RoboCop & The Future of Search (at Bing)

What will search engines look like next year? How about five, 10 or 15 years?

That was the challenge put before Bing by Sony Pictures who asked the search engine to come up with a concept for search in the not-too-distant future that would be showcased in the new RoboCop film.

Bing set out to create an interface for the search engine that was true to the RoboCop story and technology innovations on the horizon, but which was still still grounded in today's reality. For example, Bing is working on voice recognition, image recognition, dimensional displays and other "natural user inputs" like gestures and eye gaze - all fascinating technologies on their own. Bing also wanted to address arguably the more important elements of understanding user intent and reducing search result clutter.

What Bing ultimately created was pretty interesting. Building on the voice recognition work it did with Bing on Xbox and Windows Phone, the search engine produced a 3-D display with the most important data in the foreground as not to overwhelm the user with a barrage of links. You'll actually have to see the movie to see how it all comes together.

All in all, it's an interesting exercise, but what do you (an Internet professional in the modern world) think search engines and their results pages will look like in the future? Share your opinions with others by submitting a comment below!