April Fool’s Day is one of the most light-hearted days on the calendar, full of strange hoaxes from individuals and businesses alike. Surprisingly, it’s also agreat place to look for the future of technology innovation. Every year, many universities and companies come out with prank announcements, research reports, or products that mange to toe the line between outlandishly hilarious, yet plausible enough that some people believe they exist.
If you were to look back at some of the most famous April Fools’ Day hoaxes and pranks over the years though, you might find a trend: The jokes of old are today’s new tech. Whether it is a direct adaptation or a big improvement on the old hoax, it is possible that old April Fools Jokes have inspired our next big innovation.
In 1965, the BBC launched its original ‘Smellovision’ prank – tricking viewers into thinking that the TV could transmit smell from the BBC Studio into their homes. While it might be easy to assume that only the tech-naïve masses of 1965 would begin sniffing their TV sets, this prank was actually reprised by the BBC in 2007 and adapted by Google in 2013, both to great success despite the audience being a ‘digital generation’.
Though formerly the stuff of pranks, the ‘Smellovision’ concept is being brought to life by FeelReal who has created a device that will add on to existing virtual reality glasses to simulate smell (and feel as well). Believe it or not, this is not the only smell-related innovation: fragrance-emitting smart phone add-ons that will allow digital smell transmission are expected to hit the shelves in 2015. Once, just an April Fool’s Day joke, a few iterations of ‘Smellovision’ may soon be a reality.
Looking at 1999 for another example, Telepathic Emailing was a prank brought on by “Red Herring Magazine.” The premise of this joke was that a computer genius created new software that let users send tweet length emails with their mind. The article even claimed that the interview was conducted by the tech creator answering all the interviewer’s questions via telepathic email. This technology, supposedly adapted from Gulf War encryption technology, would have been revolutionary for its time – today, it would barely surprise us. We’ve taken this prank a step further and today, we’re dreaming a little bigger: we’re working on driving cars with our minds, not just writing emails. While the two share a similar concept of mind-controlled technology, we can see again that what was once a hoax will soon be our reality.
It seems real-life innovations that have a history in April Fool’s day hoaxes continue to one-up the April Fool’s day pranks that pre –date them. If that trend holds true, then we cannot wait to see how University of Michigan College’s 2013 teleportation prank adapts to the future.
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