How did Blade Runner's tech predictions stack up?

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/01/how-did-blade-runners-tech-p.html

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It was off on just about everything but I don’t think that is important.

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Point of Blade Runnner:

1%       Roy Batty farewell speech
27%      How the hell does the 3d polaroids thing work
72%      Fucker vs Father arguments
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Math checks out.

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lol it does now!

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“Siri, enhance 34 to 36”

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Obligatory:

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The part of Bladerunner that does ring true for me is the way so much of the signage is no longer in English. In my neighbourhood of Toronto near the university there are now bus shelter ads almost entirely in Chinese, as well as several restaurants with pretty much zero English to be seen.

That and the increasing ubiquity of screens advertising stuff…

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It was a way to suggest Deckard seeing something in the photo that he hadn’t noticed before

If they’d known people would be arguing about it 40 years later they would have done something else

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I wanted to build that 3D Polaroids thing. Not literally with the CRT monitor, but to make something that you could drive with speech so you could concentrate on the screen and not have to go fiddling with pointers and mice and menus. We had a simple speech control when I worked on image processing in printing. I had another go (different company) using a natural language front end for ‘xview’. But we didn’t have the skeuomorphic noises that showed when it was stepping.

I still think there is something there.

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It’s also funny to hear people complain about that part of the movie in 2019, when fuzzy-photo-realistic FPS environments that people can download over the internet isn’t something wildly speculative.

Today, people can think about it as a simple 3D environment model of the physical location of everything in the room, mapped with an Art Deco-drone, and skinned with higher-definition 2d photo surfaces, and that was what Decker was noodling around in.

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He was scanning a Polaroid. You guys are all thinking too hard.

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I had the impression he was looking in a mirror, inside the image, anyway.

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I guess tech doesn’t include interstellar travel, replicants and flying cars anymore.

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I tend to see it as 50% farewell speech.
50% high pressure questions about tortoises.

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I always wondered why movies set in the future provided dates. At some point that date will arrive.

A) Why even specify a date?
B) If you have to specify a date just use ambiguity like “The Future” or “200 years later” or whatever.

So anyway that camera would need to capture light from all angles. I wonder how far you can travel from the camera source?

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So the context of the movie is more relatable to the audience.

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And why is Tsingtao in BR’s 2019 apparently a vodka-like clear liquor rather than beer?

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