Last weekend I was at a washi exhibition in Tokyo. It showed the history and fields of application of Japanese paper. Being an information engineer from Germany paper was always a carrier of textual and two dimensional visual content to me. But especially one term in the exhibition’s explanation popped up several times and caught my attention. The term of three dimensional application of paper. Of course paper is a non-virtual item which you can touch, bend, cut and so on. But in western culture paper is used nearly exclusively to print information on it; two dimensional information. But at the exhibition I saw flowers, furnishing and even clothing made of paper. And then I realized that nearly any media technology had an evolution towards spatial use and spatial representation of information. Audio devices changed from mono output to spatial acoustics and three dimensional movies and pictures are getting more and more popular, for example. And hundreds of years ago this evolution was fulfilled for paper as well. So I think that for some topics it can really be worth looking to developments that happened even hundreds of years ago to predict future trends or to get ideas for new innovations. Even or maybe especially in the area of media technology.

Frederik