2050Life.com

Tomorrow’s technology here today? The video says it all.

If you’re curious as to what advantages this technology has, here’s a partial list from the inventors Jatech ,LLC, based in South California, USA.

• Access to occupant and/or their escape greatly enhanced in serious crash situations.
• Moving doors will stop and reverse if foreign object detected.
• Vehicle floor and belly pan form a box-like structure which greatly enhances body stiffness and strength.
• Cannot be ‘parked in’.
• Side mirrors remain in place when door is opened enabling continued observation of traffic from behind.
• No door ‘dings’.
• Less parking space required.
• 2, 3, 4, and 5-door applications possible for sedans, coupes, wagons, hatchbacks, convertibles, crossover vehicles, SUV’s, trucks, and vans, whether equipped with front, rear or all-wheel drive.
• Converted vehicles for the physically challenged.  

And here’s one of my own: No more finger jams!

Terreform, a non profit organization for philanthropic architecture, urban and ecologic design presents smart mobility vehicles for cities. The one pictured here is an “athlete” class car that uses articulated motion and linked dual control cockpits for a new kind of motion experience. 

That sounds and looks unbelievable, although thats what people probably said when the legendary Ford Model T was first assembled in 1908.

In the movie “Minority Report” the year is 2054 and you don’t have to buy train or bus tickets anymore because identification is done through eye scanning. If your eyes match what the system has on record for you, you’re in.

Guess what, we’re not so far away from that scenario! 

Fujitsu’s ‘PalmSecure’ reads your hand vein pattern and confirms whether you are in fact, you.  This way, if you were in a hurry to get to work, you can walk into your secure office door or log onto to your laptop in no time at all. The technology is quick, very accurate and already being used by governments, private and public sector enterprises.

I’ve been using the inbuilt fingerprint sensor to log on to my work laptop for over two years now. But its kind of annoying. When I move my finger across it at a particular angle and past a certain speed, or if my finger is slightly damp, it won’t work.

PalmSecure sounds like its the next level of convenience, and has a lot more applications. Either ways, I’m glad we’re moving away from having to remember any more passwords!

What’s exciting to think about is where this technology will be in 42 years i.e in the year 2050.  Who knows, maybe we won’t even need recognition anymore.

The idea of noise cancelling has been around for a while, in fact it dates back to the 1930s. Since 1988, we have been able to buy progressively better noise cancelling headphones. Now in 2008, we are looking at a new technology which if successful, would develop to such an extent that by 2050 it would be around us everywhere. In fact, we would move from “surround sound” to “surrounded by no sound!” whenever we wanted to.

Selwyn Wright, Audio Researcher and Engineer at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, UK has filed a patent called “Active noise control system in unrestricted space” for the Electronic Controlled Acoustic Shadow System (ECASS), or simply put the “silence machine”.

The concept is simple. All sound is transmitted by waves. Take a sound like the drone of a Jet engine, just reverse the sound wave, and play it back. The two waves cancel each other out and the result is nothing! No sound.

Cancelling sound in a headphone speaker cup is easy. In a room or open space it is much more difficult because of the furniture and carpet and other things that sound can bounce around off. You would need a computer with truly massive processing power to handle all those variables. With Selwyn’s current system, you can only mute out steady predictible noises like a tone while leaving everything else audible. However, more sophisticated versions of the technology are on the way. Soon you will be able to create quiet zones around your house, or in a garden. Residential areas around factories will benefit from this, as will highways and motorways.

Silence machines capable of blocking other types of sound, such as music, snoring, and human speech, were expected to be available around mid 2006 although I don’t see evidence of that yet. But it sounds like it’s on the way. There will probably come a time when you can zap a person into silence if you don’t want to hear what they have to say. Hmm, I wonder where that can be used? Stay tuned.