Life in Techtopia: Part III

This series is an effort to describe the Techtopia, short for Technological Utopia, to look forward to and work towards. My hope, is to accelerate our journey in that direction. By the end of this series, I intend to compile all the parts into an eBook, for free distribution, in PDF format. While each part is written as a standalone rather than as a continuation, you can read the previous part by clicking on the following:

Life in Techtopia: Part I

Life in Techtopia: Part II

Just Shopping

Alice's personal robobutler clears her dining table as she is done with breakfast. She is taking the morning off from work and is going shopping.

She puts on her haptic suit, complete with socks and gloves, that covers all her skin from soles to the top of her neck. The haptic clothing allows her to feel distant objects remotely or virtual objects as if they were real.

Alice enters a Virtual Mall, that she sees around her thanks to projections on the lenses of her smartglasses. As she sees an artificially simulated life-like mall environment, crowded with other shoppers from around the world, her AI Smart Assistant speaks to her, with the voice streamed right to her skull, about what is new, what is on offer and what she may be interested in, based on past shopping patterns.

Alice moves into a virtual dress shop. With space limitation not an issue in virtual worlds, the shops are huge and generously spread out. Alice walks past endless rows of mannequins. She stops when she sees a design she likes. A mirror appears in front of Alice, in which she sees herself dressed in the dress on the mannequin next to her, that has caught her eye. The dress is red. She wonders if it will look better on her, if it were in pink, and the colour of the dress in the mirror turns pink, to the tone and shade she has in mind. Then she wonders if it would be better if the shade of pink was just slightly darker, and the mirror shows her that option. She thinks the look is perfect after that customisation.

With her haptic suit, Alice is able to experience the feel of the fabric the dress would be made from on her skin. She thinks it is comfortable to her liking. The virtual mirror in front of her is able to show her her image, from all angles, including her back without her having to turn or move. Her AI Smart Assistant tells Alice the price, which seems reasonable. She wants to buy it. Custom to her measurements and colour requests, the dress can be made and drone-delivered to Alice through the distributed value chain within three days. However, the dress also promises haptic features, whereby wearing the dress, anywhere she is on the move, she can remotely hug her loved ones spread across the world, and experience weather and seasons from different parts of the world. She wants to test out and experience those haptic features for herself offline, in the physical world before making the purchase.

The virtual mirror in front of Alice turns into a virtual screen displaying map and route from her home to the nearest physical shopping outlet where Alice can try on the dress sample, to test the haptic features, along with the address and location view. Her AI Smart Assistant schedules a visit for her to the shop within the week.

After trying on a few more dresses, Alice "teleports" into a toy store because she wants to buy a present for her nephew's upcoming birthday. She already has an idea somewhat of what she wants. She heads right towards a dancing bear. It plays its own music, with limitless options as it can download new songs when they are released from the internet, and it sounds like it sings for real. It dances on its own without touch. There is no "on" or "off" switch and needs no instruction manual. It is powered by sunlight through its eyes or thermally by heat from its surroundings if it is warm enough. What Alice likes about it, is that the bear is able to keep an eye on children, streaming live views of the children to a parent's smartglasses. It can also automatically raise an alarm when a child is unwell, at risk or in danger. The bear is also able to intervene, to keep the child safe.

Alice tests the bear by reaching for a virtual power socket. Before she can touch it, the bear races forward, firmly grabs her risk, and in a friendly voice says, "oh, please don't do that, that is dangerous. Your mommy loves you."

Alice thinks the bear is adorable. She is informed that it can be drone-delivered to her within twenty-four hours. She places the order and the payment amount is automatically deducted from her bank account

Off to the Movies!

Alice window shops for a while more, and she has time before resuming work after lunch, so she steps into a cinema room within the virtual mall. She selects a movie about a Motorcycle Grand Prix racer.

Alice experiences herself in the role of the central character in the movie, experiencing the high speed and thrilling action around her. She experiences the vibrations of riding a racing motorcycle through her haptic suit. All the other characters seem real all around her. At various points in the story, Alice gets carried away forgetting that it is all simulation, just a movie, and not reality, for the life-like three-hundred and sixty degree nature of the experience.

And back for lunch

The movie ends, just it is time for lunch. To give her eyes a break, Alice withdraws from the virtual world and takes off her smartglasses. She admires the garden along the sills of her windows, that are tended too by microbots that are hardly noticeable along the plant hedges, that they are built into.

Alice's robobutler is ferrying the food from the autonomous kitchen to her dining table.

To be continued....keep a lookout for for Part IV

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting and Keynote Topics include EmTech, Industry 4.0, HR, Digital Transformation, Product Development, X Reality, Marketing, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking and Organisational Future Proofing. In an Open Letter in 2019, Harish has called on fellow Futurists around the world to emphasize in their course of work, on the need for Environmental Salvation.