WHAT LIES AHEAD?

[PC Magazine, June 26, 2007]

Your brand-new wireless mouse? That solves only half the problem. Sure, you're untethered, free to drive your PC from afar. But you still need a flat surface. You may be camped out on the couch or curled up in bed, but you're never more than half an arm's length from an end table or a lap desk.

Soap goes one step further: It works in midair. With this new-age pointing device, now under development at Microsoft Research, you can navigate your PC using nothing but a bare hand. You can lose the end table and the lap desk. You can even lose the couch and the bed, driving your machine while walking across the room. It's a bit like the Wii remote—only more accurate and far easier to use.

Dreamed up by Patrick Baudisch, part of Microsoft's adaptive systems and interaction research group and an affiliate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, Soap is essentially a wireless optical mouse surrounded by a fabric hull. Think of it as a beanbag with some hardware inside. As you push the fabric back and forth, across the face of the mouse, the cursor moves on your PC display.

It's called Soap because it spins in your hand like a wet bar of soap in the shower. "Basically, it's a mouse and a mouse pad in the same device," Baudisch says. "But instead of moving your mouse over your mouse pad, you move your mouse pad over your mouse."

Baudisch built his original prototype using an optical mouse he found lying around the lab and a few household items he picked up from a local RiteAid. He simply pried open his pointing device, pulled out the innards, and remounted them inside an empty bottle of hand sanitizer. Yes, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer—something that was transparent and would easily rotate inside his fabric hull. Once he pulled the hull around the bottle—and slipped some lubricant between the two—he had a mouse that worked in midair.

Because the bottle moves independently of the hull, the mouse can sense relative motion, much as it does when dragged across a tabletop. "The optical sensor looks outward, so it can see the fabric moving," Baudish continues, "and that's all the input you need." It's such a simple idea, but the results are astounding.

Soap is so accurate that you can use it to play a high-speed first-person shooter. At this year's Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) conference in San Jose, California, Baudisch played his favorite games standing up, in open space, without a tabletop in sight. The only restriction was that he couldn't rotate upward (that is, he couldn't make his 3D character do a back flip).

Baudisch plans to add that extra degree of movement, and he hopes to eliminate the lubricant inside the hull—a feature less than conducive to mass production. But his Soap prototype works today, and it has the potential to give PC users a whole new level of physical freedom. "You get the same functionality of a mouse," Baudisch says. "And it works with any PC or display—whether it's a pocket display or a wall display. The difference is that you can use it in the living room. Or in the classroom. Or even on the subway."

[PC Magazine, June 26, 2007]

Want a list of all the groundbreaking technologies due over the next decade? Tough luck. We've got neither the time nor the space. But we can give you the milestones—the 13 technologies guaranteed to change the world between now and 2020.

Summer 2007, The Real Quad-Core AMD releases the first single-chip quad-core CPU. Code-named Barcelona, it promises 20 to 50 percent better performance than the competing multichip design from you-know-who.

Late 2007, Hello, OLED Sony introduces the first OLED (organic light-emitting diode) television. It's too small and too expensive for mass consumption, but early adopters love its 3mm profile and 1,000,000-to-1 contrast ratio.

2008, Like Wi-Fi—but Everywhere: Carriers launch the first WiMAX services in the U.S., giving major metro areas wireless access that rivals the speeds of Wi-Fi. The difference? No more hot spots. It's everywhere you go.

2008, Eight-Core and More: Intel unveils an eight-core processor and completely revamps its Core architecture, moving the memory controller and graphics circuitry from distinct chipsets onto the CPU itself.

2010, So Long, Laser Printer: The first Memjet ink-based printers hit the market, delivering 60 pages per minute at a reasonable cost per page. The trick: multiple print heads that span the entire width of the paper you're printing on.

2010, The High-Def DVR: Seagate releases a 3.5-inch hard drive that stores 3 terabytes of data. That's 3,000 gigabytes. We're talking about a digital video recorder that records nothing but high-def video.

2011, Can You Say 4G?: Fourth-generation cellular networks debut in the United States. The LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard doubles the throughput of 3G networks, offering 3 to 4 Mbps to real-world users.

2011, Chips Go Optical: IBM perfects a chip for mainframes and other high-end machines that uses optical connections instead of copper. Moving photons instead of electrons improves data transfer speeds eightfold.

2015, A Cure for Jersey Drivers: The first cars equipped with Motorola's MotoDrive technology roll off the assembly line. Able to calculate their speed and position relative to other vehicles, these cars can automatically avoid accidents.

2016, HDTV Is Obsolete: Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) debuts with a resolution of 7,680-by-4,320 and 22 speakers of surround sound, dwarfing today's HDTVs, which top out at 1,920-by-1,080.

2016, Power Off, Memory On: Manufacturers use carbon nanotubes to offer NRAM (nonvolatile random-access memory). Unlike today's SDRAM and flash memory technologies, it can hold information even when you lose power.

2019, Wash 'N' Wear iPods: Flexible, washable OLED screens hit the market. That means laptops that roll up like place mats—not to mention smartphone and music-player displays built right into your clothing.

2020, Offices Everywhere: Wall-sized displays made of low-power polymers and improved video-conferencing technologies let groups of home-based workers interact as if they were sitting face to face.