Sci-fi's best ideas are coming to a living room near you,
Says Gary Marshall
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| Sci-fi |
One of the great things about living today, other than the
ready availability of brain-meltingly strong coffee in every high street, us
the way in which all kinds of science fiction predictions are finally becoming
real. It's not always good news, of course-sci-fi writers have also predicted
horrors including climate change, unmanned bombers and The X-Factor-but in the
fields of personal computing and consumer electronics we've come a very long
way in a very short period of time. It's an exciting time to be alive. Take the
Nokia Lumia 920, for example: if you could travel back just 20 years with one of
those babies and showed it off, it would only be a matter of time before the US
secret services tracked you down, spirited you away in a van with tinted
windows, and chucked you into the bit of Area 51 where they keep the space
aliens so they could study your technology. Some of the most far-fetched
technologies are already in our homes
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| Sci-fi |
Smartphone and tablets let us tap and wipe for access to all
kinds of information, just like the engineers of Star Terl did in the 1960s,
and Kinect delivers the same wavey, swingy waggly-fingered interface we saw in
the film Minority Report-although i don't recall Tom Cruise having to stop what
he was doing and shout at a black Labrador when it wandered in front of the
sensor, kicked him out of his own account and signed in as his wife, which is a
regular event in my house. Maybe they cut that bit. The most exciting idea in
sci-fi, however, doesn't exist in the real world yet-but it's coming. It's
small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe ... if
you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in
any form of language. It's the Babel fish as described by Douglas Adams in The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Microsoft is building it. In November,
Microsoft showed something stunning: when chief research officer Rick Rashid
spoke in English, his voice came out of the speakers beside the stage in fluent
Chinese. It wasn't a stunt-it was genuine, real time translation. As Rashid
writes, it's still a work in progress, but "we may not have to wait until
the 22nd century for a usable equivalent of star Trek's universal
translator". Given the relentless pace of technological change, it may
even be small enough to stick in your ear
