Happy 21st 2015! Back to the Future!

Back to the Future!

Image source Universal Pictures

By October 21 2015 according to the 1980s sci-fi film, we would be living in a world of flying cars, hoverboards, and seld-tying shoelace. And that day has actually arrived TODAY!

Watch teens React to "Back to the Future II"

• The Plot

In this zany sequel, time-traveling duo Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) return from saving Marty's future son from disaster, only to discover their own time transformed. In this nightmarish version of Hill Valley, Marty's father has been murdered and Biff Tannen, Marty's nemesis, has profited.  And when Marty starts to ask about the almanac, he wants to kill him too.

Doc also finds out that he was imprisoned in an asylum, so the two go back to 1955, the night of the Enchantment-Under-The-Sea party in an effort to take back the almanac. a quest to repair the space-time continuum

• Take a look at our heavy comparison of 2015s below.

1. Hoverboards
Probably the single most iconic prop from the 1989 movie is Marty’s futuristic hoverboard, which updates the 1980s-style skateboard while removing that pesky tradition of wheels. Marty’s board in the movie floats freely over any surface, including water — kind of like a radically miniaturized hovercraft. Hoverboards are indeed a reality in 2015, though they’re nowhere near as versatile as Marty’s ride. The California-based startup Arx Pax just unveiled its Hendo 2.0 hoverboard, which levitates on a magnetic cushion atop specially prepared metallic surfaces and half pipes.

2. Flying Cars
Science fiction movies have given us flying cars before, but few are as cool as Doc Brown’s tricked-out, time-traveling DeLorean. (Well, one other flying car comes to mind.) In Back to the Future Part II, flying vehicles are commonplace circa 2015. In the current timeline we call reality, not so much — although you may be surprised at what some manufacturers are getting up to. For example, the MIT spinoff company Terrafugia has already built a street-legal (and FAA-approved) auto-airplane hybrid. It’s called the Transition, and it’s just one of several flying cars in various stages of development worldwide.

3. Tablet computers 
When Doc meets Marty by the clocktower, he is brandishing what looks like an iPad-style tablet computer. Today tablets are commonplace, with 233 million units expected to be sold in 2015, an 8 per cent increase from 2014.

4. Self-Tying Shoes
It’s a throwaway sight gag in the film, but one that has had a remarkable shelf life in the public imagination: Marty tries on a pair of fictional future Nike shoes and is pleasantly surprised when the laces tie themselves. As a technological breakthrough, it’s not a hoverboard or a flying car, but still — it would be kind of nice. Well, stay tuned. Nike designers have hinted that the company is indeed working on a 2015 release of the film’s Nike MAG shoes with, yes, “Power Lace” technology. The company has even filed a patent, evidently.


5. Fingerprint recognition/Biometrics

When Back to the Future Part II was released, the field of biometric authentication — fingerprint readers, retinal scanners — was more fiction than science, at least in the realm of everyday applications. It was rather radical to see characters in the movie use their thumbprint to open locks or pay for cabs. Biometric systems are everywhere these days, of course. We’ve got facial-recognition algorithms in our cameras and fingerprint scanners on our phones. We’re likely to see even more of this in coming years, as new iterations of biometric technology replace traditional retail and authentication systems.

6. VR Headsets
During one scene in the fictional 2015 of Back to the Future Part II, Marty Jr. and his sister wear “video glasses” to the dinner table so they can watch TV and take video calls while multitasking the usual family time obligations. Yeah, that’s hitting a little close to home. The film’s flash-forward conception of head-mounted perpetual connectivity seems eerily prescient when compared with something like Google Glass. The McFly family’s gizmos also resemble the next wave of full-featured VR headsets — like the Oculus Rift and its competitors — expected to hit retail shelves in force early next year.


7. Camera Drones
When bad guy Biff is arrested in one of the film’s 2015 sequences, a USA Today camera drone descends to record the incident. Look closely and you’ll see the clunky-looking drone even has a logo sticker on the side that reads: “Always There First.” Spooky. In our actual 2015, camera drones are indeed crowding the skies, causing weird problems and prompting fierce debate about issues of surveillance, safety and public policy. Just this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced plans to require even recreational UAV operators to register their drones.

source
yahoo.com - Glenn McDonald writes about the intersections of technology and culture
www.telegraph.co.uk