The future’s bright, the future’s playing computer games and using your TV for all manner of flash, revolutionary fun.
With the Xbox One coming soon to stores and households everywhere, along with it comes a whole bunch of brand new innovative functions that will make your telly seem like a prop from Star Trek. Just minus the lens flare.
With motion sensors, voice commands, Skype and SmartGlass controls, your living room will finally start to deliver the future technology that so many sci-fi films have promised us for years and years.
Because, in a very real sense, the Xbox One utilises tech that we have seen used in some of our favourite movies. To prove it, here are some films that actually predicted the futuristic functions that will soon be a staple of every home.
Kinect
Minority Report is the go-to for realistic, innovative tech, thanks to painstaking research and collaboration between Spielberg and ‘future experts’. And of course, one of the most famous scenes in the film sees Tom Cruise manipulate mid-air images and documentation with the use of special gloves and a lot of swooshing.
With Kinect installed as part of the Xbox One, however, you won’t even need to wear those funny sci-fi mittens for the motion sensors to let you wave and wriggle your way through all sorts of onscreen entertainment.
Skype
We’ve seen video calls and messaging in films and TV shows for such a long time, it’s hard to understand why every home hasn’t had chat-screens installed for decades. 2001: A Space Odyssey proved particularly prophetic in this respect though, with a videophone scene that is eerily similar to the everyday Skype conversations that you can have every day with friends and family via the Xbox One.
Voice Control
Great news everyone. With the Xbox One’s new voice command functions, which even allows you to turn it on with a simple cry of “Xbox on!”, we are one step closer to having full conversations with our favourite machines and gadgets. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we each have our own KITT car?
One very memorable film scene that predicted the voice-instruction functionality is Blade Runner, in which Rick Deckard navigated around corners in a photograph thanks to some careful vocal commands. Given the choice, we’d still rather have the KITT car though.
Integrated TV and games
The Cable Guy might have had mixed reviews, with many not taking too kindly to Jim Carrey’s more psychotic take on his usual comedy schtick. But his Chip Douglas did at least manage to correctly predict our technology needs in his climactic rant, in which he says “You can do your shopping at home or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam”
And never have TV, games and internet browsing been better integrated than with the Xbox One, which allows you to do all these at once while ‘snapping’ the separate windows to separate parts of your screen.
SmartGlass
The Xbox SmartGlass is a nifty way to control your console using flash touch-screen technology – the same kind of technology that we have seen used, for example, throughout the Star Trek franchise. Another notable appearance of this kind of tool can be seen in The Island, where Sean Bean uses a touch-screen desktop. Using movie logic, this fundamentally proves that we’re just one step away from human clones.
