IDF: Intel opens IDF with the Tomorrow Project

Intel’s annual developer forum opened today in San Francisco, with a media-only ‘day zero’ event.

The event focused on Intel’s ‘Tomorrow Project’, Intel’s initiative to ‘have conversations about the future’, which has been running for the past three years. It has thus far spawned The Tomorrow Project Anthology, a collection of reality-inspired science-fiction stories, and the upcoming Vintage Tomorrows, a novel and documentary film on the Steampunk subculture.

The Tomorrow Project panel is led by the company’s resident futurist Brian David Johnson and features technology analysts Rob Enderle and Kathleen Maher, science fiction authors Madeline Ashby and Karl Schroeder, clinical psychologist Margie Morris, and research scientist Doug Carmean.

Johnson opened the day’s discussion by stating that as the scale of computing devices moves toward zero (becomes progressively smaller over time), “we can turn anything into a computer”. Johnson gave examples from a table, to a shirt, to the human body itself.

Much of the panel discussion focused on human-computer interfaces and relationships, with allusions to Intel Labs’ ‘Display without Boundaries’ project, which allows any surface to be used as a display. We’ll see that project demonstrated later today in the Intel Labs showcase – details and photographs to follow.

Harley Ogier is attending IDF 2012 as a guest of Intel.