Future Technologies

According to the famous page23 document created by the architecture studio (and also in this other similar document), the third civilization has supposedly occupied the island from 1800 to 2500. That date in the future is interesting from the narrative point of view, but also because it suggests that future technologies could have been used on the island by the third civilization. The idea of future technologies provides an alternative hypothesis to the usual overpowered explanation consisting in saying that "it's a virtual reality, so everything is possible."

= List of elements potentially using a future technology =

Here is a list of elements that do not behave in a normal way and could thus use a future technology:


 * The force field and lasers used as the grid of the fort in the Start Area.


 * The floor puzzle and the pillar puzzle in the Start Area as well as the pillar puzzle at the entry of the Challenge all seem to use a technology that allows to display a puzzle on a normal material (stone and concrete)


 * The bridges made of puzzles in the Treehouses seem way too stable to be purely mechanical structures. They should normally move like a diving board as you walk on them.


 * The bridges in the Mountain that are created as you draw in the puzzles clearly use an unknown technology.


 * The flying elevator in the normal ending sequence uses future technologies, as it is able of flying, disappearing part by part, and finally make the player disappear (no shadow) and pass through incredibly small spaces.


 * The hotel is invisible from outside, levitates in the air, and uses seamless two-way portals between different locations on the island.


 * Many luminescent objects or light sources without electrical wires (see list below).


 * Platforms, stairs and doors: these elements move after a puzzle is solved but there is generally no visible motor, gears, or anything transmitting energy or motion. (Although there are often rails or counterweights to make that motion look realistic).


 * Laser beams? In the mountain top, there is one you could cross, but it seems a repulsion field prevents you from doing so.

= Hypotheses =

Bridges in the Mountain
These bridges are in an horizontal plane materialized by black stripes on the four walls of the building. With a closer look we can see that these stripes are actually grids, and the corresponding texture file is named loc_theEnd1_holoProjector, so we learn that the bridges are actually projected holograms and have no material existence — which explains their strange color variations and transparency. The fact that we can walk on them therefore implies some kind of antigravity (but we would then be flying like astronauts and would not be able to walk), or more likely, a controlled force field (the later hypothesis being confirmed by the sound file names: amb_force_ctrl_room_01, amb_force_tower_* and force_bridge_*). Note how this explanation matches the content of the audio log by Eddington over the Start Area grid (which also use a future technology).

The idea of a force field in the whole cube can also give a new meaning to the glass structure filled with office furniture: this furniture could have been used as experimental material in place of human beings (for obvious security reasons), and their arrangement could be a consequence of a successful experiment consisting in placing all of them in the structure using the force field.

Also note that the glass structure is wider inside the building than in the upper part, and the inner part is suspended to the building's roof (actually, to the beams around the building). On the other hand, the top part of this glass structure is not attached to the building and do not seem to be attached to the lower part neither: it goes through a hole in the roof of the building, which is actually bounded by the piece of metal that links the lower part to the building. But for the upper part of the glass structure, only a few rivets touch that piece of metal (the same ones that we can see on the beams of the structure, that maintain the glass panes in place), and we can doubt that these rivets are strong enough to support the weight of the whole top part of the glass structure with the statues on it.

In addition, the puzzle at the top of the mountain and the two statues on it are attached to the top of the glass structure, and one can see that the catwalks around have been cut in the same shape than the puzzle (hexagon), so that the whole structure could have raised from below to reach that position, moved by the force field that also maintain the glass structure in place (a more rational explanation would be that the catwalk have been cut this way because there were no other way to put them there otherwise, but we would expect more from such an advanced civilization, right? Especially when the grids on these catwalks could have been placed on the nearby uncut grid of the same dimension and then moved horizontally toward their current position).

Portals in the Hotel
The hotel is invisible from outside, levitates in the air, and uses seamless two-way portals between different locations on the island. This is usually believed to be possible because the island is a virtual reality, as suggested by the second ending video. Another option is however that a future technology allows to create such spaces.

The final portal (the one that starts the video) could then be a portal to a parallel universe (which seems to be our universe). In that case, the airport-like part of the hotel would not (only) be metaphorical, but could also be practical, used to move people from the island to parallel universes (like the books and libraries in the Myst novels). The island could then be empty because everybody left the island for another universe. The screens with static announcing the departures would then have become useless and disconnected from the system.

Note also that the future technologies used in the hotel are similar to the ones used in the flying elevator (although this one seem more complex) in that the elevator levitates, becomes transparent, and disembodies you.

Luminescent objects

 * All the puzzle wires.


 * Colored tubes and containers leaking some kind of luminescent paint in the underwater rooms of the Marsh.


 * Force plates in the keep and in the red room of the mountain.


 * luminescent bricks in the theater (two rows under the railway bridge, two rows on the walls, in the frame of the window and door, and in the broken circuit involved in the environmental puzzle in the Psalm46 video).


 * Diamond-shaped, suspended lights in the caves and hotel: there is a greenish luminescent gem, bulb or liquid-filled test tube inside.


 * other light sources could be added to this list, although they have a more common shape, because they lack electrical wires to power them.

All these things could be luminous because they contain the same luminous paint than in the Marsh, which might be made of living bio-luminescent bacteria (there is a strong evidence that the color of water in the Marsh is due to bacterial activity). Such bacteria emit light when water pressure changes, which could be compatible with the mechanisms of the force plates, and of the water pumps in the Marsh. Puzzles could also use pneumatic technology to augment the pressure in the wires. These bacteria need nutriments and normally stop emitting light after some time, and only do it during certain cycles, which are the main obstacles to their use as light sources today. But as a future technology it could be very energy-efficient and would not need an external source of energy.

Puzzle displays
While some puzzles use CRT-like display that is rather old technology today, the pillar puzzles in the start area and at the entry of the challenge as well as the puzzle on the floor of the start area all allow to draw lines directly on stone or concrete without any visible substrate, which suggests the use of a future technology.

Note that this future technology could actually be used also in places where CRT or LCD displays seem to be used: if you can turn stone and concrete into a display, you can surely turn an actual display into one too, not using the original hardware of the display.

Another possibility is that the technology used for puzzles is the same than the technology used for luminescent objects (see above), but there is no evidence to support this hypothesis.