A look at H+ The Digital Series with its creators | Geek Pick | Geek.com

How do you take a transhumanism story and accidentally turn it into a statement on modern technology? John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tomosso, the writers of a unique webseries called H+ The Digital Series talked to me for a little while and offered up their view of how that exact thing happened.

The Show So Far

One third of the global population is dead. There was no time to do anything, no way you could have possibly known it was coming, but it happened. If this were your future, there?s a relatively good chance that you as the reader of this article would be dead. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe it was the will of a group of people who felt a message needed to be sent and the global balance of power needed to be adjusted. Whatever happened, there?s no way to undo what has been done. A full third of the global population gone in an instant, all because they were connected to a piece of technology that was embedded into their body and mind.

Like any good show, H+ starts off with infinitely more questions than answers. By the time you?ve reached the end of the first season, there?s a dozen new questions for every answer provided, and as the writers of the show sit down to flesh out the script for season two, the real world has already caught up to the story in some interesting ways.

H+ starts off by introducing a world where most of the functions of the smartphone you keep in your pocket have been transferred to an interface that only you can see, because the smartphone is in your brain. Your user interface is projected out in front of you, and the user swipes and pokes at thin air in order to interact with the computer. Your mind is always connected to the Internet as a result of this technology, and the lines between your computer and your body are permanently blurred.

John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tomosso began working on a story back in 2006 that introduced some wild technological advances in order to help tell an exciting cyberpunk-esque story. This story was conceptualized before the rise of the modern smartphone, before touch interfaces were globally commonplace, and before YouTube was seriously viewed as a place for premium content. As the tech world continued to evolve, season one of H+ found itself in a place where it is easier than ever to not only believe the story being told, but to find yourself wanting the tech in the series as though it were being released tomorrow.

Every episode starts from the point of view of one character or another. You look right through their eyes, usually so you can see the digital world as they interact with it. Most of the technology in this show relies on a special interaction with the eyes in one way or another. The embedded technology, for obvious reasons, uses your eyes as projectors for data.

Meanwhile the writers have re-invented netbooks to look like interconnecting slabs of glass that don?t do much until you slide on a special pair of glasses that reveal the operating system only to you. There?s also transparent smartphones that seem to be aware of when there?s a pair of eyes gazing on them, and shows the user information based on the area they are in and the activities they are currently involved with. It?s so easy to see how current technology is already headed down these paths, and it?s really exciting to watch.

Moore?s Law and CyberPunk

During my interview with John and Cosimo, the two took a look back at the concepts they researched heavily in order to integrate them as if they were advanced future concepts that are now incredibly common. In 2006, where smartphones were really just PDAs with very slow Internet connections, it was impossible to guess that we?d have gotten as far as we have in less than ten years: an always on, always connected generation of users that treat Android and iOS as though they have been around forever and will continue to exist for as long as they are alive; cloud services that act as household names, powerful enough that tablets can be used as personal computers. In many ways, the technology in H+ is just as sci-fi now as our current generation of technology would seem to someone in 2006.

As you jump around in time and explore the technology in the show, you come across the antagonist group that is somehow responsible for the attack that killed so many people. This group uses a piece of technology that is similar in many ways to the now mainstream H+ units, but intentionally setup to be fundamentally different in what it is used for. Where H+ is beautifully designed with an elegant user interface that allows the user to glide through a connected world, you can only do what the creator allows you to do with it. Meanwhile this rival piece of technology is not nearly as pretty, but highly functional.

It?s hinted in several points during the first season that the more technical implant is much more powerful, but its only available to a limited group of people. This unnamed rival implant also seems to grant mental and physical enhancements to the host body, clearly demonstrating a different relationship with the host body.

John and Cosimo both laughed when I drew the immediate parallel between iOS and Android, and reminded me that the concepts they had been working on were on the table before either of those platforms were on the market. The truth is that there have always been tech rivalries like the ones we experience today, though Cabrera pointed out that the intensity with which users embrace the Android ecosystem certainly reminded him of concepts that he and De Tomasso have sewn the seeds for with the rival group in the show.

Google?s other buzzworthy yet unreleased tech, Project Glass, has caught the eye of these two writers, especially as they see the excitement for that tech as a direct comparison to how they imagined the world would have responded initially to the implant they invented for the series. John Cabrera commented several times about how eager he was to use Glass and see how close to he and Cosimo?s vision of the future we?ve really come.

Source: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/a-look-at-h-the-digital-series-with-its-creators-2013036/

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