The Utopia Experiment

4

True to her word, Janine had gotten them seats four rows from the front. She had a natural pushiness that, combined with her youth and beauty, tended to part a crowd pretty well.

“I wonder if he finally got new glasses,” Janine said, putting her hand on Smith’s forearm. “We have a pool at the office and it’s up to more than five hundred bucks.”

Her question was answered a moment later when Christian Dresner strode onto stage and stalked toward the lone lectern at its center. The Coke-bottle glasses he’d been wearing since the eighties were still there, as were the suit and tie that he seemed to have bought around the same time.

The truth was that Dresner looked as out of place as Smith did in this crowd. Not only the clothes, but the graying blond hair worn in such a shaggy, haphazard style that many people believed he cut it himself. In Smith’s mind, though, everything seemed carefully calculated to diminish the almost cartoonishly square jaw, the heavy shoulders, and the still-narrow waist. With contacts, a decent tailor, and a coupon to Supercuts he would look like a spectacularly successful Nazi eugenics project.

A light applause erupted and Dresner seemed a little uncomfortable, losing himself for a moment in securing a Bluetooth headset to his ear. In fact, this was only the fourth public appearance in the notoriously shy genius’s career.

While comparisons to Steve Jobs had been obvious, Smith had always thought Willy Wonka was a more apt analogy: an odd recluse who suddenly burst on the scene with something incredible and then retreated to the safety of the factory.

“I want to thank you for coming,” he said in the slight German accent that he’d never shaken off. “I hope you’ll be as excited about my new project as I am.”

The screen behind him came to life with an image of a hand holding a device that looked a little like a gray iPhone with no screen.

“Electric cigarette case?” Janine said, nudging Smith in the ribs as a confused murmur rose up around them.

He honestly didn’t know. A tiny switch and a blue indicator light were visible on the right side, but other than that it was just a graceful piece of plastic.

Dresner pulled his jacket back and showed an example of the real thing hung on his belt. “I’d like to introduce you to Merge. The next — and maybe final — generation of personal computing devices.”

“Oh, God,” Janine groaned, actually slapping her forehead. “He’s invented the cell phone. And he’s carrying it in a holster.”

“How many of you out there use augmented reality systems?” Dresner continued, blissfully unaware of Janine’s sarcasm. “You know — astronomy apps, something that tells you how good the restaurant you’re standing in front of is…anything.”

More than half the audience raised their hands and Smith joined them. Janine just folded her arms across her chest and scowled.

“And how many of you really find them practical?”

His hand dropped along with everyone else’s. As much as he loved his $2.99 constellation finder, holding a phone at arm’s length and looking past it at the sky wasn’t exactly a seamless experience.

“GPS has definitely moved that technology forward, but we’re still stuck with an interface that isn’t all that much different from the one we had when the first personal computers came out more than thirty years ago. It’s that, and not the software, holding the technology back. It’s not particularly hard to imagine augmented reality’s potential, but almost no one is pursuing it because of the lack of a workable hardware platform. I’m hoping to change that.”

He walked back to the lectern. “Let me switch you over to what I see.”

The screen behind him faded into a video of the crowd as he scanned across it. Along the left side was a series of semitransparent icons glowing various shades of red and green. Across the top was some general data — that he was connected to the Las Vegas Convention Center wireless network, the temperature inside and outside, as well as a number of abbreviations and numbers that Smith couldn’t decipher.

Janine leaned into him again. “That actually looks pretty good. I tried the Google Glasses prototype and they just have a cheesy head-up display at the top of one of the lenses.”

Smith nodded. “I tested a prototype from a British company that projects onto your retina, so it can work with your entire field of vision and create that transparent effect. Great idea but the images were blurry and every time the glasses moved on your face, the image would break up. Maybe Dresner’s nailed it.”

“I’ll admit it’s a little cool,” she said with a shrug. “But hell if I’m spending the rest of my life walking around in glasses that make me look like I’m using a chain saw.”

Dresner looked down from the stage and focused on a man in the second row, his surprised face suddenly filling the screen. “Let’s make a phone call. Bob, why don’t you stand up?”

He did, looking self-consciously at the crowd behind him. Either he was a damn fine actor, or this wasn’t a setup.

“Now, I know that Bob is a good citizen and turned his cell off before he came in. But could I bother you to turn it back on?”

Dresner looked out over his audience again. The phone icon at the edge of the screen expanded and the address book went immediately from names starting with “A” to names starting with “S,” finally scrolling to “Stamen, Bob.” A moment later, the tinny sound of Blondie’s “Call Me” filled the room.

The increasingly nervous-looking man answered and his voice was transmitted through the PA system by Dresner’s Merge. “Hello?”

“Hi, Bob. How’re things?”

“Good.”

Janine leaned forward, squinting at Dresner as he chatted. “How is he controlling those icons and scrolling through the names? Is it tracking his eye movements?”

Smith had been wondering the same thing. “I don’t think so. You’d see the screen image moving around. He was looking straight at the crowd when that app opened.”

“Maybe this was all set up beforehand. Maybe the system’s just in some kind of demonstration mode.”

“I don’t know. Maybe…”

Dresner pulled out his Bluetooth headset and laid it on the lectern before walking back to center stage. “I’ve always hated those things. They hurt my ear. How about you, Bob?”

“Um…” Stamen said, missing a few beats as he wrestled with the same thing everyone else was — why was Dresner’s voice still being picked up by the PA and why could he still hear the phone call? “I don’t like them.”

“Exactly! Me neither. So I thought, What if I just had a tiny microphone built into a custom cap that clamps to one of my back teeth? And on top of that, what if I had a much smaller and more sophisticated version of my hearing implants route sound directly to my brain?”

There was complete silence in the auditorium for a few seconds before everyone started talking at once. The tone wasn’t necessarily excitement, though. More of an impressed skepticism apparently shared by the young woman sitting next to him.

“Okay, he’s definitely into cool nerd territory now, but if you find your Bluetooth so uncomfortable, there are a bunch of companies that will make you a custom earpiece. That’s gotta be cheaper and easier than getting a dentist to make something that fits on your tooth and getting studs screwed into your skull.”

“I dunno,” Smith responded. “I’ve worked with a lot of people who use Dresner’s hearing system and they all say it aches a little for a couple of days and then you forget the studs are even there until they need to be recharged. And he’s saying he made them even smaller.”

She scowled and leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her chest again. If there was any great truth, it was that her generation was virtually impossible to impress where technology was concerned. They always wanted more.

“Thanks, Bob. I’ll talk to you later,” Dresner said. The color drained from the phone icon and it tucked itself back into the side of the massive screen.

He started pacing again, the audience following his every move. “I’ve had terrible vision my entire life and I know I look ridiculous with these huge lenses but I’ve never been able to get comfortable with contacts.”

He took his glasses off and let them hang loosely in his hand. Instead of the screen behind him suddenly tracking the floor, the image of the audience held steady but turned distorted and blurry.

“I don’t get it,” Janine muttered, but Smith ignored her. He was pretty sure he did understand, but he was having a hard time believing what his mind was telling him.

Illegible words appeared across the top of the screen and he concentrated on them as they slowly came into focus.

PROCESSING VISION CORRECTION

Confused silence prevailed as Dresner returned to the lectern and leaned against it. “So then I thought, if I can send sound to my audio cortex, why can’t I send images to my visual cortex?”

This time there were no voices at all. The only sound was of a hundred people attacking their cell phones in a desperate effort to be the first to text word of Dresner’s new miracle to the world.