Tech travel
BRAVE NEW WORLD
From Podcast tour guides to virtual hotel concierges and 3-D city street mapping, technology is changing the way we travel.
Words by Sally Howard
Life moves pretty fast,” counseled the titular hero in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the classic ’80s coming-of-age movie set against Chicago’s soaring skyline. “If you don’t stop and look around you every once in a while, you could miss it.”
But perhaps we can be forgiven if we do miss some of the details in this fast-changing, tech-driven landscape. Today’s consumer is bombarded with a baffl ing conveyor belt of new gadgetry— from Wi-fi to the Blackberry, MP3s and GPS—that help make life more effi cient, yet more complicated. So it’s little surprise that many of us yearn for the imaginings of a more innocent age: that simple, silver future where we all wear tinfoil pants and dine on pills.
Of course, much of 21st-century reality has realized 20th-century art—see the Jetsons-style two-wheeled Segway transporters recently given the seal of approval by law offi cers in Chicago, Washington, DC, and the Mall of America, or Knight Rider-like talking cars that warn of traffi c conditions ahead.
But this brave new century is a more sophisticated beast than Wells and Orwell could have imagined. Today, it’s technological invention as much as art that makes the imagination soar. How else to explain breathless propositions such as the “intelligent fridge” that scans bar codes to reorder milk when you’re running low; speaking utility bills programmed with a reminder to pay; or newspapers that refresh daily onto fl exible electronic paper? These are just a few of the many developments posited as indispensable to the high-tech home of the very near future.
Perhaps the marriage of travel and tech—happy bedfellows since the heady days of air travel’s inauguration—is easier to get a handle on than these surreal domestic tech timesavers. However, nowhere is technology revolutionizing travel more than back on the ground.
The much-vaunted internet-based world-mapping services, such as brand leader Google Earth (www.earth.google. com), are enabling travelers to view their destination in minute detail from the comfort of their home offi ce before they even board the plane. Using local search functions and satellite images, Google Earth creates a three-dimensional view of buildings and terrain in cities across the US, which can be tilted or rotated at the viewer’s whim.
Rivals have been quick to scramble for lucrative market share, with Microsoft launching a satellite imagery mapping service (www.teraserver.microsoft.com), and Amazon’s A9.com pairing local information with digital photos of businesses in several cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Detroit.
When you do manage to wrest yourself from the glow of your laptop screen, tech advances mean it has never been easier to negotiate unfamiliar big-city streets. Billed as the humble guidebook’s nemesis, Podcast city guides, or “soundseeing tours,” will soon be as ubiquitous as those telltale white apple earphones.
And a babble of disparate voices is crowding this new market for downloadable audio information. They range from Soundwalk (www.soundwalk. com), which offers area backstreet guides written by locals (13 guides to New York, including a Bronx graffi ti walk) to Talking Street’s history-focused guides (www.talkingstreet.com), narrated by Ben Stiller and Sigourney Weaver. The more formal CVB-sanctioned Sounds For Sights (www.soundsforsights.com) covers New York, Washington, DC, and Boston, and annual subscription service www.tourgi.com covers San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston and Chicago. All of the above offer the ability to install a stop-startable tour guide into your pocket MP3 player, hand-held computer or cell phone, and are downloadable from the web or from CD.
One enthusiastic proponent of podcasting is Manhattan’s Dream Hotel (www.dreamny.com) on 55th and Broadway, which offers guests iPods preloaded with Soundwalk products. The digital tours are in perfect synch with Dream’s other hi-tech features—guest rooms bathed in otherworldly blue lighting and glass-bubble elevators transporting you to the minimal rooftop bar.
Large chains such as InterContinental are also in talks with technology providers to revolutionize your hotel stay. The most promising service is the “virtual concierge,” a live person on a screen in your room who can see as you approach and interact with you, booking theater tickets or arranging to have your laundry picked up. Other hotels are forming relationships with cell phone providers to deliver concierge content to guests through their phones. Once you sign on, the fi rm will develop personal profi les to second-guess your needs.
And the days when baffl ed motorists are forced to wrestle with a road map at a stop sign are numbered. The darling of drivers traveling to unfamiliar locations, GPS (global positioning system) technology is soon to become much cheaper, meaning it will become standard in most vehicles. With the launch of a new GPS satellite within the next three years, both speed and accuracy are set to improve. GPS technology will soon become widely accessible through mobile phones too, with services such as Wayfi nder Navigator offering cyclists, drivers and pedestrians an overview of their current position, traffi c conditions ahead and instructions on how to reach their destination.
Wi-fi technology has exploded across the country in the past few years and is the innovation that’s perhaps done most to revolutionize life for the everyday traveler. Wi-fi permits anyone with an enabled computer or digital hand-held device to access the internet at high speeds within a 300-foot radius of the router. Routers, as most laptop-carrying travelers will know, pepper the streets of big cities, meaning you’re never far from an internet hotspot, be it paid through services such T-Mobile and Cometa, or free via a friendly café. Wi-fi technology is also the killer app for many of the current travel gadgets, such as internet phone calling headsets, which allow the user to make free phone calls worldwide when roaming around in an open Wi-fi space.
It may make you wonder where the roller coaster of innovation will carry us next. If you think you have a handle on where new technology will lead us, why not join www.longbets.org, a group of bored geeks who bet on the distant future? However, it would take remarkable prescience to top biologists Steven Austad and Jay Olshansky, who have placed a bet with each other over whether someone alive in 2000 will live to 150 with their mind intact—a trust fund will pay out $500 million to the winner’s heirs in 2150. I’m betting they’ll wear their best tinfoil pants for the celebration party…
2026 The way the world could be in 20 years…
Billboards
Will be triggered by tags in our clothing—and fl ash up ads customized to our consumer profi le.
Bricks
Electronic identifi ers will allow an architect to walk around a half-fi nished school or hospital and see an image of the building on their laptop.
Books and newspapers
Will be downloaded onto electronic paper that can be rolled up and stuffed in our pockets.
Haptics
Touch technology will allow you to do everything from shaking hands to fi st fi ghting online.
Radio frequency ID chips
Chips will be embedded in everything. For example, chips in clothes will program your phone to different settings, depending on whether you are wearing work or casual attire.
Skin
Has conductive properties that will be used to link electronic devices around the body. Earrings will read our pulse rates, and bracelet monitors will analyze the composition of our sweat.
Food packaging
Will contain microchips so refrigerators can read the expiration date and order more when the product is about to expire.