@cwebber I think this is far enough out that I can talk about it without risk of a lawsuit...

One of my favorites is a prototype computer interface that Microsoft was working on in the early 2010s.

I was in Redmond to pitch MS on a partnership with JCPenney. Weird right?

Myself and one other designer (I think we were both interns at the time) put together a proof of concept for social shopping powered by the Kinect. We had leveraged the Xbox avatar design language and interspersed it with real video footage so people could virtually try on clothes and have their friends in as avatars to give feedback. It was based on the feeling that the "1-vs-100" game gave - this ability to get a group together and share a moment in time.

We also had a working prototype for contactless shopping by leveraging RFID tags so you could toss all the clothes you want in a bag and just put the bag on the Microsoft Surface table to scan in all the items and manage payment, as well as tap in to the JCP online store if you needed a different size or color sent to your house as part of the order.

After the pitch, they took us on a tour of their innovation lab, and the thing that stuck with me most was a desk of fully curved acrylic. I don't think they had OLED because the embedded screens were only on flat surfaces, but it was mind blowing.

The device turned on and was mainly controlled via proximity. You walked up and it turned on, much like something out of Iron Man, and then you could put your hands over different spaces to activate them. It felt like I was using the computers in Minority Report.

I still think about that and wish it saw the light of day. Everything was intuitive and made me excited for technology.... back when tech was something that was going to make lives better...