I believe that science fiction is reality catching up to the future. Others say that science fact is the science fiction of the past. Regardless, the gap between science fact and science fiction is fascinating to me, especially as it applies to computers.

My partners and I spend time at CES each year along with a bunch of the founders from different companies we’ve invested in due to our human computer interaction theme. In addition to a great way to start the year together, it gives us a chance to observe how the broad technology industry, especially on the consumer electronics side, is trying to catch up to the future.

We are investors in Oblong, a company who’s co-founder (John Underkoffler) envisions much of the future we are currently experiencing when he created the science and tech behind the movie Minority Report. Oblong’s CEO, Kwin Kramer, wandered the floor of CES with this lens on and had some great observations which he shares with you below.

Looking back at last year’s CES through the greasy lens of this year’s visit to Vegas, three trends have accelerated: tablets, television apps platforms, and new kinds of input.

I gloss these as “Apple’s influence continuing to broaden”, “a shift from devices to ecosystems,” and “the death of the remote control.”

Really, the first two trends have merged together. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad, along with iTunes, AirPlay, and FaceTime, have profoundly influenced our collective expectations.

All of the television manufacturers are now showing “smart” TV prototypes. “Smart” means some combination of apps, content purchases, video streaming, video conferencing, web browsing, new remote controls, control from phones and tablets, moving content around between devices, screen sharing between devices, home “cloud”, face recognition, voice control, and gestural input.

Samsung showed the most complete bundle of “smart” features at the show this year and is planning to ship a new flagship television line that boasts both voice and gesture recognition.

This is good stuff. The overall interaction experience may or may not be ready for the mythical “average user”, but the features work. (An analogy: talking and waving at these TVs feels like using a first-generation PalmPilot, not a first-generation iPhone. But the PalmPilot was a hugely successful and category changing product.)

The Samsung TVs use a two-dimensional camera, not a depth sensor. As a result, gestural navigation is built entirely around hand motion in X and Y and open-hand/grab transitions. The tracking volume is roughly the 30 degree field of view of the camera between eight feet and fifteen feet from the display.

Stepping back and filtering out the general CES clamor, what we’re seeing is the continuing, but still slow, coming to pass of the technology premises on which we founded Oblong: pixels available in more and more form factors, always-on network connections to a profusion of computing devices, and sensors that make it possible to build radically better input modalities.

Interestingly, there are actually fewer gestural input demos on display at CES this year than there were last year. Toshiba, Panasonic and Sony, for example, weren’t showing gesture control of TVs. But it’s safe to assume that all of these companies continue to do R&D into gestural input in particular, and new user experiences in general.

PrimeSense has made good progress, too. They’ve taken an open-hand/grab approach that’s broadly similar to Samsung’s, but with good use of the Z dimension in addition. The selection transitions, along with push, pull and inertial side-scroll, feel solid.

Besides the television, the other interesting locus of new UI design at CES is the car dashboard. Mercedes showed off a new in-car interface driven partly by free-space gestures. And Ford, Kia, Cadillac, Mercedes and Audi all have really nice products and prototypes and employ passionate HMI people.

For those of us who pay a lot of attention to sensors, the automotive market is always interesting. Historically, adoption in cars has been one important way that new hardware gets to mass-market economies of scale.

The general consumer imaging market continues to amaze me, though. Year-over-year progress in resolution, frame rate, dynamic range and cost continues unabated.

JVC is showing a 4k video camera that will retail for $5,000. And the new cameras (and lenses) from Nikon and Canon are stunning. There’s no such thing anymore as “professional” equipment in music production, photography or film. You can charge all the gear you need for recording an album, or making a feature-length film, on a credit card.

Similarly, the energy around the MakerBot booth was incredibly fun to see. Fab and prototyping capabilities are clearly on the same downward-sloping, creativity-enabling, curve as cameras and studio gear. I want a replicator!

And, of course, I should say that Oblong is hiring. We think the evolution of the multi-device, multi-screen, multi-user future is amazingly interesting. We’re helping to invent that future and we’re always looking for hackers, program managers, and experienced engineering leads.

Bwahahahaha – I know what it is, but I can’t tell you. But you can now play a text adventure game, created by Andrew Plotkin, which will give you hints. Remember Adventure?

You really shouldn’t have wandered away from your tour guide. The gleam of glass in a deserted room caught your eye for just a moment… but with that mob of chattering tourists out of sight, the MakerBot facility doesn’t seem quite as friendly as it did a moment ago.

Servos hiss behind you — but that’s not the guidebot’s cheery mask looming out of the shadows. It’s a security bot! You’re in trouble now. You duck into the laboratory. Or is it a showroom? Test chamber? You pull the door shut; hopefully you can hide out until the robot has passed.

No maze of twisty little passages here. Just a big scary security robot. I just played it for a while – it’s awesomely fun. I expect Seth Levine and Paul Kedrosky will get sucked in this afternoon and it’ll cause Paul to need to buy a MakerBot to print out the pieces in game.

I’ll see you at CES if you are going to be there. And keep your eyes on the MakerBot site for some cool new things.

My little buddy, the robotic ball controlled by your smartphone named Sphero, has shipped and you can order a Sphero now! Having watched Sphero come to life over the past 17 months, starting as a seed of an idea in the heads of two mad geniuses (Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson) has been awesome.

I remember seeing Ian and Adam’s video application to TechStars for the Boulder 2010 program (at the time the company was called Gearbox). There were a lot of questions on the selection committee because it wasn’t a typical software thing. “These guys are hardware hackers – will we have good mentors for them?” was one of the questions asked. “Fuck yeah” I said. “I’ll be one of their lead mentors. I love robots.”

In my first mentor meeting with Ian and Adam, they showed me three ideas. One was an iPhone controlled door lock. One was something else that was iPhone controlled but was so stupid I can’t remember what it was. One was a ball that you could control with your smartphone. As they described idea #1, they told me about the mentors who had said “this could be a good business.” As they described idea #2, I started thinking to myself “where is the passion in these guys that I saw in the video?” When they got to the ball, I remember Adam (or was it Ian) saying something like “our third idea is a remote control ball – how cool is that?” We talked about it for a minute or two and with each passing second they became more animated. Adam literally stood up and was gesturing around as he tried to show me what it would be like to use it.

I looked quietly at each of them and said “which idea do you love?” In unison, they responded with “the ball.” Do you love any of the other ideas? Silence. Then I asked “so why is there even a choice in your mind?” One of them responded with “well – some of the people we’ve talked to thought the ball was a stupid idea and there was no market for it.” I responded with “Fuck that – do what you love.”

Paul Berberian, one of their mentors during TechStars, shared the same enthusiasm. About halfway through the program Ian, Adam, and Paul started to talk about teaming up – by the end of TechStars Paul had joined as the CEO. I’ve worked with Paul since he co-founded Raindance Communications in 1997 and was delighted to quickly lead a seed financing for Orbotix.

17 months later we have the world’s first robotic ball controlled by a smartphone. The early reviews are starting to come in and they are all in the “wow this is cool I wish there were more apps” category.

TechCrunch on Sphero: “As a technological artifact, the ball is incredible. When’s the last time you’ve seen a small, self-propelled ball with built-in gyroscope, accelerometer, Bluetooth radio, and compass? You could put a little explosive in these and they could be a Bond villain.”

CNET on Sphero: “In the end, it’s Sphero’s shape that may be both its strength and its weakness, for it’s hard to ignore the fact that this is a ball–and it’s not terribly exciting to see a ball roll around on its own after a while, even one that’s interactive and lights up. Of course, it’s something of a technological feat to remotely put a ball in motion, and kudos to Orbotix for doing that and coming up with an app tie-in strategy that should help keep things interesting moving forward. All that’s pretty clever. Or maybe it’s stupid. It is such a fine line.”

Engaget on Sphero: “That said, Sphero is a great toy to have if you’ve got any furry friends — this reporter spent a good thirty minutes making Sphero chase a friend’s dog, and it seems the pup had even more fun with it than his human friends. We should also note Sphero’s worth as a conversation starter, as most folks haven’t seen anything like it, and are keen to take it for a spin.”

I have two dogs and they love the Sphero. So far I haven’t gotten remotely bored playing around with them with it. I’ve played a few of the upcoming Sphero apps, including a Mixed Reality Pong game, using Sphero to control your phone (3D joystick like behavior), movement tracking, and Wii like games where the ball replaces the Wii mote. The potential of apps built to incorporate a Sphero just blows my mind.

In addition to shipping Sphero, Orbotix also released their SDK and the first five Sphero apps. The short term goal is to make it easy for anyone to develop apps for Sphero since – even though the Orbotix team is crazy smart and creative, we know that the breakthrough apps will come from other people.

I love the stuff I invest in. It’s magical to me that the idea Ian and Adam had 17 months ago is now a product with a full fledged software ecosystem around it. Orbotix is a long way from being a successful company, but shipping Sphero is a huge step in their journey.

If you love robots, want to hack on a robotic ball, have a cat, have a kid, or just want to play around with an amazing new toy at its very early stages, order your Sphero today. Yes, there’s a backlog so you won’t get it in time for Christmas, but hopefully they’ll be fully caught up by January.

Recently my partners and I spent some time discussing three of our recent investments – Spanning, Yesware, and Attachments – which are each applications built on top of Google Apps. Specifically, they are built for Google Apps and available in the Google Apps Marketplace or the Chrome Web Store.

Each company is going after something very different. Spanning is all about cloud backup. Attachments is all about getting control of your email attachments. And Yesware is “email for salespeople.” However, they have one very significant thing in common – they are all deeply integrated into Google Apps. In our thematic definition, they are in the Protocol theme.

The Google Apps ecosystem snuck up on us. We have all been hardcore Google Apps users for the past year and are psyched and amazed about all the easy integration points – both into the browser and the various Google Apps. In the past, we would have been more focused on “email as a datastore”, which would have resulted in multiple platforms, including of course Outlook / Exchange and IMAP. However, the pace of iteration on top of Google Apps, and the ease of integration is spectacular when compared to other platforms.

Notably, when the choice of building for Outlook vs. Google Apps comes up, many people who I know comes down strongly on the side of building for Google Apps. Their mindshare for cloud based business apps far outpaces Microsoft. A decade ago, Microsoft made a huge push with Visual Basic for Applications and the idea of “Office as a Platform” and – while plenty of interesting tech was built, something happened along the way and the notion of Office as a Platform lost a lot of visibility.

Theoretically Microsoft’s huge installed base of Outlook / Exchange users should drive real ISV integration interest, but the friction associated with working with Microsoft seems to mute the benefit. And – if you’ve ever built and tried to deploy an enterprise wide (say – 100,000, or even 1,000 seat) Outlook plug-in – well, I feel your pain. It’s possible that with Office 365, Microsoft will re-energize focus on Office as a Platform, but I haven’t seen much yet.

While Google has been building this all very quietly, I’m extremely impressed with what they’ve done. Companies like Yesware are able to release a new version of their app to all users on a weekly basis. For an early stage company that is deep in iterating on product features with its customers, this is a huge advantage. And it massively simplifies the technology complexity to chose one platform, focus all your energy on it, and then roll out other platforms after you’ve figured out the core of your product.

I expect to see versions of each of these products expand to work with Microsoft – and other – ecosystems. But for now, the companies are all doubled-down on Google Apps. And I find that very interesting.

Last week we announced our investment in Awe.sm. It’s squarely in our Glue and Protocol themes and is similar to investments we’ve made in SendGrid (for transactional email infrastructure) and Urban Airship (for push notification infrastructure). Oh – and the founders – Jonathan Strauss and Laurie Voss are – well – awesome.

We love things that wire the web together and believe Awe.sm is the company to do that for the construct of “sharing.” Specifically, Awe.sm’s goal is to become the key infrastructure provider powering quantitative performance marketing across the social sharing channel.

If you are a developer of a web app, take a look at how Awe.sm’s platform can help you.

My friends at Cheezburger Networks have been rolling out what we have internally been calling Cheezburger 3.0. It’s called Cheezburger Sites and lets anyone create their own humor channel on the web.

In my never ending effort to poke fun at myself – and other VCs – I’ve created a site called I Can Has A VC. It’s just getting started – feel free to send me videos and photos of VCs doing stupid things, or stupid things masquerading as VCs.

And – if you has a sense of humor, go for it!

My friends at Standing Cloud have closed another $3 million financing from us (Foundry Group) and Avalon Ventures. They’ve also added a long time friend, co-investor, and amazing entrepreneur Will Herman to the board.

Standing Cloud is a great example how one of our funding strategies plays out. We are the seed investors and have been working closely with the company since inception. They’ve built an incredibly deep product around a very specific aspect of the broad Cloud computing ecosystem. When they started, much of Cloud computing was total noise and marketing baloney. While there’s still plenty of that in the system, many of the products and services are maturing and the particular segment Standing Cloud has gone after has suddenly become incredibly important to a large number of hosting, managed services, and cloud providers (often the same thing) not named Amazon. Specifically:

Standing Cloud provides a seamless application layer for cloud providers, making application deployment and management fast, simple and hassle-free for their customers. Standing Cloud’s standard application catalog includes 100 open-source and commercial applications; its Platform-as-as-Service (PaaS) capabilities support multiple programming languages, including Rails, PHP, Java and Python, and a wide range of cloud service providers and orchestration software systems.

If you are a hosting, managed service provider, or building a cloud service (public or private), you have three choices. The first is to ignore this stuff (dumb). The second is to try to build it all yourself and keep pace with Amazon (good luck). The third is to use Standing Cloud.

If you want an intro, just email me and ask.

My friends at Orbotix have made a spooky Halloween video for you starring Sphero.  The costumes were made by Adam (one of Orbotix co-founders) using his MakerBot.

Happy Halloween from Sphero from GoSphero on Vimeo.

MakerBot has a great weekly TV show. This week learn about all the things you can make for halloween with your MakerBot as well as how you can help save the hermit crab. Also watch as the new MakerBot TV mascot – Mr. Maker – goes on a tour of New York City.

I love Fitbit. We had a board meeting yesterday and there is so much amazing stuff coming from this company in the next few quarters. James and Eric are product creation machines – they love what they do, love their products, obsess about every bit of them, and have a vision about human instrumentation and where it can go that dwarfs anything I’ve heard from anyone else. Oh – and they’ve built a killer team that shares this vision as well as the ability to execute on it.

The newest Fitbit (the Fitbit Ultra) is out – if you’ve been holding off buying one don’t wait any longer. And today they just released the iPhone app for the Fitbit. I’ve been using it for a few months and it’s a great companion to the Fitbit.

My belief that in a decade humans will be fully instrumented – and be able to have the instrumentation create realtime feedback loops – is one that causes some people to look at me funny. But, whenever someone who has a Fitbit hears this, and then asks me to explain more, I see their head start nodding up and down.

I’m really lucky I get to work with these guys.