Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we’ve come to it at last. My final tech column. It’s been a good year, a tough year for many, but the development of technology marches onward and upward.
For this final issue, I’d like to share with you my vision of one of the possible (and probable) futures based on technology currently available. To do that, I will be referring to a lot of different items and giving a brief intro about each one. Please do not hesitate to look them up online if you have additional interest in them and want to learn more. Without further ado, let’s dive right in.
A few months back, we saw the release of the Motorola Atrix, which was seen as Motorola’s latest attempt to put itself back in the limelight of smartphone success (the original Motorola Droid put the company back into the picture). This phone can dock into what the company refers to as a lapdock, which is nothing more than a battery, keyboard and LCD screen fit together to look like a netbook, but thinner. There is no processor, memory or hard drive, though there are a few ports and such. The phone docks behind the screen, out of the way, and the user can use the “computer” as if it were a full laptop and when ready to hit the road, simply undock the phone and continue to work on whatever it was he or she had open on the computer.
It’s a very neat concept, and really points toward one of the directions we are headed in. Smartphones are getting more and more powerful, faster and faster, as the many manufacturers compete to get the most out of the growing market. Since the Atrix came out, a slew of other high-end, dual-core, large-screened smartphones have hit the market, both in the U.S. and overseas, with more coming each month through the next year. So there will be no shortage of powerful devices to work from.
In the future, laptops and desktops are going to be relics of the past, with few clinging to them for personal use. They will be legacy devices that companies will no longer target, and desktop and laptop computer viruses will become nearly extinct. Instead, it is the mobile world that will be the most traveled, and the mobile internet and cloud will become MobileWeb3.0. Of course, by then our phones will really be supercomputers that have excellent connectivity and fit in our pockets, and happen to make phone calls once in a while.
Now, let’s bring into the picture wireless charging, a technology that has been getting ever more popular. Actually, let’s expand that to wireless everything while we are at it. Intel has wireless video taken care of, and there is growing support for near-field communications (NFC) and RFID tags (Radio-frequency Identification).
Let’s just take the wireless charging and wireless video for now. Imagine going home, or back to your (super high-tech) dorm, and setting down your phone on a pad by your door or desk. Your phone starts charging and streaming video to the paper-thin screen on your wall. Oh, I forgot to talk about that part of your sweet dorm room. It will have a flexible OLED display (organic light-emitting diode), which is also powered wirelessly and can do wireless video, so it doesn’t even need to be plugged in anywhere. No wires! The setup will also feature gesture recognition, so you won’t need to sit down to your keyboard and mouse anymore. Just wave and swipe your hands around and navigate the Internet.
What’s more, you will be able to have amazing live video-conferencing experiences using a wrap-around flexible OLED display and an array of webcams embedded into the walls, so that you can see everything in 3D perspective as you move and interact, drawing on virtual whiteboards and exchanging ideas. This is what is referred to as a holo-deck. Definitely look that one up if you’re by a computer — don’t forget that your smartphone is a computer now too!
One of the real tough questions that I can’t really answer right now but will leave to you to think about is what the method of input will be in 10 years. The keyboard has been around for a long, long time, since the age of the typewriter in fact. But we can’t be bound to this input method for eternity. Someday, there will be a change. I don’t know when it will happen and I don’t know what it will be, but I do know that there will always be the stalwarts who refuse to change.
The keyboard was a great invention, and it allows us to transfer our thoughts to words about as fast as we can think (provided we’re a skilled enough typist). But even technologies like voice-recognition, once refined, will reign superior to typing by virtue of the fact it will literally be as fast as you can talk. Of course, there is the limiting factor of how densely people can sit in the work office, but directional microphones can easily solve that.
So there you have it, my vision for one possible future, along with some closing thoughts for you. To those of you who have been following this column, I thank you and hope that you will continue to keep up with technology in the years ahead as we move into ever more exciting new discoveries, inventions and innovations. Keep on keeping, best of luck to all of you and may your technological feats and knowhow impress your friends evermore.
