A number of recent or ongoing developments give an indication of what technologies we might be using in the future to create, use, and exploit our digital objects. They are described below. The various dates quoted are taken from the internet’s Wikipedia.<\/p>\n
GPS position data in photo tags:<\/strong> It has now become a standard camera feature to include location data in the metadata tag of every photo taken, by using GPS position data. The tags also include full details about the camera, the settings used, and of course the date. All this data is acquired automatically and placed in metadata tags which are mostly hidden unless specifically looked at. Music recognition: <\/strong>Shazam and other internet services identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played through the microphone on the device being used to run the relevant application. Shazam first started operating in 2002 and this kind of functionality is now well known and widely used.<\/p>\n Face recognition:<\/strong> Google\u2019s Picasa programme was one of the first photo management applications to offer a face recognition capability in 2008. Since then, the function has become a commonplace feature provided in a host of applications and mobile phone apps. Not only can you search for a face within a set of photos, but also across the whole internet. Image recognition:<\/strong> Google\u2019s image search capability was amazing when it first came out in 2001; but was even more astounding when a reverse image search function was added in 2011 which searched for images similar to one uploaded or specified. These soon became heavily used functions which most Internet users were familiar with. They were further extended in the mid-2020s by AI systems which were able to identify music, faces, objects, anything. Smart home devices:\u00a0 <\/strong>The market for systems to control a wide variety of home facilities including heating, lighting, doorbells, and security cameras, continues to grow. This is currently the most prominent aspect of a general idea referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) in which communicating chips are built into products to assist their manufacture, use and maintenance. Memory Reminders:<\/strong> Many mobile phones and social media systems now possess a memory function which regularly presents historical photos and posts to their users. These remind people of what they were thinking and doing, and who they were interacting with, in the past; and reawakens their memory of those events. The culture of sharing and being public:<\/strong> Today, a great many people want to upload, share objects, and get ‘likes’ in social media systems. There is less interest in private reflections, diaries and private photo collections. The emergence of Virtual Reality:<\/strong> Virtual Reality (VR) has been under development since the 1960s, but has still not become mainstream technology. However, several of the major technology companies have products; and some use is being made of it in computer gaming. The industry is searching for a killer application; in the meantime, however, there is a continuing belief that the technology will eventually be widespread. Voice interaction:<\/strong> Voice recognition products emerged in the 1980s and have been getting better and better ever since. However, the introduction of smart speakers, starting with Amazon’s Echo product in 2015, hugely increased the public’s familiarity with speaking to a computer. The Echo employed an interface called Alexa and was used initially to access Amazon’s huge music library and the internet. The ability to stand in one\u2019s kitchen and suddenly desire to hear a particular piece of music and to say, for example, “Alexa, play the album ‘No Secrets’ by Carly Simon” and to have it start playing 5 seconds later, was – and is – amazing, and is indicative of how easy it will be in the future to pull up any of our digital objects including photos and mementos. In the mid-2020s the introduction of internet-based AI models which could be literally chatted to, cemented the use of voice as a standard mechanism to interact with computers. The arrival of publicly-accessible AI:<\/strong> By the mid-2020s a number of publicly-accessible AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude, were available on the Internet and were being used by huge numbers of people for a wide variety of tasks, some of which have already been mentioned in this tutorial. Significant numbers were simply treating them as friends to chat to throughout the day – and night. At the time of writing in 2026, development of AI’s capabilities was proceeding apace, with no-one really knowing what the end result would be. However, one way or the other, it seems that AI will have a huge impact on human life; and consequently the whole of unit 6.3 is devoted to its potential Impact on collecting.<\/p>\n To previous Unit<\/a>\u00a0 || \u00a0To Contents<\/a>\u00a0<\/span> || \u00a0To next Unit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A number of recent or ongoing developments give an indication of what technologies we might be using in the future to create, use, and exploit our digital objects. They are described below. The various dates quoted are taken from the … Continue reading
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: Systems will increasingly use all available information and data sources to build up a set of knowledge about each digital object. These other sources may include calendar systems, emails, texts, social media and the internet.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects:<\/u> See Image Recognition below<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: The ability of computers to recognise music, faces, objects \u2013 anything \u2013 will become increasingly sophisticated and accurate. This will be of great use to collectors in enabling them to find items on the internet, to identify and catalogue items, and to spot fakes.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: Many of the physical possessions we obtain in the future may include a chip which contains information about the object and which can communicate with parent apps. We may become familiar with controlling objects in this way and with using the parent apps. We may attach our own tags to our important possessions that are not already chipped, so that we can keep track of them within the same control systems.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: This sort of feature will be incorporated in many systems that accumulate user\u2019s digital objects. Users who like it will come to regard it as a primary source of prompts for their memories. As the collections of objects grow over time, they will become increasingly valuable to individuals. Users will also become accustomed to not having to put any effort into saving material because the systems will do that for them.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: People will increasingly want to share the broad range of digital objects (i.e more than just photos) in their collections with others. Systems will continue to be developed to enable them to do so. Perhaps families will possess their own virtual spaces to curate their own history.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: VR could eventually provide a controlled access exhibition space in which to manage and display all your digital objects.<\/p>\n
\nImpact on OFC projects<\/u>: Now that the voice interface has become almost as reliable as normal conversation, a considerable amount of computer interaction currently performed using keyboards will migrate to voice. Users will become used to the idea of asking the computer for information and answers, and having the computer respond with what they want.<\/p>\n