Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Computing

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine looks at 5 ideas that will reinvent computing. IMAX-quality movies at home with new projectors, a mid-air mouse that requires no flat surface, a home quantum computer, a router-based peer-to-peer system, and a man-made brain all made the list."

Comments

Writing a list

[kernel_pat]

"IMAX-quality movies at home with new projectors, a mid-air mouse that requires no flat surface, a home quantum computer, a router-based peer-to-peer system, and a man-made brain all made the list."

Surely you just need a bloke with a pen and a piece of paper to make a list.

Article Summary

[ma11achy]

I took the liberty of copying and pasting the meat of the article here. WAY too many ads and click-thru's for my liking.

IMAX at Home
=============
You thought LAN parties were fun? Get ready for the projector party. At HP Labs, Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata have spent the past few years developing a technology that reinvents the notion of a home theater. With Pluribus, you can build a cineplex-quality image using a handful of ordinary, $1,000 PC projectors--in less time than it takes to pop the popcorn.

The Midair Mouse
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Your brand-new wireless mouse? That solves only half the problem. Sure, you're untethered, free to drive your PC from afar. But you still need a flat surface. You may be camped out on the couch or curled up in bed, but you're never more than half an arm's length from an end table or a lap desk.

Soap goes one step further: It works in midair. With this new-age pointing device, now under development at Microsoft Research, you can navigate your PC using nothing but a bare hand. You can lose the end table and the lap desk. You can even lose the couch and the bed, driving your machine while walking across the room. It's a bit like the Wii remote--only more accurate and far easier to use.

Extreme Peer-to-Peer
====================
In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus forever changed the way we view the cosmos. He put the Sun at the center of things--not the Earth. Today, at the famed Palo Alto Research Center, Van Jacobson hopes to lead a similar revolution, one that forever changes the way we view PC networking. He aims to put the data at the center of things--not the server.

With a project called Content-Centric Networking, or CCN, Jacobson and his team of PARC networking gurus are turning this model on its head. They're building a networking system that revolves around the data itself, a system in which a router can actually identify that Bode Miller video and act accordingly. Under the CCN model, you don't tell the network that you're interested in connecting to a server. You tell it that you want a particular piece of data. You broadcast a request to all the machines on the network, and if one of them has what you're looking for, it responds.

The Man-Made Brain
==================
It could be the most ambitious computer science project of all time. At IBM's Almaden Research Center, just south of South Francisco, Dharmendra Modha and his team are chasing the holy grail of artificial intelligence. They aren't looking for ways of mimicking the human brain, they're looking to build one--neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse.

"We're trying to take the entire range of qualitative neuroscientific data and integrate it into a single unified computing platform," says Modha. "The idea is to re-create the 'wetware' brain using hardware and software."

Their first goal is to build a "massively parallel cortical simulator" that re-creates the brain of a mouse, an organ 3,500 times less complex than a human brain (if you count each individual neuron and synapse). But even this is an undertaking of epic proportions. A mouse brain houses over 16 million neurons, with more than 128 billion synapses running between them. Even a partial simulation stretches the boundaries of modern hardware. No, we don't mean desktop hardware. We're talkin' supercomputers.

So far, the team has been able to fashion a kind of digital mouse brain that needs about 6 seconds to simulate 1 second of real thinking time.

Mid-air mouse...

[rilister]

... I can debunk this one for you right away.

Take your mouse. Hold it the air for five minutes. For extra effect, wave it about. Now imagine doing this eight hours a day. And being accurate.

Tired arm much? Using a 2D mouse is about accuracy and long-term usage. OK, the mouse isn't perfect, but hanging it in space significantly deteriorates both these properties.

The Wii controller is a whole different ball of wax - it's for using for a couple of hours at most, and you don't try clicking on unfolding menus with it.

Re:Mid-air mouse...

[Soulshift]

Do you even know how the Soap pointing device works? Hint: you don't wave it around in mid air. It's essentially the guts of an optical mouse put into a smooth, clear container and stuck into a sock. The optical sensor tracks the grain of the enclosing sock, and you manipulate it by squeezing the sock gently, causing the "mouse" inside to rotate - much as if you were squeezing a bar of soap (hence the name)

Unlike a lot of stuff coming out of Microsoft, I regard this little invention to be actually rather creative and worthwhile. If anything, it will definitely be a boon to people who need to use a pointing device during presentations (much better than the trackball solution we have today)

Re:Mid-air mouse...

[mlush]

You dont even need to do the experement, there is a name for it since the 1980s From the Jargon files gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".

Re:Mid-air mouse...

[jollyreaper]

Also, hasn't this existed for years now? But now they're going to put five blades on that fucker, and TWO aloe strips. Whole new product, man.

Man-made brain, hmm

[tgv]

I guess by "man-made" they mean artificial and that it will REVOLUTIONIZE(tm) computing since these artificial brains are going to be built in to every PC. Where did I hear that before? I think at the time they grossly overstated the capacity of computers such as the original IBM PC. So perhaps Moore's law applies to hardware, it surely doesn't apply to exaggeration.

Anyway, who needs an electronic brain? Now I can at least yell "idiot" to MS Word when it joins sections or splits pages without it getting offended. Can you imagine Clippy looking angry and saying in this cute cartoon like blob "Now I'm not going to erase your document, you asked for it".

Re:My Idea...

[maxwell demon]

A hand-carried fusion reactor, unless you want to take down the grid with those ideas...

Well, add on that list: The closed time loop computer. By sending information to the past, it allows to infinitely speed up software: The result of one step is just sent to the past for preparation of the next step. Since also the final result gets sent into the past, you get your result immediatly. Indeed, you can get your result before you even asked the question!