Back to the Future from CES 2015
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- There was a common refrain at last week's Consumer Electronic Show: The future had arrived.
You know, the time of tomorrow, as described in Back to the Future II, the 1989 time-traveling sequel to the 1985 original, which just happened to take place in 2015. Or better yet, the 2052 future of the space-age cartoon many of us watched as kids, The Jetsons.
At CES, we had cars that could drive and park themselves, retail robots that greeted and served you, sensors for every part of your body to interact with your smartphone and mini drones that could go one better than a selfie by following you and snapping your image from a few feet above. There were even virtual reality headsets capable of knocking out your senses with a body blow.
Our future is here, and it's cooler than Hollywood writers imagined.
Okay, we don't have flying cars and hoverboards, but "I'm not disappointed," says Adrienne LaFrance, tech editor of The Atlantic, who is such a fan of the Future sequel, she's watched it every year since it came out.
"Self-driving cars are way cooler," she said. "If we want to fly somewhere, we can take an airplane. A self-driving car is better, because it can change lives."
In Back to the Future II, Marty McFly and his friends watched entertainment on a new kind of TV that resembled a movie screen. It didn't have a round tube, but instead was flat, and the McFly's could make video calls on it.
That's fine, but we've got a better model. We can make calls, play games and listen to music on these flat panel sets -- and best of all, we've got 4K ultra HD resolution.
The McFly's get their news updates via, ahem, faxes! That is so 1990s.
We've got the Internet and smartphones, which could do more than probably even Steve Jobs could imagine when he introduced the iPhone in 2007.
At first, they let us talk, surf the net, check our e-mail and play games. But now, in this age of the Internet of Things, it seemed that every product at CES was connected to the Net and smartphone apps in some way.
Our future lets us open our doors with our phones, start a car, even turn on and off the lights. And let's not forget about all those CES products like washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, stoves and cars that are connected to apps, able to send us alerts when it's time to turn them on and off, or in the case of the car, get it to the mechanic.
The McFly family wore video glasses to enjoy entertainment without a big screen. We can go one better, by doing that and taking photos of people non-stop, talking and reading texts, via Google Glass.
(That, of course, is the product that was virtually non-existent at CES. Google Glass clearly has seen it's day. But with so many products focused on wearable tech at CES, surely we'll see a wearable glass the mass market wants in the coming months.)
Watching the opening of the Jetsons on YouTube, I was struck by what the folks at Hanna-Barbera thought possible 100 years from the time they were writing it, in 1962. Beyond the cars that fold into suitcases, there were robots that made lunch and greeted you when you come home, along with smart toothbrushes and doors that open automatically.
All things we can do now.
I was shocked in the theme song, when I saw George hand over some pre-historic cash to wife Jane to buy goods. Dollars. Remember those? They seem so last century in this age of credit cards and apps like Venmo and PayPal, don't they?
So OK, the flying cars are probably not coming in our lifetime. But did any writer of the Jetsons or Back to the Future dream of that other flying accessory, the drone?
Now we can have a camera that follows our every move, from the skies. And there were more than 100 drones of every shape, size and color at CES.
I love our future. It's cooler than the one in the movies.
Follow Jefferson Graham on Twitter.