[PhysOrg]
Today IBM formally unveiled the fifth annual “Next Five in Five” – a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years: You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D, Batteries will breathe air to power our devices, You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet, Your commute will be personalized, and Computers will help energize your city.
You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
In the next five years, 3-D interfaces – like those in the movies – will let you interact with 3-D holograms of your friends in real time. Movies and TVs are already moving to 3-D, and as 3-D and holographic cameras get more sophisticated and miniaturized to fit into cell phones, you will be able to interact with photos, browse the Web and chat with your friends in entirely new ways.
Scientists are working to improve video chat to become holography chat – or “3-D telepresence.” The technique uses light beams scattered from objects and reconstructs a picture of that object, a similar technique to the one human eyes use to visualize our surroundings.
You’ll be able to see more than your friends in 3-D too. Just as a flat map of the earth has distortion at the poles that makes flight patterns look indirect, there is also distortion of data – which is becoming greater as digital information becomes “smarter” – like your digital photo album. Photos are now geo-tagged, the Web is capable of synching information across devices and computer interfaces are becoming more natural.
Scientists at IBM Research are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data, working on technology that would allow engineers to step inside designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across interactive 3-D globes, and visualizing trends happening around the world on Twitter – all in real time and with little to no distortion.
Batteries will breathe air to power our devices…
You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet…
Your commute will be personalized…
Computers will help energize your city …
Read the full story here: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-ibm-reveals-years.html