The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible. IBM’s predictions include:
• Beaming up your friends in 3D.
• Batteries that breathe air to power devices.
• Ordinary people saving the planet.
• Computers helping to energize your city.
• Commutes that are personalized.
How will you beam up your friends in 3D? In the next five years, 3D interfaces, like those in the movies, will let you interact with 3D holograms of your friends in real time. As 3D 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 “3D 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.
Better batteries will allow you to chat longer. In the next five years, scientific advances in transistors and battery technology will allow your mobile devices to last about 10 times longer than they do today. Scientists are working on batteries that use the air we breathe 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.
These new battery technologies will reduce the waste created by today’s batteries in landfills on our planet. Another way that our planet will get some help is through ordinary people functioning as walking sensors. In five years, sensors in your phone and your car 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 or to save endangered species. These simple sensors already exist and the data from them will create massive data sets for research.
It is research of course that exposed the effect global warming is having on our planet. And it is research that will play a powerful role in enabling us to do more with less — reducing our impact on the environment. For instance, what 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. Using new technologies, such as 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 this technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction!
The last of IBM’s Next Five in Five predictions involves minimizing the misery of the daily commute to work. Your commute will be personalized as advanced analytics technologies provide travel recommendations that aim to get you where you 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. Using new mathematical models and IBM’s predictive analytics technologies, researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that can affect commuters, to deliver the best routes for daily travel. That way you’ll receive the best advice on how to get where you want to go in the shortest time, using the least amount of energy.
