Halfway to Minority Report

The movie “Minority Report” from a few years back had a number of nifty sci-fi technologies on display. Some are likely to remain pure fantasy for a good long while – mind-reading computers and, sadly, jetpacks are probably at the top of the “it’s the year 2000… where’s my flying car?” list – while some are either really close… or already here.

While the world of “Minority Report,” unlike “Blade Runner” (both of which were based on Phillip K. Dick stories) was shown as a bright, sunshiny and on the whole clean place, it was nevertheless a bit of a nightmare world due to ever-present surveillanc, and overpowering omnipresent commercial advertising. These are of course trends that would surprise approximately nobody if they get to the point shown in “Minority Report.” One of the advertising technologies shown was animated cereal boxes. Cartoons would play on the flat surfaces of the boxes, and would, apparently, be triggered on and off by movement of the box:

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As a bit of added realism, the “off switch” is shown to not work all that well, and it just comes across as yet another annoying technological pain in the ass .

Well, guess what… the boxes are damn near here:

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They are not “animated” quite yet, but that can’t be far away. The boxes light up in various patterns… and what’s worse, they apparently communicate with each other.

Wonderful. Something else for the schizophrenics to freak out about… their Trix cereal conspiring against them with the Honey Nut Cheerios. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Furbies were talkign to each other and telling nutjobs that Sarah Palin wanted them to gun down Republican-appointed federal judges, now breakfast cereal will be spreading sekrit messages from Tea Party Central Command.