For Robocop, Bing Imagines The Future Of Search In 2028

What will search look like in 2028?

That’s a question that the folks at Bing were tasked with answering for the new movie, Robocop. (Well, “new” as in a remake of the 1987 original that just hit theaters this week.)

In a blog post this week, the Bing search folks shared a few screenshots showing a 3D, three-panel search display that they come up with for search circa 2028:

(Note: Bing’s original images were pretty dark, so I brightened them a bit in Photoshop for sharing here.)

Here’s how Bing describes the vision:

Building off the voice recognition work we have released for Bing on Xbox and Windows Phone, in this vision of search, a character can speak in natural language and instantly receive accurate and relevant results. We also needed to convey millions of results without overwhelming the display with a barrage of links. The solution was to have elements continuously scrolling in and search results updating in a living animated way. We also envisioned a 3D display with the most important things in the foreground. As we know that digital data is going to continue to explode at an exponential rate, we called for the search results tally to be constantly updating as new information arrives.

I haven’t seen the new Robocop, so I have no idea how much screen time “Future Bing” gets. These screenshots only show the Bing logo — not the name — and I suspect most movie-goers would struggle to ID Bing’s new logo without also seeing the name. So, who knows whether this will end up being good product placement for Bing or not.

Speaking of which, it seems safe to assume that this is a case of paid product placement, but Bing’s blog post is a bit coy on that. It only says this: “…it was a natural fit when Sony Pictures asked us to come up with a concept for search in the not-too-distant future to showcase in the upcoming Robocop film.”