Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
The ‘Future’ is now
As fans celebrate, here’s a look at what ‘Back to the Future’ got right about tech
It’s often said that life imitates art. That’s certainly been the case with many of the gadgets envisioned in the classic 1989 film “Back to the Future II.”
In the film, — starring Michael J. Fox as “Marty McFly” and Christopher Lloyd as “Doc Emmett Brown” — McFly time travels to Oct. 21, 2015, to save his kids.
The future depicted in the film features a slew of gizmos that may have seemed far-fetched in 1989, but today are pretty practical aspects of everyday life.
The future, it seems, has arrived.
Let’s start with flat-screen, wallmounted televisions.
Back in 1989 TVs were ... well, big. Many of them were three feet deep or more and they weighed a ton. McFly, who in the film had a flat-screen mounted over his fireplace in 2015, would be pleased with today’s flatscreen, wall-mounted TVs, which offer far higher resolution and much less weight. And tablets? Those are seen in the movie when a member of the Hill Valley Preservation Society holds out one to McFly to sign a petition to save the clock tower. Not so sci-fi today, when it seems nearly everyone has one. From Apple iPads to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 4, it seems the film’s writers had a portal into
the actual future.
And video calls? The movie really nailed this one. From FaceTime on your iPhone to Skype on your laptop, video chats have become commonplace for many of us.
David Cearley, a vice president and senior fellow at Gartner Inc., a Connecticut-based technology research firm, isn’t surprised that “Back to the Future” got so many things right.
“You have to remember that it’s the tech visionaries who tend to make these movies,” he said. “They didn’t make these things out of whole cloth. There were parts of the movie that were envisioned by technology futurists, who among other things, look to the future.”
Many of the “Back to the Future” devices that have shown up in real life grew out of a natural progression, according to Cearley.
“They were extrapolating key value propositions,” he said. “They asked the question, ‘How do we make these technologies work?’ That’s a powerful inducement.”
Smart glasses
“Back to the Future” also featured multipurpose smart glasses that users wore to watch TV or answer calls. These days, we can use Google Glass and Oculus Rift for similar tasks, although neither has quite caught on in the mainstream.
Google Glass allows users to record their surroundings and interactions with people, connect to the Internet and even have foreign language signs instantly translated to English.
A nifty concept, to be sure. But the glasses have elicited privacy concerns because some people worry that users might film or photograph them without their consent.
Eric Shuss, who attended a wearable tech conference in Pasadena last year, has grappled with that issue. Shuss said people immediately become uneasy when he wears the glasses in public.
“I mostly use them at conferences and conventions because it allows me to record my surroundings very easily,” the 50-year-old Orange County resident said. “But it’s too distracting for day-to-day use because people believe you’re recording them all the time.”
Fingerprint recognition
The film also featured fingerprint recognition, another technology that has become commonplace today. Some of Apple’s iPhones have this as a security feature, so only the phone’s owner can access its data. And fingerprint access to buildings has been around for years.
“Fingerprint technology has evolved in the last 20 years with hardware and algorithms that are much more sophisticated,” said John Trader, a spokesman for M2SYS Technology, an Atlanta-based biometric identification company. “But it can’t be used by a certain percentage of the population, including some people who work in manufacturing or construction because the work they do tends to wear down their fingerprints.”
Trader said M2SYS is involved in a variety of biometric solutions that are more advanced than fingerprint recognition — and far more accurate. Iris recognition is a prime example.
With this technology, a camera scans the person’s eye and creates a digital image. A series of circles and lines are then added to the image to separate various areas of the iris for analysis. The pattern of light and dark areas of the iris ultimately provide a digital “iris code” that is unique to each person.
“It’s extremely hygienic and can be used in hospital settings,” Trader said.
Hoverboards
Perhaps the most famous prop in the movie was the hoverboard. In one scene, Marty McFly climbs aboard one of the gravity-defying devices to escape three thugs. While Hoverboards will likely not be available to the average consumer anytime soon, they do exist. Arx Pax in Los Gatos, Calif. has designed the Hendo Hover, which uses Magnetic Field Architecture to hover about an inch above the ground.
“We are thrilled that our Magnetic Field Architecture technology can bring things to life that were seen to be impossible, and now made possible, like the Hendo hoverboard,” said Greg Henderson, the company’s cofounder and CEO.
The board’s lift is achieved by two discshaped engines that are each equipped with an array of spinning magnets arranged in an alternating north/south pole pattern. When the engines pass over a conductive surface they create an “eddy” current, which also creates an opposing magnetic field.
The effect is the same as holding two magnets together with their north or south poles facing each other. When placed together, they repel each other and — varoom! Liftoff.
Alternative energy sources
The movie also featured a “Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor” that could instantly convert household waste into nuclear energy to power the time machine’s flux capacitor and time circuits. We obviously don’t have time machines yet. But two companies — Clean Energy in Newport Beach and Houston-based Waste Management — are turning landfill gas into low carbon fuel for cars and trucks.
Their work is also helping California reach its pollution reduction goals.
“We capture the methane from landfills, remove some of the impurities and turn that into natural gas,” Clean Energy spokesman Jason Johnston said. “It’s used in the transportation industry for things like trash trucks, refuse vehicles and buses. We just did a big launch with the city of Santa Monica.”
Most of Santa Monica’s fleet of 200 buses will be converted to Clean Energy’s renewable, natural gas, he said.
Self-lacing shoes and flying cars
Nike innovation chief Tinker Hatfield confirmed earlier this year that the shoe company is working to create Power Laces, which will mirror the self-lacing shoes Marty McFly wore in “Back to the Future.” Great technology for anyone who’s in a hurry.
And the flying cars featured in the movie? Terrafugia, a Woburn, Mass. based company, has created a road-legal aircraft called the Transition, and the company is also developing a flying car called the TF-X. Both are designed to be able to fold their wings, enabling the vehicles to also operate as street-legal road vehicles. They will also fit in a standard, single-car garage.
“We hope to deliver the Transition in 2017,” said John Bourneuf, the company’s vice president of development. “We’ve built and tested two of them.”
With a cruising air speed of 100 miles per hour and a 400-mile range, the Transition will tentatively be priced between $350,000 and $400,000, he said.
“You can pull it out of your garage, drive to the landing strip, fold the wings down and fly,” he said. “And a big advantage is that if you get into bad weather you can land and drive it because it’s a street-legal aircraft.”
Company spokeswoman Dagny Dukach said the Transition should appeal to pilots and others who want the convenience of dual transportation, as well as business people who frequently make long trips to get to meetings and other functions.
Transition will run on premium, unleaded gas for both in-flight and street use and it will get 35 miles per gallon on the road.
Terrafugia hopes to bring the TF-X to market in 2023 , tentatively priced at around $250,000 to $400,000. The company figures the TF-X will appeal to the luxury sports car market.
The TF-X is especially convenient because it initially achieves vertical lift through the use of two powerful rotors, so a runway is not needed.
Once the car is airborne, the rotors retract and the car’s rear-mounted hybrid engine takes over, propelling the car forward. The rotors are later re-deployed to bring the car to a safe, vertical landing.
“We’ve built a 1/10th scale model that will go into a wind tunnel at the end of this year,” Bourneuf said. “It’s pretty exciting. This is really our vision for the future and it will revolutionize personal transportation.”