It’s human nature to fantasize about the future.
But have you ever imagined your mobile changing its shape to fit your
pocket or having a two inch music player, which can store all your music
achieves?
This is how technology around you is evolving and in five to ten years from now, companies including IBM, Intel and Microsoft will commercialize many of these technologies which were once, just a fantasy.
SkinDisplay
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The technology was developed by Clara Gaggero, head of Vitamins Design Ltd in a BlackBerry
sponsored project. SkinDisplay uses piezoelectricity to display
raised-up letters on the back of your phone, which can be imprinted into
your thumb with a press. The raised-up message includes caller name,
reason for call and the urgency, which is represented by three dots.
"If you're in a meeting and you hear your phone ring, you immediately get stressed out because you can't answer it. Is it an emergency? Is something wrong with the kids? We wanted to give the phone a chance to be discreet," Gaggero says.
So you simply put your hand in pocket, press the raised portion in mobile and read the imprinted message in your hand without anybody knowing it. The technology was patented by Research In Motion, the BlackBerry maker in 2011.
Microsoft’s Future Home
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People who visit Microsoft’s executive briefing home in Redmond, Wash
will be welcomed with a full scale model home of the future including
kitchen, living room, dining room and a foyer. As soon as you enter the
home, it will start briefing you on things that happened since you left
including news that your son got A grade in math test, The air
conditioner stopped working, your electric scooter will be charged in 27
minutes and you have six voice mails.
The home is completely equipped with micro sensors which help it to learn a lot including your daily routines. It will tell how to cook a dish, referring the things you have in fridge, remind you to take the medicines and automatically send a message to you or relatives if it finds anything out of ordinary like leaving the doors unlocked. According to Microsoft, the technology based on internet and “cloud” will become affordable and common within five years.
Intel’s Programmable matter
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Imagine you stretching the mobile to make it big or pressing a button
to convert it instantly to a lap top. It seems impossible, but that is
what Intel is currently working on i.e. shape shifting technology and
the company things it will be possible within next decade.
Intel has already built sphere shaped microrobots called “catoms,” which has enogh computing power to be self programmable. Millions of them work together to take a particular shape. Intel currently is successful in making catoms with 1 millimeter diameter and is trying to make the diameter tenth of a millimeter. If this material were used to make a device's casing, it would be theoretically possible for your smartphone or tablet to change shape whenever you want.
Intel plans to use the technology first in health field, where doctors can model the 3-D structure of organs for diagnosis.
IBM’s 12 atom memory storage
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To store one bit of data, you now need about 1 million magnetically
charged atoms, a main reason why hard drive capacity is not getting much
bigger related to physical size. But in January this year, IBM
announced that it stored one bit in just 12 atoms, a technology which
could increase the capacity of hard disks to 100 times without
increasing size.
Eventhogh IBM achieved the success in limited conditions in a lab with an electron microscope, the company believes that it can eventually use the results to bring something significant into market.
So you could see a 2 inch iPod shuffle which can store an entire archive of pop songs back from 1950’s or a hard drive with 300 TB capacity in the near future.
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