10 Developing Technologies That Will Change Your Life

February 22nd, 2006 · No Comments

Where’s My Flying Car?

Forbes has an interesting list of developing technologies that it believes will change your life in the future. The ones that interested me most I’ve left in Forbes’ text. For the rest you need to go to Forbes.

The drawback, if there is one, is that many of these things aren’t that new or exciting. That’s because many of them are either happening right now or just beginning to take off. After all, Gutenberg was only able to print a handful of Bibles in his lifetime, while today more than one million titles are published every year, or approximately one book every 30 seconds.

…

The problem with most of these technologies is not that they don’t work. In some cases, it is more a question of replacing existing technologies and attitudes that, out of ignorance or self-interest, resist adapting. For example, the telephone companies’ scramble to adjust to life after VoIP.

The other obstacle is that many of these new things are still too experimental or too expensive to be commercially implemented.

Fuel Cells

Gene Therapy

Haptics

Whether people know it or not, haptics has been subtly making inroads into everyday life in the form of vibrating phones, gaming controllers and force-feedback control knobs in cars (BMW’s iDrive system uses the technology). But the science of haptics has the potential to do much more. Products, such as the CyberForce “whole-hand force feedback system” from Immersion Corporation and SenseAble Technologies, let users interact physically with virtual objects. For instance, by using a sensor-equipped glove and a force-reflecting exoskeleton, you could literally feel the shape, texture and weight of an onscreen 3-D object. Such devices are used now for virtual modeling, medicine and the military, but as costs decrease, haptic interfaces could become valuable communication tools. Using haptics technology, people will be able to shake hands virtually over the Internet, and doctors will have the ability to remotely diagnose and operate on patients.

Internet2

LifeStraw

What’s the most precious liquid on earth? If you said oil, you’re wrong. It’s water. Even though more than 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in H20, many parts of the world suffer from a persistent and crippling shortage of potable drinking water. LifeStraw hopes to change all that. The 10-inch-long, 1-inch-in-diameter device is made by Vestergaard Frandsen S.A. of Lausanne, Switzerland, out of a patented resin that kills bacteria on contact. Its filters remove bacteria, such as salmonella and staphylococcus, from surface water in rivers and lakes. Reusable and, at $3 to $4 each, affordable, it has the potential to not only reduce the outbreak of disease but also to improve living standards and sanitation in many of the world’s poorest regions.

MRAM

MRAM, or Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, could change the way we work. Researchers at IBM have shown that MRAM can be six times faster than the current industry-standard memory, dynamic RAM (DRAM). It is almost as fast as static RAM (SRAM) and is much faster and suffers less degradation over time than Flash memory. Unlike these technologies, MRAM uses magnetism instead of electrical charges to store data. As a result, it is lower in density and in cost. In December 2005, Sony engineers verified operation of a spin-torque-transfer MRAM in the lab with data-write speeds of two nanoseconds. If adopted as a universal standard, MRAM could have significant military communications applications.

$100 Laptop

$200 Barrel Of Oil

VoIP

WiMAX

Link to print version, it skips the annoying slideshow.