You have to love the look on this guy’s face as he holds up a very early production DVD. Did it have to be The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? The photo dates from 1996 and it’s part of Paleofuture’s photo essay on the CES’s of the past. Here you’ll find electronic e-bibles, mind wave readers, and some of the ugliest virtual reality gear ever.
It just goes to show you that the state of the art in tech is always changing (although honestly the Oculus Rift does look like it comes from the 1990s) and what looks cool to us this year probably will look utterly ridiculous in the future. Still, it’s a tantalizing look at what could have been and what actually was. It’s also a reminder that some of today’s “breakthrough” technologies like smart watches have been tried before. If you don’t remember the devices shown in these pictures, that’s because they failed in the market. Think about that for a second.
