Corning has seen the future, and it's filled with touch-sensitive glass. The glass company has released a video imagining what "a day made of glass" might look like. You roll out of bed (non-glass, we think) in the morning and check your work schedule on the architectural display glass that doubles as your bathroom mirror, then chop veggies for an omelet in the kitchen on the same architectural surface glass that displays the weather and a newscast. Your children are nearby, playing with Harry Potter-esque moving photos on the refrigerator's appliance veneer glass. And that's just how the day begins:

Yes, it's pretty cool. But haven't we seen this before? The trance-inducing electronic music, antiseptic homes and offices, and really happy people? It turns out Corning isn't the first company to envision a sublime future dominated by the products it makes. Here are some of the other predictions:

In 2009, Microsoft transported us to the year 2019, where children in different countries communicate via touch-screen, transparent walls and real-time language translation bubbles:

Then there was GE's "kitchen of the future," in which a pajama-clad Mr. Davis asks his kitchen what he can have for breakfast:

And who could forget IBM's depiction of what it will be like in five years when we hang out with 3-D holograms of our friends?

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Uri Friedman