots and poverty so it's not all for nought.

As an aside, one early wow moment was the first time I saw a mini camcorder, then another for the first genuinely mobile phone; both Sony I think. Also, though a bit later, I remember seeing an in-car GPS and deciding it was basically a perfect interface for it's task.