How many times have you ended up buying a product, only to be confronted with a much cheaper and better version just a few months down the line? With the constant pursuit of amelioration in the technological industry, here are the current trends and what you can soon look forward to having at your disposal soon:
Holistic Gadgets: With the release of Apple’s iPad, the trend of holistic gadgets that combine your mobile, entertainment, practical and social needs is becoming more than mainstream – it is becoming an absolute necessity. While 3G phones provide a good amount of space for music and internet accessibility, they do not have the proper equipment for continued visual usage as a laptop. However, laptops lack the capabilities of a cellphone that allows instantaneous communication without waiting for programs to open or devices to power up. Thus the products have begun to converge with the leading item being the iPad which has, inevitably, led to several spin-off products. For example, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon boasts: 3G mobile broadband, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS , intuitive user interface and mobile operating system. Sound familiar? NVIDIA, Intel, Meego, and Google’s OSAndroid and soon to come ChromeOS are also similar, portable 21st century gadgets. These gadgets all seek to take the best and most popular advancements of the past ten years and crush them into one, fantastic, pocket-sized money-machine. So, let the games begin – the iPad 2.0 will soon appear in order to dazzle its competitors even more.
3D Technology: Sharp has surged in recent news due to their press release stating that a 3D touchscreen will soon be available in their products. With the advances that have been made in CG-Silicon which enables the cheaper production of high quality images due to the use of less material to achieve the same effect, and the optimization of parallax barriers, Sharp can afford to create a lightweight touchscreen that allows the user to see 3D images without the use of special glasses. With these developments, there has been talk of using Sharp’s new patent on the upcoming Nintendo 3DS game console. LG 3D LCD TV is 47 inches of 3D goodness, Sony BDP S770 Blu-ray player can accompany the 3D television set and Panasonic helps you along in your 3D film career by providing camcorders to film the next Avatar or Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert (which is helpfully available in 3D). The future is certainly not two-dimensional.
Augmented Reality: In the vein of 3D technology, augmented reality products help to enhance life by merging technology with the visible and concrete aspects of life. For example, this iPhone app became very popular in the summer of last year due to the fact that there was a real time subway map displayed on the app, directing the user to the nearest and most convenient subway in the city of New York. Other augmented reality gadgets include the SixthSense project being carried out at MIT. This gadget has a projector screen that goes on any flat surface – including your hand, in order to help out with such tasks as: finding the most environmentally friendly toilet paper in a store, comparing prices, finding reviews for books, and taking pictures of any immediate area that strikes your fancy simply by making a camera action with your hands.
The website describes the gadget as follows: “The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.”
Translation: Awesome.
The creators of Skinput seem to have a similar idea as they turn a person’s arm into a screen using a projection system, meaning a future reduction of materials required to create gadgets. Plausibly, all future gadgets requiring a screen could be reduced to small projector systems.
Open Source!: With the growing number of apps and the Add-Ons available for your Firefox browser, the trends points to only more open sourced customizability in the future. A new development that promises to take virtual life in a new direction is the Prefab application that has been developed at The University of Washington. This app basically hijacks softwares or applications and allows a person customize it, not by modifying the code but what is displayed. This leads to a virtually limitless array of hijack-able products as there is no real safeguard to protect the image given off – as yet, that is. Such continued inventions that allow customizability in users’ products show no signs of slowing down and Open Source production continues to take over everyday technology.
Neural Decoding: Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley have been able to take play-by-play images of mental activity through several experiments. The technology they have utilized is fMRI scanning, but the technique involves studying brain patterns in response to certain images shown to the patient in order to predict future responses. The computer to which this information is fed then processes and synthesizes the information in order to help the researchers understand what different responses mean. Furthermore, electrocorticography (EcoG) experiments have revealed that researchers are able to detect what vowel or word patients are thinking of. In fact, it was found that both speaking and thinking the word gave just about the same result. Most researchers involved in this field express surprise at the pace of development of the science which is rapid and impressive.These technologies promises to change the judicial system, the security industry, accessibility to products for people with disabilities and perhaps even the notion of privacy in the long run. The technology continues to mature but there is no reason to fear a Big Brother state just yet.
Multi-Purpose Environmental Inventions: The PeePoo is a new invention to join the ranks of multi-purpose Green Tech. The PeePoo is a bag into which human waste goes and out comes fertilizer – something that will help Kenya’s poor sanitation problems as their water systems have become corrupted due to a lack of proper sewage. There are also such products as the solar powered trash compactor and Eco-friendly homes made from recycled plastic as well as other clever, multi-purpose and clean energy creations. The reason for this trend comes due to the desire to optimize the use of materials that comes with the Green culture. There is always a desire to create a product that is not only beneficial to the environment but that also fills a need in the consumer.
Wireless World: This technology has the potential to change the way that people think about mobile gadgets. Powermat has already taken on this task commercially. However, projections for the technology are to allow items in the vicinity to power up wirelessly using what is called WiTricity. This could mean the end of wires all together. If you cannot imagine how much of a big deal that is: look at the nearest extension chord. Look at the items that are connected to it. That could be a toaster, a television, a computer, a cellphone or a lamp. Now, imagine them without any wires at all. You could put any item anywhere in a room without thinking about sockets. No more tripping over your laptop’s chord. Even better, people with pacemakers and other battery-powered medical items and surgically implanted electronics could benefit from the technology!
Furthermore the growth of freely available WiFi is growing to be a more and more popular notion.
So, it seems as though the future is here, and the gadget of tomorrow is a solar-powered, 3D touchscreen, augmented reality, wireless, open sourced projector that has apps that can tell when you are hungry or when you want to watch Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus’ Best of Both Worlds Tour without you having to say anything. Or is that the wrong interpretation of the trends?
Sources:
Rob Enderle “There are products that hope to beat the iPad” TGDaily
Richard Adhikari “Sharp’s Next-Gen Mobile Touchscreens: 3-D for the Naked Eye” TechNewsWorld
Pranav Mistry “About SixthSense” SixthSense
Katherine Noyes “Prefab May Give Any Software Opene Sourciness” TechNewsWorld
SurfDaddy Orca “Mind-reading (Neural Decoding) Goes Mainstream” Hplus Magazine
Brian Dolan “WiTricity: Wireless Charging for Pacemakers” Mobihealth News
Impact Lab “Biodegradable Bag to Clean Up Kenya’s Slum’s ‘Flying Toilet'” Impact Lab
