The “choose your own adventure” products actually came and went over fifteen years ago – there were a number produced for game consoles of that era. They failed utterly, perhaps partly because the video was pretty rough, and the writing even rougher. But the biggest problem (and this was shared by “Clue”) is that the audience doesn’t want the story to be interrupted in order to make them decide.

If you want an interactive experience, we have that now in the form of high-end video games. I’d suggest taking a look at “Mass Effect” for example. If there’s a prediction to be made it’s that interactive games will become even more story-like and accessible, attracting a much larger non-gamer audience. Time frame for that is probably within five years.

The 4D experience is likewise old hat, particularly with theme park ride movies coupled with flight simulator technology that have been doing plenty of business for over two decades. It’s unlikely to ever become widely used because it’s simply too expensive to maintain on a large scale and anything that exposes an audience to random motion, chemical smells and whatnot is potentially a liability nightmare (take a look at the history of Smell-O-Vision). Home novelty devices like the one mentioned above will probably continue to be readily available and it’s quite probably that a “standard control system” may be adopted. This will either happen in the next five years or it won’t happen at all.

Finally, jacking into the matrix is either completely impossible or we’ll have figured out how to do it in the next twenty or thirty years, tops.

You’re probably pretty spot on about 3D TV, though I think if “Avatar” is released with a consumer priced BluRay 3D player, TV and glasses it may become the most quickly adopted entertainment tech ever. The newest generation of hi-def flat screens already include a number that are 3D-ready.

Don’t say I didn’t warn ya

Personally, I’m holding out for Wonka-Vision.