My Next Computer

When I open up the “lap-top” with the keyboard flat and the screen upright, I want the volume of space they define to appear to be real, so objects within it appear solid and people appear lifelike.

It would be a 3-D space that one would look at from the outside.

The front and top and sides can obviously be entered.  If something does inter, like my hand, then it would “freeze frame” and go static.  Then it would be possible to for example, pick up a character in a film in the pose that they were frozen in, and then open a new window, that for example would 3­d print it. 

Text would not just be projected onto the back wall, but appear to be on a screen that is floating in space that we can position at any angle, instead of shifting the back itself.

The space we look into would be infinite.  Theoretically, it would be possible to travel in it in any direction without end.  To add to the confusion, it could be hyperbolic, so it not only goes on for ever but becomes more spacious as it does so.

The equivalent of opening a new window would be to open another infinite space.  If the present “scene” or whatever was being shown, went into freeze-frame it could be limited to the present view in size and then shifted sideways, forward/back or up/down, like moving round the cells of a tesseract, the 4-d cube.  

For something like a thousand years or more, throughout the Greco-Roman world, a common object was the wax tablet.  These were usually in pairs and were similar size and opened up like a lap-top computer.  The wax could easily be written into with a stylus and remained for a long time until erased by heating.   Books were published in sets of these.  While they were a common sight throughout the Ancient Western World, they were forgotten when literacy became restricted to the clergy.  Now we have something similar, but with a screen that is “live”, but still as flat as it ever was.

My Next Computer must move into the next dimension and give me a visual reality to see and interact with, not a flat approximation.  Present head-set technology is starting to give us the sense of 3-d virtual reality, but it is cumbersome.  Perhaps in time we will all wear a simple version that double as spectacles or sunglasses that give us a 3-d overlay of what we are seeing.