retro-futurism

11.21.09

A Look At Japan's Retro-Future

By Stuart Fox Posted 10.23.2009 at 3:01 pm 5 Comments

Those Robots Are Still Nicer Than Nuns : via Pink Tentacle

As much as we love the actual future here at Popular Science, we love the past's vision of the future almost as much. So we basically freaked out when our good friends over at Pink Tentacle discovered this spread from a 1969 issue of the Japanese magazine Shonen Sunday.

These pictures show a predicted 1989 where computers have changed how we live. The above photo depicts a classroom full of children learning on computers, watching a video of a teacher, and receiving beatings from enforcement robots.

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Retro-Futurism: Olympus's New Rangefinder-Inspired Digital Camera

Olympus's EP-1 digital squeezes many of a DSLR's features into a compact package inspired by the fifty-year-old Pen F

By John Mahoney Posted 06.16.2009 at 12:10 pm 20 Comments

Sometimes looking to the past to inspire designs of the future is inspired by nothing more than fashion, but sometimes, it actually serves a functional purpose. Enter Olympus's freshly announced EP-1, which recreate a form factor we haven't seen a lot of since the film era: a sleek, compact body with interchangeable lenses.

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