Post by mew151 on Dec 31, 2023 2:56:24 GMT
In 2009, The Science Channel aired the show Popular Science's "Future Of...". This series focused on upcoming technologies and each episode had a specific theme to it ("Future of Play", "Future of Communication", etc). The show ran for one season, with 10(?) episodes airing from August to October of 2009. I don't think it was ever a popular show (more like Unpopular Science am I right?) and after its one season run it faded into even more obscurity. As a kid who loved sciencey gadgets and whatnot, I watched most episodes of this show as they premiered. Even at the time I could feel like this show was struggling, and it seems like my suspicions were mostly correct looking at the impact it made on the internet (not much).
IMDb lists two reviews. One is a... weirdly racist user review, and the other is a Common Sense Media review. The latter review being very surface level as they say there are no sexual references despite the apparent existence of a "future of sex" episode existing.
I believe most of the series is currently lost; it is not available on any streaming services and only exists as a few clips on Youtube. Here's all I've found so far.
Official uploads by The Science Channel
- The theme song. They actually just played the opening sequence during commercial breaks on The Science Channel and that's what this upload is.
- A clip from the "Future of Pleasure" episode
- Part two of the previous clip, which was just given the default title from the filename lol
The rest of the clips I've found are unofficial, mainly uploaded by the people who were featured on the show itself:
- This clip from the "Future of Communication": www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1KAgFkGYzw
- This clip from an unspecified episode on Augmented Reality. I'm guessing it's from "Future of Play": www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXpOTWpAzo
- These two clips from an unspecified episode that is almost certainly from "Future of Communication": www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPsy1yuuLZQ / www.youtube.com/watch?v=7onO3N_Q9SY
- A relatively high quality clip from the "Future of Adventure" episode, including parts of the opening: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ih5Fefp5KU (I had to double take at the mention of a "one man submarine" to see if it was at all related to the submarine incident that happened earlier in 2023)
- A low quality clip from the "Future of Adventure" episode (I think): www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNs5elzZ9gs
- This clip from the "Future of Play": www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDyE2K9tw8E
- This clip from the "Future of Pleasure" on Miracle Fruit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTAPOx2s2M
- A promotional crawl for the show (love that someone has this archived): www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-1-OEikaaw
Oh, and also the show had an official Twitter account which definitely did Tweet like it was 2009: @futureof
While this is a good amount of clips, there is still a LOT missing from this, including some episodes mentioned on IMDb which seem to be completely lost, at least as far as I can tell from Youtube and Google searching. The Science Channel had other clips hosted on their website at some point in the past, but they used a flash-based video player which were not archived by the Wayback Machine.
So... Why am I interested in this show? I'm mainly just a bit curious about it; I watched it when I was a young teen. I'm an adult now and even though it's been less than 15 years since the show aired, a lot of the tech it showcased has actually moved from being janky tech demos into commercial products people use every day (augmented reality, advanced machine translation, people hosting miracle berry tasting parties). But on the other hand... I think there were a few things that I wasn't critical of at the time. Ideas that didn't work out but as a kid I thought they really were going to be the future. I'm interested in seeing that stuff again. There's also just a bit of charm to seeing predictions of the near-future from not that long ago. The show has that kind of... "Frutiger Aero" vibe that's a bit nostalgic to look back on now.
But in particular, there are two key moments from the show I want to revisit since they have stuck in mind a little bit. One of them was just... a cold bar that athletes were supposed to hang on to cool them down quickly while they were exercising to help with performance? At the time I thought was really interesting but since then I haven't seen much mention of it at all. In hindsight, it feels too good to be true and I'd love to look at the clip and see how they explain the technology. Maybe it was an obvious scam, or maybe it was something else? I don't know!
The other key moment I remember is a bit weirder. I think I either misunderstood what the clip was (most likely) or they were just straight up fabricating technology. Or I dreamt it. As far as I remember, they were showing a technology where they could read the "microexpressions" on someone's face, and then exaggerate that on video so their face looked like it was expressing a readable emotion. This moment kind of shocked me at the time; the idea of a computer being able to generate a new facial expression on someone's face just from exaggerating a "microexpression" was really uncanny to me. But now that I have 2020's hindsight... clearly this tech was impossible, at least for 2009 standards. I don't think even the most cutting edge researchers would have been able to produce good enough results until at least the mid 2010's. I really want to go back and find this clip in particular, to verify that I misunderstood what they were actually explaining.
So that's my summary for the show! I think it could use a LMW article, but wanted to post on the forum just in case others had more info. Maybe I'm bad at searching and it isn't lost at all! Let me know if you've seen it or have any more information!
The other key moment I remember is a bit weirder. I think I either misunderstood what the clip was (most likely) or they were just straight up fabricating technology. Or I dreamt it. As far as I remember, they were showing a technology where they could read the "microexpressions" on someone's face, and then exaggerate that on video so their face looked like it was expressing a readable emotion. This moment kind of shocked me at the time; the idea of a computer being able to generate a new facial expression on someone's face just from exaggerating a "microexpression" was really uncanny to me. But now that I have 2020's hindsight... clearly this tech was impossible, at least for 2009 standards. I don't think even the most cutting edge researchers would have been able to produce good enough results until at least the mid 2010's. I really want to go back and find this clip in particular, to verify that I misunderstood what they were actually explaining.
So that's my summary for the show! I think it could use a LMW article, but wanted to post on the forum just in case others had more info. Maybe I'm bad at searching and it isn't lost at all! Let me know if you've seen it or have any more information!
