IBM Predicts Holographic Calls, Air-Breathing Batteries by 2015

[Joanne98]

By 2015, your mobile phone will project a 3-D image of anyone who calls and your laptop will be powered by kinetic energy. At least that’s what International Business Machines Corp. sees in its crystal ball.

The predictions are part of an annual tradition for Armonk, New York-based company, which surveys its 3,000 researchers to find five ideas expected to take root in the next five years. IBM, the world’s largest provider of computer services, looks to Silicon Valley for input, gleaning many ideas from its Almaden research center in San Jose, California.

Holographic conversations, projected from mobile phones, lead this year’s list. The predictions also include air- breathing batteries, computer programs that can tell when and where traffic jams will take place, environmental information generated by sensors in cars and phones, and cities powered by the heat thrown off by computer servers.

“These are all stretch goals, and that’s good,” said Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at the investment-advisory firm Discern in San Francisco. “In an era when pessimism is the new black, a little dose of technological optimism is not a bad thing.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-23/ibm-predicts-holographic-calls-air-breathing-batteries-by-2015.html

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Joanne.

[Joanne98]

2. You're welcome Uncle Joe!

[RZM]

3. Perhaps phones will be doing this in 2015

But 'your' mobile phone probably won't until much later. It takes a while for advances to filter down to the masses. That will probably happen eventually, but not in 2015.

[Speck Tater]

4. But what will power all those gadgets when the price of electricity is out of reach

of the former middle class serfs and peasants who will be getting by on subsistence farming of turnips and cabbage?

[unblock]

5. help me obi-wan! you're my only hope!

i'm actually not sure i like the idea of needed to be holograph-presentable whenever i make a call....

[ChairmanAgnostic]

6. you'll have available avatars to stand in for you.

those are even easier than getting your image up.

[unblock]

7. yeah, but then they'll just assume i'm on the crapper.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

8. think of the fun you can have.

My ugly mug on Raquel Welch's body? or my body attached to Big Bird?