IBM looks into its crystal ball

THE DIVINATION DIVISION of IBM has been examining the flights of swallows and has come up with five ideas that it thinks will be in the shops by 2015.

According to Biggish Blue, by 2015 your mobile phone will project a 3D image of anyone who calls and your laptop will be powered by kinetic energy.

Such predictions come out this time every year from IBM's Almaden research centre in San Jose, California.

Apparently Star Wars style holographic conversations projected from mobile phones will soon be available to any Princess hoping to escape from a Death Star after being captured by an asthmatic bloke wearing a scary mask.

IBM said that batteries will soon abandon lithium-ion technology. The new models will instead rely on energy-dense metals that only need to interact with the air to recharge.

Some electronic gear might abandon batteries and use something similar to kinetic wristwatches, which only need to be shaken in normal use to recharge their batteries. Aging baby boomers might recall that their fathers thought that was an amazing cutting edge technology in the 1960s.

IBM also sees data helping shorten commutes in the next five years. Computer programs will use algorithms and real-time traffic information to predict which roads will have backups, and help people figure how to avoid getting stuck in traffic.

A slightly stranger prediction is that cities might be powered by the heat thrown off by computer servers. This does not make a lot of sense to us. The amount of heat generated by computer servers is actually dropping, so we suspect they will have some very chilly cities.

IBM's predictions are sometimes right, but sometimes they are completely off. For years IBM told us that speech technology would be the next big thing. That was about 15 years ago, but it hasn't happened yet except in some very niche applications.

The company also predicted that Second Life would become more widespread, which it didn't.

One thing that did come true was a 2007 prediction that mobile phones would become a wallet, ticket broker, bank and shopping assistant. That's happening, and it's already a mass reality in Japan.

Big Blue said its boffins are currently working on projects that include efforts to develop an electric car battery that runs 500 miles on a single charge, along with an efficient water filtration system for desalination.

Josephine Cheng, a VP at IBM's Almaden lab said the company's glorious five year plan is supposed to give a window into the company's innovation engine, which we guess will soon be powered by heat from its mainframes. µ