Technology Predictions from 20 Years Ago | Hacker News Reader

Technology Predictions from 20 Years Ago

blog.jeffhaynie.us

I heavily disagree with this article. While most of the predictions have come "true", few of them have come to pass in a massively accessible way that I'm sure was the dream.

"Prediction: Everyone from architects to dressmakers will be able to make simulations of products - in 3-D."

This hasn't come true. While we have the CAD software needed to design objects and simulations in 3D, most are too expensive and require far too much training for just anyone to pick up and use.

"Prediction: Any artist will be able to do super-sophisticated animation or create images that look real."

Not true either. Not any artist, our software is FAR too difficult to use for that. An artist with months, if not YEARS of training, working in a large, well-funded team, yes, but 3D animation tools are FAR from the reach of the average person. I believe they envisioned software that understood the needs of the user so well that it would be a no-brainer to use.

My main impression from this article is that while we have made many things possible in the last 20 years, very little of it is accessible to the layman, and that is the greatest tragedy of the software industry I believe, the fact that we have all of this capable still locked up in confusing command-line applications. Nobody cares about usability, nobody cares about putting together something Joe the Plumber can use.

I think you might be exaggerating how inaccessible 3d animation and rendering is. Pretty much anyone can download Blender3d (blender.org) and learn it in a year or two well enough to make decent animations. (It'd take a lot of practice, of course, but it's still not that hard)

I think most people tend to take for granted how difficult most software is to use. Blender is free, yes, but the UI is far from intuitive, even for hardened veterans in the industry. Even supposedly no-brainer apps like 3dsmax has a extreme learning curve. We've all sort of accepted this as the Way Things Are.

For comparison, I heard a talk by a very interesting startup about a year ago that was doing n-sided patch modeling... which is to say that artists were able to literally draw the primary curves of the shape they were trying to make, and not to concerned at all with quad-patches, lining up the vertices, etc etc. Artists with little to no experience in CAD/3D modeling were able to make complex shapes but merely drawing.

That is the kind of universal usability that the article's predictors were dreaming of, not the convoluted, brain-dead UI we got instead. When I read that article I cannot help but think of how it describes a software world that could have been, if people really just gave a crap about usability.

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