Augmented Reality Network Crashes, Leaving Millions Dataless

November 17, 2029—TEL-U Mobile said today that network disruptions yesterday led to inoperable augmented reality service, leaving millions of customers to walk or drive around with no information about what they were seeing.
 
The outage began about 2:16 p.m. ET yesterday and lasted until early this morning, affecting customers across the country, a TEL-U spokesman said.  The company says a software error led to the disruption.  

TEL-U customers complained that they felt virtually crippled without the augmented reality (AR) data that tell them everything from the source of the beans used in their Starbucks coffee to the marital status of a person passing them on the street. The incident underscored Americans’ deepening dependence on AR -powered eyeglasses and contact lenses to get through the day.    
 
TEL-U advertises its AR network and eyewear as the most sophisticated in the nation. The company boasts more than 7 million subscribers.

The company yesterday was deluged with calls from angry customers. Diners complained that they had no data to determine whether a restaurant they were considering patronizing had any health-code violations. Consumers complained that the outage hampered their everyday search for the latest fashions.

“I was walking down Park Avenue and noticed this woman wearing a gorgeous cashmere coat,” Manhattan resident Pru Tenchus said. “I wanted to know where she bought it and how much she paid for it, but the data didn’t pop up on my AR sunglasses. This was highly inconvenient.”

Pedestrians griped that they had no information about the criminal history, political affiliation or religion of people they passed on the street.

“I started chatting with a very nice man in line with me at the deli near by office,” said Chicago resident Sue Spiches. “I was waiting for information about him to pop up on my contact lenses, but it never came. For all I know, he was a registered sex offender or a Mormon.”
 
For other customers, the outage merely hampered their personal lives a bit.

“I was sitting at a coffee shop and was attracted to a woman sitting at the table next to me,” said Greg Aryus, a longtime TEL-U subscriber. “But I’m a conservative guy. I like old-fashioned girls, and without the AR network functioning, I had no information on whether she was a member of a NOW or a regular contributor to Emily’s List. Unaugmented reality bites.”

The Premature Future: Space Hotel Ready for 2012

FU’s occassional step away from the future and into the crazy present.

Galactic Suite has revealed that plans to open the first hotel in space are on schedule and The Galactic Suite Space Resort will be open for business and accepting tourists by 2012.

 But it’s not a bargain stay. The Barcelona-based architects of space resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island before the trip.   They could make a reality show out of the training camp alone. Read more…

“Time-Traveling Boy” Incident Was a Hoax, Authorities Say

October 19, 2029—The story that a little boy had been hurled 140 million years into the past aboard a time machine was a hoax concocted to land a reality Web TV deal, authorities said this morning, and the boy’s father will likely face felony charges.

The stunt last week was a ploy by Conrad Mann, a self-proclaimed inventor who lives in Boise, Idaho, to convince the public that his four-year-old son, Ostrich, crawled into a first-of-its-kind time-traveling apparatus and accidentially activated it, according to the Ada County Sheriff Chase U. Downe.  Mann is suspected of concocting the entire incident to launch a self-produced reality series titled “Time Swap,” in which families from different centuries switch places and try to adapt to their new surroundings, Downe said.  

Downe said he expected to recommend that Mann be charged with making a false report to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant be brought against Mann. Federal charges are also possible.

The drama involving Ostrich played out over live streaming video over a 24-hour period on Oct. 14, after Mann made a desperate call to the sheriff’s office asking for help in rescuing his son.  Mann said  that recording data on the machine indicated Ostrich had been transported to the early Cretaceous period.  Mann’s statements had prompted the authorities to gather leading physicists and technologists from around the world to gather in Boise to rescue the boy.

The experts eventually programmed the device to return Ostrich to the present, but when they opened the machine to pull him out, all they found was a Protoceratops egg. Officials thought the boy had possibly been eaten or trampled by a dinosaur, but Ostrich was subsequently found in the family’s hologram room, playing with a 3D image of Elmo from Sesame Street. 

In fact, the machine — which was nothing more than a souped-up clothes dryer — would not have the power to launch the the 27-pound-boy back in time, Idaho State University physics professor Molly Cule said, adding that the scientists involved in the rescue should have realized the story was a hoax since Mann, who has a high-school education, was not likely to have invented time travel.

The Mann case bears a striking resemblance to the “balloon boy” case that gripped the nation 20 years ago. In that incident, a Colorado man named Patrick and Mayumi Heene were accused of fraudently convincing authorities that their six-year-old son Falcon was aboard a runaway balloon when the boy was in fact hiding in the attic of the family’s home.  Charges against Mayumi Heene were eventually dropped, and Patrick Heene was acquitted by reason of insanity in a 2010 jury trial.

Asked by FU to comment on the similarities between the balloon incident and the time-machine stunt, Falcon Heene, now 26 and living in Utah, promptly threw up.