Source: https://www.ineedamobile.com/
A few decades ago, using a mobile phone meant carrying around a small-briefcase-sized piece of hardware. A few days ago, we saw a video of someone drop his smartphone through the gaps in a grate to see if it would fit. Questionable lines of thinking aside, this technological growth and commensurate physical shrinkage are nothing short of astonishing.
We tend to take it for granted as it happens so slowly, but that makes this development no less important or influential. So what do we see as some as the most interesting and important changes that mobiles have brought into our lives?
Reshaping Classic Industries
One of the most long-underestimated avenues which saw explosive mobile growth came from the world of gaming. In the early days, with games like Snake, most users saw serious mobile gaming as an impossibility. With the advent and proliferation of the smartphone, though, all of that changed. Gaming on mobile today is worth billions of dollars, with hundreds of millions of active players.
While traditional video games certainly expanded into this area with great strides, it was the mobile casino industry that saw some of the most profound shifts. At the early point of smartphones, online casinos had already taken significant cuts out of their brick and mortar cousins, and now services like Mobilebet casino take these changes a step further. Offerings table games, slots, and a wide range of live casino games anywhere on the go, it’s perhaps little surprise that this form of gaming enjoys such success.
Live Maps and Scanning
Among the most popular and least enjoyable things we used to have to do while traveling were physical maps. Unfolding a large map, tearing it slightly, searching for a location, missing a turnoff, and then struggling to refold the map were all parts of the classic travel experience. With mobiles today effectively acting as cheap GPS devices for everyone, these struggles and arguments are rapidly going the way of the dinosaur. If you’ve only recently got into international travel, then you have no idea how much pain you’ve avoided.
The other side of this comes from an incredibly interesting new technology of photogrammetry. This refers to shooting images or videos with a phone and then having programs stitch the components together into a 3D whole. Take the following video, for example:
In this video, the host has scanned his room to turn it into a VR environment, and he’s currently moving around the VR version. In effect, he’s moving around an earlier version of this room while he’s located in the current version of his room. Granted, this is performed with an expensive camera, but mobile phone cameras are not likely to remain far behind for long. While still in the early days, the promise of this technology on mobiles is astounding for both professional and entertainment use.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Speaking of VR, this and AR have finally become viable on a mass scale through mobile phone integration. At this point, these technologies are mostly used for entertainment, but their advantages as tools could also fundamentally reshape how many industries operate.
Imagine being able to quickly see how your house would look in another color, or how your hair would look in a different style. All this can be achieved without the need for first putting down hundreds or thousands of dollars or making a huge mistake.
As a tool, this also could help the medical and construction industries to locate and solve issues, and this is just the start.
Room for Growth
While mobile use in the western world is now ubiquitous, mobile technology still has untapped limits in terms of hardware and software potential. Remember that phones today are much faster than many of the home computers many of us grew up with, and there is no telling how high this bar could reach a decade or two in the future.
Whatever the case, we can’t wait to see what weird and wonderful things come next.
