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IBM Projects Holographic Phones, Air-Driven Batteries
geek4 writes "In 2015, we will be using mobile phones that will project a 3D holographic image of callers, claims IBM in a list of predictions of future technologies culled from a survey of 3,000 IBM scientists. 3D displays are also the focus of work between Intel and Nokia in the development of a holographic interface. Cities heated by servers and advanced city traffic monitoring are also listed as being among the prevalent technologies of the next five years, according to a Bloomberg article."
Instead of asking 3,000 people, what they should have done is ask the 3,000 people to pick the 10 smartest and THEY should have made some educated guesses.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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Most 3D projector cell phones will run on ethanol.
...that this article is baseless fantasy. Half of it's gibberish: what does "cities heated by servers," even mean? The other half ignores what's known to be possible, with the holographic projections popping out of phones within four years being the most obvious clanger. How's that supposed to work? Like in Star Wars, of course, which is to say only as a special effect in a movie.
If you're going to be using electrical heating, you might as well get some useful work out of that energy instead of just setting it on fire.
As for holographic projections, a heliodisplay isn't technically the same thing, but it looks like the ones from Star Wars, so I'll give them a pass. It isn't that difficult to project a holographic phone.
In 2007, Bloomberg notes, IBM was bullish on online immersive environments like Second Life. Big Blue certainly put its patent efforts where its predictions were - 250+ published IBM patent applications mention 'avatar' or 'avatars'.
I'd be surprised to see it happen on a significant scale, because of the legal, cultural, and infrastructure hurdles in many areas; but "cities heated by servers" is actually a perfectly cogent idea.
On many large institutional campuses(academic and corporate), and (if memory serves) a few closely built cities, there is a single "steam plant" that heats the whole place. A single large generator of heat, with that heat piped around the campus in underground steam lines.
In principle, a city or institutional campus with one or more very large datacenters could adopt a similar scheme using the waste heat from those facilities. Depending on distances, logistics, and a bunch of fiddly engineering considerations, this could either mean just directly pumping hot-aisle air out of the datacenter and into other buildings, mixing it with ambient air at the concentration required to provide the requested temperature, or it could mean using the hot-side output of the chillers to pre-heat water going into a conventional steam plant, to reduce the deltaT that needs to be provided by other fuel sources, or some other such arrangement.
Now, outside of greenfield or total-conversion deployments in campuses owned by a single entity, there would be a lot of legal and cultural hashing-out to be done, about billing, running heat lines, etc. but as an engineering exercise it is cogent enough. (Of course, legal and cultural and to some degree economic stuff tends to be where "futurists" and sci-fi writers are at their absolute weakest. How many sci-fi stories feature superhuman strong AI in a technological environment where every other computer system is a 70's dumb terminal, rather than our present situation, where AI is still at the '20 years off' phase; but malnourished 3rd worlders have cellphones? Never mind the hoary 'ship crews calculating the trajectory for their faster-than-light drive with slide rules and tables of logarithms' stuff. Or the venerable flying car: guess what, kids, the future where the middle class can afford helicopters and will be allowed by the feds to operate them is further off now than it was when that stuff was written...)
Aren't cell phones annoying enough as it is without people projecting the person on the other end in my face?
When you have finished this cup of coffee your adventure will begin again.
At IBM, the patent attorneys aren't a part of the process for approving patents. Rather, depending on the division, there is a panel consisting of various representatives from the department. Some are engineers, usually one is an attorney. Inventors pitch their idea and the panel asks questions and decides to either ask the inventors to return with more details or additional information or may approve moving forward. Usually, the next step is to pass a search of prior art. Only then is the disclosure rated "file," where the inventors can start working with an assigned attorney to prepare the actual application. In some divisions, the panel may be just a few people, but always predominantly from the scientist/engineering side, not the legal. Legal is usually just one representative, providing guidance so no time and money is wasted on ideas that fail basic patentability criteria. A key consideration through all this is how important the idea is to IBM business. Another consideration is how discoverable the idea is. If it's too hard to detect whether or not someone is violating the patent, it's not worth going through the process. Ideas that relate to an upcoming product tend to be prioritized over those that are just potentially connected to product. This is based on going through this process a few dozen times when I used to work there.
Why not try bulimia? It does exactly what you want and it's available right now.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.
China had quite and advanced civilization 1500 years ago. I don't think that had anything to do with cheap petroleum energy. I don't think the technological (e.g. financial achievement) has anything to do what so ever with natural resources. It has everything to do with the character of the people. Witness Japan.
I agree with you other points though. I think the problem is that there are too many parasites (lawyers, politicians, tv personalities). The poeple that produce e.g. farmers, scientists, engineers need to rise up and declare war on the hair dressers and bullshit artists of the USA. Maybe we can send them all overseas to 'invest' in the emerging markets.
The other day I was reading a X-man comic book from the 1970's. It had adds in the back for kids to buy kits to make their own analog computer! It kind of makes me realize how far we have devolved as a nation. Go to u tube and look at old tv talk shows from the 70's i.e. Donahue. Compare that to the TV pundits we have on the air today. The difference is truly shocking. I wonder if there are not a bunch of alien UFOs hovering over the United States, and sucking out our brains while we are unaware. It would explain a hell of a lot.
Even trickier to get cities flying on the moon.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
I am waiting for intersection that do not have traffic lights or signs because every car will know where every other car is that is within a hundred yards of it and will adjust its speed to avoid a collision at the intersection. I waiting for cell phone that once placed in a base will connect all the other cordless phones one has in their home. I can remember when most homes had only one phone and it cost extra to get another one in the house. It seems we have gone back to that era except when the cell phone leaves the house there are now no phones unless everyone in the family has there own cell phone. I am waiting for a cell phone that can easily vnc into any computer in the world. One should be able to control their home computer from anywhere in the world. I am waiting for race track memory. Maybe a trillion bytes of non-volatile ram memory so that hard drives are a thing of the past. Cell phone should need very little memory since they should be able to access all the programs on the home computer and exchange any data that is needed. I think my examples are a lot more useful than those in that article.
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.
Really now? What about nations which are not dependent on oil such as France, Germany, and Japan. Yes peak oil would most likley be a pain for international shipping, but nations who had the forethought to actually build nuclear power plants and decent mass transit systems will shrug and keep on going.
Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.
Government? Whose government? Are we talking about? You talk as if the past 200 years of advances were primarily made by people who lived on Washington, DC's payroll.
The world will advance. It will adapt and it will progress... The statement you should be saying that the world will not progress should say "The United States will not progress, while China, Japan, and Europe keep going."
Its not like China is short on cash.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over.
Maybe you are just getting old and jaded, while the rest of the world continues on. Did you ever think of that?
I have a phone that is more powerful than the supercomputers that were built when I was growing up. I have a desktop PC that runs at a combined clockspeed of something like 20,000 times that of the Apple IIe my parents bought, and is probably more powerful than most of the computers in the US at that time combined. I have a camera that lets me photograph visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. I think that's pretty cool, but feel free to think that everything of value has already been created.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
ALL of those problems that you speak of are almost exclusive to the United States.
China won't have energy problems : they have the guts (and the money to pay for) thousands of small nuclear generators, engineered to be fundamentally safe. China has our money, and their banking system isn't leveraged by credit default swaps.
Europe has similar protection against these problems : they don't depend so utterly on cheap light crude oil to run their cars.
Nuclear energy is cheap, if you use fundamentally good reactor designs and you don't bury the plant operators in red tape.
And we are a matter of a few years away from having solar energy so cheap to be better than coal. Photovoltaic cells have consistently declined in price, decade after decade, and are only a couple times more expensive than coal today. About 10 separate companies are producing cells using new processes that are substantially cheaper than conventional silicon. Yes, there's a way to store the power : compressed air in caverns is cheaper than any battery technology ever invented.
Oh, and the United States has colossal reservoirs of coal.-centuries worth. Coal energy is cheaper than oil. It's horrible for the environment, but if we were desperate, we could burn it and power everything. It's easy to make natural gas from coal, and with more complex chemistry you can make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and the rest.
Technological advancement is peaking.
Bullshit. You sound like the patent examiner in the 19th century who resigned his position on the grounds that everything worthwhile had already been invented.
If you were paying attention you'd see that we are on the cusp of inventions that make the 20th century's inventions seem trivial. We have nanomaterials, metamaterials, new knowledge about subatomic particle physics (and thanks to the LHC, more will be coming quickly).
If you weren't young you would see that we live in incredibly primitive times, and the present is ALWAYS primitive compared to the future.
It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy.
Cheap petroleum doesn't fuel progress. Scientific advances fuel technological advances.
Plus there isn't any money.
There wasn't any money in the 1950s, either, yet the US Interstate highway system, transistors, lasers, and the birth of space exploration happened in that decade.
one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction.
The US isn't the world.
The 21st century is the era of entropy
Every century is one of entropy. Time is simply a measure of entropy. Our evolution was a function of entropy. Progress is a function of entropy, and it's not likely to stop any time soon.
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