ARMONK, N.Y., Dec. 29, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Today IBM
(NYSE: 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
* Computers will help energize your city
The
Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to
transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM's Labs
around the world that can make these innovations possible.
In the next five years, technology innovations will change people's lives in the following ways:
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 an interactive 3-D globe, 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
Ever
wish you could make your laptop battery last all day without needing a
charge? Or what about a cell phone that powers up by being carried in
your pocket?
In the next five years, scientific advances in
transistors and battery technology will allow your devices to last about
10 times longer than they do today. And better yet, in some cases,
batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices.
Instead of
the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on
batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal,
eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful,
the result will be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery
capable of powering everything from electric cars to consumer devices.
But what if we could eliminate batteries altogether?
By
rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the
transistor, IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor
to less than 0.5 volts. With energy demands this low, we might be able
to lose the battery altogether in some devices like mobile phones or
e-readers.
The result would be battery-free electronic devices
that can be charged using a technique called energy scavenging. Some
wrist watches use this today – they require no winding and charge based
on the movement of your arm. The same concept could be used to charge
mobile phones, for example – just shake and dial.
You won't need to be a scientist to save the planet
While
you may not be a physicist, you are a walking sensor. In five years,
sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet and even your tweets will
collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of your
environment. You'll be able to contribute this data to fight global
warming, save endangered species or track invasive plants or animals
that threaten ecosystems around the world. In the next five years, a
whole class of "citizen scientists" will emerge, using simple sensors
that already exist to create massive data sets for research.
Simple
observations such as when the first thaw occurs in your town, when the
mosquitoes first appear, if there's no water running where a stream
should be - all this is valuable data that scientists don't have in
large sets today. Even your laptop can be used as a sensor to detect
seismic activity. If properly employed and connected to a network of
other computers, your laptop can help map out the aftermath of an
earthquake quickly, speeding up the work of emergency responders and
potentially saving lives.
IBM recently patented a technique that
enables a system to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis
of seismic events, such as earthquakes, as well as provide early
warnings for tsunamis, which can follow earthquakes. The invention also
provides the ability to rapidly measure and analyze the damage zone of
an earthquake to help prioritize emergency response needed following an
earthquake.
The company is also contributing mobile phone "apps"
that allow typical citizens to contribute invaluable data to causes,
like improving the quality of drinking water or reporting noise
pollution. Already, an app called Creek Watch allows citizens to take a
snapshot of a creek or stream, answer three simple questions about it
and the data is automatically accessible by the local water authority.
Your commute will be personalized
Imagine
your commute with no jam-packed highways, no crowded subways, no
construction delays and not having to worry about being late for work.
In the next five years, advanced analytics technologies will provide
personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in
the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn
traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and
route information to travelers than is available today.
IBM
researchers are developing new models that will predict the outcomes of
varying transportation routes to provide information that goes well
beyond traditional traffic reports, after-the fact devices that only
indicate where you are already located in a traffic jam, and web-based
applications that give estimated travel time in traffic.
Using
new mathematical models and IBM's predictive analytics technologies, the
researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that
can affect commuters to deliver the best routes for daily travel,
including many factors, such as traffic accidents, commuter's location,
current and planned road construction, most traveled days of the week,
expected work start times, local events that may impact traffic,
alternate options of transportation such as rail or ferries, parking
availability and weather.
For example, by combining predictive
analytics with real-time information about current travel congestion
from sensors and other data, the system could recommend better ways to
get to a destination, such as how to get to a nearby mass transit hub,
whether the train is predicted to be on time, and whether parking is
predicted to be available at the train station. New systems can learn
from regular travel patterns where you are likely to go and then
integrate all available data and prediction models to pinpoint the best
route.
Computers will help energize your city
Innovations
in computers and data centers are enabling the excessive heat and energy
that they give off to do things like heat buildings in the winter and
power air conditioning in the summer. Can you imagine if the energy
poured into the world's data centers could in turn be recycled for a
city's use?
Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern
data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted
because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. With new technologies,
such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the
thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently
recycled to provide hot water for an office or houses.
A pilot
project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the
technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions
per year, the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A
novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is
attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which
allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material
itself. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed
more efficiently. Water heated to 60 degrees C is then passed through a
heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.
