By: David Murphy
Continuing a tradition it’s upheld since 2006, IBM has announced the 2010 results of a survey of its 3,000 researchers company-wide. Said survey comes with a simple premise: What are the five technologies or ideas that have the best chance of becoming reality within the next five years?
As reported by Bloomberg, the top technology select this year is holographs. Specifically, the act of creating holographic visualizations using one’s mobile phone–a concept that isn’t new in its design by any means, but certainly one that’s possible for a company that invested 6.1 percent of its total revenue, or $5.8 billion, in research and development last year.
Other ideas topping IBM’s list include air-breathing batteries, computer-driven tracking and prediction of traffic jams (likely high on the list of priorities for IBM’s Silicon Valley researchers), an increase in environmental information through the use of new sensors in both phones and cars, and–perhaps IBM’s most ambitious research project–cities powered by the heat generated from massive computing clusters.
“All this demonstrates a real culture of innovation at IBM and willingness to devote itself to solving some of the world’s biggest problems,” said Josephine Cheng, a vice president at IBM’s Almaden lab, in an interview with Bloomberg.
So how, then, have IBM’s other predictions fared? Just looking at the company’s 2006 list, virtualized healthcare has yet to take off on massive scale–the idea that vitals could be taken on-the-fly in one’s residence and beamed on over to a doctor to diagnose as needed. As well, we have yet to reach a point where sensors installed in one’s home can track chronic diseases like diabetes or heart conditions.
Real-time speech translation is still chugging along, however, with Google itself thinking that the technology is accomplishable within a few years’ time. The company envisions a day when one could use one’s mobile phone to translate speech on-the-fly, fast enough such that a response in an entirely different language from one’s native tongue could be possible within the back-and-forth of a normal conversation.
IBM’s prediction of a three-dimensional Internet has fallen flat, now that the fad of Second Life has passed through the global conscious. But what about “mind-reading phones,” or IBM’s idea that a mobile device could automatically sense its location and hit you up with a special advertisement (for an after-work meal, for example) or enable or disable certain features (if you’re in a meeting)?
Done and done–it’s entirely possible to do so today in a myriad of interesting ways, including apps like Yelp which can concoct an augmented reality, combining real-life with Yelp information, using the camera and GPS on one’s phone.
Source: www.pcmag.com
