Foreword

When I was young, I told my dad that I'd rather own a computer than a home. Of course, that was back when a 4K Data General Nova cost more than a house in Silicon Valley.

Today, just a few decades later, we all carry a computer that is thousands of times more powerful than the computers of my childhood. Computers used to be huge, but today's tech is getting so small, we can wear them. The $250 Apple AirPods Pros have more compute power inside them than an iPhone 4 and certainly a lot more than that Data General computer that cost tens of thousands of dollars back in the 1970s.

People often ask me what I would engineer if I were starting out today. When I worked at HP we built calculators and huge laser printers. Currently, there's tons of research being done in Spatial Computing, which includes the hardware and software surrounding Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. All of these bring interesting engineering problems that would keep me interested for sure. I see the potential in all of them to bring computing to people in a way that is ubiquitous, more powerful, and far more personal.

Spatial Computing will move computing from something that sits on a desk, or that you hold in your hands, to something you move around with. There, you'll be joined by robots, virtual beings, and assistants. I'm optimistic that Spatial Computing will be used to serve us with a deeper understanding of ourselves, and give us wild new ways to experience the world and new ways to become more productive in businesses and classrooms.

Children soon will have "imagination machines" on their faces. That will be in contrast to the toys I grew up with. One of my favorites was a transistor radio, which had six transistors (a modern phone has billions of transistors, by comparison). That radio brought the world to me. Spatial Computing will open up new worlds to today's kids that simply didn't exist when I was growing up.

To me I'm excited by what the children of today will do with these technologies and hope they remember that life is about happiness. Smiling and laughing is good. Hearing music in new ways is good. Telling new jokes to each other is good. Spatial Computing can do all that and can bring new ways to learn, work together, and travel the world to boot.

What Irena Cronin and Robert Scoble have done in their book The Infinite Retina is provide readers with an accessible, useful and entertaining guide to all of the latest advances in Spatial Computing and how this new technology is influencing and priming the way forward for a host of new innovations that will affect how we live our lives, how we go to work, and how we communicate with each other for years to come.

– Steve Wozniak