Science-fiction has been the avant garde of industrial design since the 1939 World’s Fair, if not earlier. It has been a medium to market strange ideas (aliens from outer space, our minds being computer generated delusions), to forewarn of us of potential dangers (the computers take over, the robots nuke us), but through the pragmatics of using experimental design ideas to build unfamiliar worlds, it serves as both a promotional vehicle and fertilizer of new markets. Science fiction envisioned how computers might be used, which in turn taught us how we might be able to use them, which in turn inspired engineers to make them that way, which led to us using them the way we do. A video-phone in late 20th Century science-fiction television and movies becomes early 21st Century Skype. 

While the idea of a ‘videophone’ is both old-fashioned and going nowhere as a device, ‘Skyping’ is alive and well. We are living with ‘videophone’ technology but it is just is not being mediated by landline telephones that sit on our desks; instead it is being mediated by our computers. Further, the ubiquity of cellphones means that there’s currently no market for ‘video phone booths’ as depicted in 1968’s 2001:A Space Odyssey when Dr. Haywood calls his daughter from the space station. 

Or the scene in Blade Runner, when Deckard called Rachel at the bar. This scene defines the concept of the ‘videophone’ that I grew up with. In the context of 1982, this is a video-phone call. 

In 1989’s Back to the Future II, Marty gets an AT&T mediated video-call from his colleague Needles (played by Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s bassist Flea) on his flat-screen television. Interestingly, the flat screen tv seems the only thing that came true from that projection twenty years ago. (Since 1989, we have not developed flying cars nor a highway system for them, nor are we using fusion reactors for our vehicles, and hoverboards still aren’t happening. Nor do we have holographic cinema billboards.)

Back to the Future II was set in 2015, and imagined the fax machine would have much more prominence that it attained, replaced by computers and heldhelds with their killer-app, email. Blade Runner was set it a post-ecocidal (if not post-apocalyptic) Los Angeles of 2019, where no one had cellphones and CRT televisions printed out Polaroids of their screen-capture.

One thing of note is that all video-phone scenes filmed in the 20th Century included ‘end credits’:

Back to the Future

(AT&T of course is the network that runs the (20th Century futuristic) iPhone in the United States.)

With regard to video-phones, it is not inconceivable to me now that by 2019, (that is, within ten years) you could have novelty Skype booths set up in bar, and for a few coins (“$1.25”) or a credit card swipe, make video-calls to girls you just met and invite them out for a drink. Deckard’s phone call may not being as unrealistic as it still seems.

In the meantime, we are already carrying video-phones in our pocket, allowing us such activities as described in this song by Beyonce: