The 1912 Stockholm Games was the first time electronic stop watches were used; in 1936, the Berlin Games was the first to broadcast live on television; in 1964, the Bullet Train debuted at the Tokyo Summer Olympics; and finally it was in 2002 that we started the instant video replay in the Winter Salt Lake City Games.
All of the above seems so ‘normal’ so let’s see what future generations will be calling ‘normal’ in the next few decades when talking about the Olympic Games coming up in 2020.
Japan plans to have a small army of robots at the beck and call of international visitors. In fact there is going to be so many of them that they are building a village to house them. They will help with directions, translations and transportation.
Uber, DeNA, ZMP, Toyota and Nissan are all vying to have autonomous cars on the road by the time the guests start arriving for the Games. The government will pass new laws by 2017 to regulate these self-driving taxis.
Boeing, Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines, the University of Tokyo and the Government of Japan are working together to make the fuelling of airlines and buses with algae a reality by 2020. Algae is a clean and efficient fuel source, which can cut carbon dioxide by up to 70%.
The Japanese Government is spending $330m to promote hydrogen energy use across the country, for both energising cities as well as for transportation. They are planning to construct an underground pipeline that directly funnels the gas onsite for the Olympic villages. The government envisions 6,000 fuel cell cars by 2020 and 100,000 by 2025, as well as subsidising anyone buying a Toyota Mirai (hydrogen-powered car).
Japan’s largest mobile operator, DoCoMo, in partnership with some global players in the mobile space, are developing and building 5G wireless networks across Japan to give the 500,000 visitors over the Games access to speeds of more than two gigabits a second (compared to 300megabits per second through 4G).
Sharp Electronics and the NHK (Japanese state television network) are determined to show the Games in ultra-vivid 8K – that’s 7,680 by 4,320 pixels or 16 times more pixels than most HD TVs have at the moment. We can look forward to seeing the nose hairs of the athletes for the first time now as well. The current 8K TV sets cost around $130,000 a set, but as we know about technology, soon we will get an 8K set when we buy our next cell phone contract :)
Blog inspired by Fast Company, Futurism, Wired and my own brain :)
