When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in 2007 he spent some time talking about its sensors - the capacitive multitouch sensors in the screen that let you use your bioelectric finger as the best pointing device ever, the accelerometer that triggered it to rotate the interface when you rotated the phone, the ambient light sensor that adjusted brightness to fit the environment, the proximity sensor that turned off the screen and capacitance to save power and avoid accidental touch events when you held the phone up to your face. Over the course of the next year, Jobs also introduced Wi-Fi mapping and then GPS so the iPhone could chart location, and later still, a magnometer and gyroscope so it could understand direction, angle, and rotation around gravity. From the very beginning, the iPhone was aware.
The awareness was bi-directional as well. As the iPhone connected to Wi-Fi networks, so could it be used to map more networks. As the iPhone bounced off cell-towers and satellites to learn its location, so could its location be learned and information inferred from it, for example, traffic conditions. As devices got smarter, so to did the networks connecting them. It was one, and it was many.
Microphones had been part of mobile phones since their inception, transmitting and recording the sounds of the world around them. They improved with noise cancellation and beam-forming, but they cam alive with Siri. An App Store app and service bought by Apple and integrated into the iPhone in 2011, it made the microphone smart. All of a sudden, the iPhone could not only listen, but understand. Based on something previously said, it could put the next thing said into relation and context. Rather than simply transmit, it could act.
Google Now, though lacking Siri's charm, was far less reserved about its scope. Hooked into the calendar and web browser, email and location, and a bevy of internet information sources, it wouldn't wait for a request, it would push data when time or conditions made it relevant. With the Moto X, Google took it further still, integrating context and natural language coprocessors that could listen constantly for queries and parse them faster locally all without burning precious battery life. For those for whom "always listening" didn't cross the privacy line, it enabled an entirely new level of functionality. The phone could now be there, waiting not only for a touch, but for a word.
Apple introduced their own coprocessor in 2013 as well, the M7 motion chip. Not only would it allow the existing sensors to persist, recording motion data even while the phone's main processor slept in a low-power state, but that persistence would enable new features. Some, like pedometers, better empowered existing apps by co-opted functionality that previously required accessories. Others, thanks to that persistence and that data becoming part of the whole, created new functionality like a system that could realize when a person switched from driving to walking and record the location where they parked, making the car easier to find later, or realize when a person fell asleep and reduce network activity to preserve power. It meant the phone not only knew where and how it was, but what was happening to it.
Cameras like iSight have been slowly evolving as well. Thanks to Apple taking ownership of their own chipsets, image signal processors (ISP) could not only better balance, expose, and focus on images, but could detect multiple faces and, eventually, merge multiple images to provide higher dynamic range (HDR), dynamic exposure, and eliminate instability and motion blur in both the capture and the scene. The software allows the hardware to do far more than optics alone can account for.
Microsoft is already on their second generation visual sensor, the Kinect, and they're using it not only to read a person's movement around them, but to identify people, to try and read their emotional state and some amount of their biometrics. Google has experimented with facial recognition-based device unlock in the past, and Samsung with things like pausing video and scrolling listviews based on eye tracking. Apple has now bought PrimeSense, the company behind the Xbox 360's original Kinect sensor, though their plans for the technology have not yet been revealed. The idea of "always watching" is as controversial, if not more so, than "always listening" but given context and consent, visual sensors could do for the iPhone's eyes what Siri did for its ears. It could make them better understand not just that we are, but who we are.
Touch ID, Apple's fingerprint identity system, is already doing that. It's taken the Home button from a dumb switch to a smart sensor. Instead of verifying people based on a Passcode they know, it identifies people based on what they are. Apple has hired other biometric sensor experts as well, though they haven't yet announced just what exactly they're working on. Yet the idea of devices even more personal than phones, wearable, capable of tracking not only fitness but health, is compelling. Pair them with the concept of Trusted Bluetooth - something you have - to verify identity, and one day what knows people on a biological level could be used to unlock the technological world around them.
And that world is the next great frontier. Phones now know and understand more than ever about their own place in the world, and their owner's, but the world itself remained largely empty and unknowable. iBeacons, also introduced in 2013, could help change that. While satellites orbit the earth, cell towers dot the landscape, and Wi-Fi routers speckle homes, and schools, and business, iBeacons are meant to fill in all the spaces in between, and to provide information beyond just location. Connected via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, it could eventually guide navigation everywhere from inside stores, schools, and buildings, to vast wilderness expanses. iBeacons promise a network as rich as the world around it.
Thanks to the "internet of things" where every device with a radio can also be an iBeacon, and can also sense and transmit it's understanding and capabilities, everything could eventually tie together. Nest already makes connected thermostats and smoke detectors. Nexia already makes connected door locks and security systems. Almost all car companies offer connected automotive options. Eventually, everything that controls environment or will understand that environment and be able to hand over that understanding and control.
Traffic will take a turn for the worse. We'll glance at our wrist, noting we need to leave for our appointment a few minutes earlier. The heat at home will lower. Our car will start. It'll be brand new, but since our environment is in the cloud and our interface projects from the phone, we'll barely notice the seats moving and heating, and the display re-arranging as we get in. The podcast we were listening to in the bedroom will transfer to the car stereo even as the map appears on screen to show us the way. The garage door will open. We'll hit the road. The same delay that made us leave early means we'll be late for our next meeting. Our schedule flows and changes. Notifications will be sent out. We'll arrive at the building and the gate will detects us, know our appointment, and just open. We'll be guided to the next available visitor's parking spot. We'll smile and be recognized and let in, and unobtrusively led to exactly the right office inside. We'll shake hands as the coffee press comes back up, our preference known to the network and our beverage steaming and ready. We'll sit down, the phone in our pocket knowing it's us, telling the tablet in front of us to unlock, allowing it to access our preferences from the cloud, to recreate our working environment.
Meeting done, we'll chit chat and exchange video recommendations, our homes downloading them even as we express our interest. We'll say goodbye even as our car, back in the parking lot, turns on and begins warming up, podcast ready to resume just as soon as we're guided back to it, and into listening range. On the way down, we'll glance at our wrist again, note we need to eat something sweet to keep our energy in balance. A vending machine on the way will be pointed out, the phone in our pocket will authorize a virtual transaction. A nutrient bar will be extended out towards us. We'll grab it, hurry down, and be on our way to work even as our 4K displays in the office powers up and the nightly builds begin to populate the screen, and the tea machine starts brewing a cup, just-in-time, ready and waiting for us...
Right now our phones, tablets, and other mobile devices are still struggling as they awaken and drag themselves towards awareness. It's a slow process, partially because we're pushing the limits of technology, but also because we're pushing the limits of comfort as well. Security will be important, privacy will be important, humanity will be important. If Apple has had one single, relentless purpose over the years, however, it's been to make technology ever more personal, more ever accessible, and so very much more human. Keyboards and mice and multitouch displays are the most visible examples of that purpose. Yet all of those require us to do - to go to the machine and push it around. Parallel to input method there's been a second, quieter revolution going on, one that feels and hears and sees and ultimately not only senses the world and network around it, but is sensed by it. It's a future that will not only follow us, but, in its own way, understand.
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