Microsoft’s vision of the future: Everything is a screen, and thin is in

Take a trip into the future.

From time to time, Microsoft produces attractive and compelling videos presenting its vision of the future: a world in which technology is seamlessly integrated into the world around us, making everything better and more convenient.

The latest productivity vision (via The Verge) shows us a few days in the life of Kat, a marine biologist, and Lola, a corporate executive, working together to make kelp seem exciting and futuristic.

As has been the theme with many of Microsoft’s other visions of the future, few people work at anything resembling a normal computer. Instead, everything is a touch screen. Thin bracelet-screens stick together to make bigger screens which can then be used to reschedule meetings and book coworking spaces. Desks, glass walls, and even foldable, flexible sheets all become screens without any obvious power supply or electronics.

It’s all quite magical. The user interfaces are all extremely contextual, adapting perfectly and instantly to match the task at hand. Tasks can be moved between screens with nothing more than a flick, and somehow they manage to consistently show the right information with the right layout whenever this is done.

Also striking is the aesthetic of all the software that’s being used. It uses flat panels and attractive typography, and it features full-color photos with no discrete windows or other interface chrome. This continues the design concept seen in past Microsoft future visions, and it looks an awful lot like a derivative of the Metro design—or Google’s Material design. It has an elegance that real software, that has to deal with real users and real usage, will always lack.

Microsoft says that it’s a vision of five to ten years in the future. It isn’t, of course. It’s an amalgamation of the kind of sci-fi concepts we see in films placed in a slightly more mundane, working context, and while it looks cool as hell, it’s about a million miles away from ever becoming real.