IBM Projects Holographic Phones, Air-Driven Batteries

geek4 writes "In 2015, we will be using mobile phones that will project a 3D holographic image of callers, claims IBM in a list of predictions of future technologies culled from a survey of 3,000 IBM scientists. 3D displays are also the focus of work between Intel and Nokia in the development of a holographic interface. Cities heated by servers and advanced city traffic monitoring are also listed as being among the prevalent technologies of the next five years, according to a Bloomberg article."

Re:In a shocking development, it turns out...

[The_mad_linguist]

...that this article is baseless fantasy. Half of it's gibberish: what does "cities heated by servers," even mean? The other half ignores what's known to be possible, with the holographic projections popping out of phones within four years being the most obvious clanger. How's that supposed to work? Like in Star Wars, of course, which is to say only as a special effect in a movie.

If you're going to be using electrical heating, you might as well get some useful work out of that energy instead of just setting it on fire.

As for holographic projections, a heliodisplay isn't technically the same thing, but it looks like the ones from Star Wars, so I'll give them a pass. It isn't that difficult to project a holographic phone. [io2technology.com]

Re:Why survey the scientists?

[NameIsDavid]

At IBM, the patent attorneys aren't a part of the process for approving patents. Rather, depending on the division, there is a panel consisting of various representatives from the department. Some are engineers, usually one is an attorney. Inventors pitch their idea and the panel asks questions and decides to either ask the inventors to return with more details or additional information or may approve moving forward. Usually, the next step is to pass a search of prior art. Only then is the disclosure rated "file," where the inventors can start working with an assigned attorney to prepare the actual application. In some divisions, the panel may be just a few people, but always predominantly from the scientist/engineering side, not the legal. Legal is usually just one representative, providing guidance so no time and money is wasted on ideas that fail basic patentability criteria. A key consideration through all this is how important the idea is to IBM business. Another consideration is how discoverable the idea is. If it's too hard to detect whether or not someone is violating the patent, it's not worth going through the process. Ideas that relate to an upcoming product tend to be prioritized over those that are just potentially connected to product. This is based on going through this process a few dozen times when I used to work there.

Re:These guys are crazy

[mcgrew]

Technological advancement is peaking.

Bullshit. You sound like the patent examiner in the 19th century who resigned his position on the grounds that everything worthwhile had already been invented.

If you were paying attention you'd see that we are on the cusp of inventions that make the 20th century's inventions seem trivial. We have nanomaterials, metamaterials, new knowledge about subatomic particle physics (and thanks to the LHC, more will be coming quickly).

If you weren't young you would see that we live in incredibly primitive times, and the present is ALWAYS primitive compared to the future.

It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy.

Cheap petroleum doesn't fuel progress. Scientific advances fuel technological advances.

Plus there isn't any money.

There wasn't any money in the 1950s, either, yet the US Interstate highway system, transistors, lasers, and the birth of space exploration happened in that decade.

one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction.

The US isn't the world.

The 21st century is the era of entropy

Every century is one of entropy. Time is simply a measure of entropy. Our evolution was a function of entropy. Progress is a function of entropy, and it's not likely to stop any time soon.