The Digital Future

"The goal for networking in the next decade will be to provide individuals with a data cloud that follows them wherever they go. Whether I am attending a meeting in New York, sitting in my backyard in California, shopping in Tokyo, or meeting with a customer in Thailand, I should never be without any of my digital information. The network challenge [will be to make] this available whenever and wherever I am; the database challenge [will be] storing, organising, and retrieving all of this heterogeneous material."

Thomas G. Zimmerman, researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Centre

Page Break

"Information about you will follow you around online. This will let you maintain your persona and reputation as you move about the virtual world. However, it raises concerns about privacy. Who will control this information? If individually controlled, the system is unreliable - I'm unlikely to share unflattering data about myself. Yet an externally controlled persona raises the disturbing vision of a society under ubiquitous surveillance."

Judith Donath, assistant professor at MIT Media Lab and director of the Sociable Media Group

Page Break

Think the Melissa virus was annoying? Consider this scenario: an employee at company X receives e-mail containing a snippet of virus code. The recipient opens the message, releasing the virus onto the hard drive, where it sits silently ... waiting. When the PC idles for an extended period, indicating that the employee has left for the day, the virus downloads another code, which sifts through the hard drive and forwards data to a remote site on the Net. If anyone touches the keyboard, the program shuts down and hides until the next opportunity to strike arrives.

I Spy

Until now, computer viruses have been more pesky than pernicious, vandalising data but rarely stealing it. Soon, experts say, spy viruses will be a real threat. Last June, antivirus companies learned of a virus that works through a screen saver called PrettyPark.exe. Click on the application, which comes as an e-mail attachment, and, if you're an mIRC user, the virus enters your computer to steal network passwords and other data, then attaches itself to outgoing e-mail.

Virile Viruses

Experts at Symantec and Network Associates say new viruses will study their host environments and alter themselves based on these. Last year, both companies reported an increase in the number of polymorphic viruses, those that change their code to evade detection. "For a virus to spread," says Jimmy Kuo, director of antivirus research for Network Associates, "it mustn't call attention to itself." That's why showy programs like Melissa, which make a lot of noise, do relatively little damage.

Kuo also reports a proliferation of data diddlers, viruses that undermine the integrity of data by randomly changing bits of it. One of these, called Compat, changes the values in an Excel spreadsheet to within 5 per cent of what they should be.

You can easily imagine the potentially destructive power of such a diddler. We wouldn't want one infiltrating our anaesthetist's computer, let alone the Pentagon's.

Page Break

Go ahead, laugh. By now you've probably heard about the microwave oven that connects to the Net, and the fridge that tracks your grocery list.

Well, don't laugh too hard. Appliance companies - such as Samsung (maker of the Internet-ready microwave), Frigidaire (which, along with ICL, created the smart fridge), and Philips Electronics - are taking this stuff very seriously. And some of the biggest names in computing - including Intel - are sinking big money into digitising furniture and kitchenware.

Mi casa es PC casa

At its recent "La Casa Prossima Futura: The Home of the Near Future" show in the US, Philips Electronics exhibited designs for tomorrow's chefs, including a speech-enabled cook's apron (which lets you turn on the stove with a voice command) and a thermometer-like sensor that gauges the calories in your lasagne. Don't expect these gadgets in your kitchen soon, though; the food analyser and apron won't appear for years, if ever.

Tomorrow's kitchen gets wackier at MIT's Media Lab in Massachusetts, US. Starting with the premise that "the kitchen is no place for a keyboard, and certainly . . . no place for a mouse", the lab's Counter Intelligence Project (yes, that's its name) is developing a talking oven mitt that, when thrust into a hot oven to check the chicken, will tell you if your bird is cooked. Other inventions include a spoon that will measure the spiciness of your chilli; a refrigerator that will not only tell you whether you've got milk, but also order it for you from the corner shop; and a countertop that will talk you through a cordon bleu recipe.

Count on computing companies to have a strong presence in the post-PC household. For example, a Pentium chip runs Frigidaire's smart fridge. And Intel is pushing its StrongARM processors for set-top boxes, game consoles, and other specialised machines. Microsoft hopes that Windows CE will be the OS of choice for these devices.

Chat rooms

The key to the future home is connectivity. Smart appliances won't be much use if they can't talk to each other. Microsoft hopes that Universal Plug and Play will be the lingua franca for domestic network devices. UPP is expected to appear in Windows 9x (code named Millennium and slated to ship in 2000), as well as future versions of Windows CE and Windows 2000.

For obvious reasons, companies such as Microsoft and Intel are determined to keep the PC at the centre of the smart home, as a digital cop for all the devices on a home network. Says Micro-soft product manager Keith Kegley, "Right now, the PC is the only [device] flexible enough to let all these new technologies coexist. . . . Because of their ubiquity, [PCs] will be the single common device on every home network."

Sure, it's a rosy picture, but biases aside, it's a safe bet that even tomorrow's high-tech fridge won't outsmart your PC anytime soon.

Page Break

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft. Need help getting in the mood? Think back to your first PC and recall the countless hours you've spent staring at Windows error messages since then.

For nearly two decades, Microsoft has almost single-handedly shaped our computing experience. Can any company wrest control from the giant from Redmond? We think so.

Your computing life today probably revolves around a traditional "Wintel" PC, but before you know it you'll have a host of clever devices that don't need Microsoft or Intel inside. This isn't to suggest that Microsoft and Intel will disappear, but the glory days of desktop PC profits may be over.

Instead, providers of Internet services and computing appliances - such as smart handheld devices that let you send e-mail, browse the Web, and conduct wireless transactions - will likely benefit most from this future computing environment. And, in a twist of fate that Microsoft opponents will relish, the Gates empire isn't positioned to supply the operating system for many of these handheld gadgets. Who is? Our bet's on London-based wireless-tech guru Symbian.

Get smart phones

While Symbian isn't exactly a household name, this company already packs enough might to make Bill Gates shiver in his oversized sweater. A joint venture formed between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Matsushita - four telecom giants that together supply the majority of cell phones in the US, Europe and Japan - Symbian is poised to corner the market on operating systems for smart phones (handhelds that look like cell phones, but which also let you send e-mail and browse the Web).

Symbian is busy improving and licensing Psion's EPOC operating system for handheld devices. EPOC's low memory requirements and its user interface, which is suitable for small screens, appeal to hardware designers, says Diana Hwang, IDC's research manager for smart handheld devices. Further-more, thanks to an agreement with Sun Microsystems, these smart phones will also run Java apps and work with Java-compatible gadgets.

No room for Bill?

In contrast, Microsoft's only venture into handheld operating systems, Windows CE, may be too hardware-intensive for smart phones. Today, Palm PDAs greatly outsell Windows CE devices. Research firm IDC predicts that smart phones will account for some 40 per cent of the handheld market by 2003. That's a huge opportunity for Symbian, and a formidable challenge for Microsoft.

Symbian's other competitor, Palm Computing, could be a worthy opponent, especially once it spins off from parent company 3Com. For now, Palm is working with Symbian, not against it - Nokia is making a pen-based wireless device that melds the Palm and Symbian operating systems. Look for it next year.

Page Break

"Within 10 years, the two-planet Interplanetary Internet will be in operation, with several satellites in orbit around Mars. Many robots will have landed on the surface and at least one e-mail server [to communicate with them] will likely be on the planet. As many as two billion users will be on the Internet, and that many devices will be on the network as well. Intelligent devices will be a normal part of daily life, performing functions for us such as ordering [groceries] . . . as we occupy ourselves with less mundane matters."

Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology at MCI WorldCom

Page Break

In 1997, Alan Ramadan introduced a new way to watch sports, made possible by the World Wide Web. Throughout the seven-month Whitbread Around the World sailing race, Ramadan's newly formed Quokka Sports (www.quokka.com) broadcast the images and expert commentary that usually accompany sports coverage, but with a twist. Quokka added technical data (some of it in real time) such as navigational notes, boat speed, radio conversations, and e-mail diaries written by the sailing crews. The company mixed it all up and put it on a Web site that drew 1.8 million visitors.

Today, Quokka Sports is no longer an edgy startup with a fistful of venture-capital dollars. Its list of partners includes TCI/Liberty, Hearst, British Telecom and Excite@Home. The site offers a clear glimpse of the future Web. Click on a link for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, and you'll see pages filled with a mélange of pictures, charts, bits of text, and at least one video or audio clip. Quokka also created the RaceViewer, a Shockwave application for motor sports that mixes graphs of the racers' positions with textual commentary and a live video window.

Multimedia-rich Web sites like Quokka's and RealNetworks' Take5 (www.real.com), which gathers an array of audiovisual programming from the Web for users to access in one central location, could be the hottest draws for broadband consumers in the future.

More sites will routinely feature streaming media and 3D modelling. The software to deliver such content already exists. Site designers just need to refine it, and consumers need faster Net connections to view it.

Page Break

What business doesn't want to be the next Amazon. com? Lots of companies are vying for the spot, though consumer retail space online has got a lot more crowded since Jeff Bezos turned his shoestring operation into "the world's biggest bookstore". Without a doubt, every new startup and garage geek on the planet is hoping to rake in millions through e-commerce. Not everyone will strike it rich, but one thing is certain: the electronic marketplace is on the verge of a tremendous growth spurt.

Forrester Research predicts that online retail sales will explode to $US184 billion a year by 2004, up from $US20 billion in 1999. "[The market is] going to be big," says Lisa Allen, an analyst at Forrester. She pauses for effect. "It's going to be really big."

VR Shopping

Not only will the variety and volume of products you can buy over the Net continue to expand, but your entire experience of online shopping will evolve, as well. Think virtual reality is only for games? In the future, you may stroll the aisles for a lug wrench at Mitre10 or finger the threads at Saks Fifth Avenue, all without leaving the comfort of your own home. Indeed, services such as these are already being tested by some stores.

As bandwidth into the home increases, e-commerce could develop into far more than a point-and-click experience. Covad, a US-based provider of high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) services, sees a day when companies will buy bandwidth in bulk, and trade it to consumers in exchange for their loyalty. "The company could communicate over a live video feed to a customer's house," says Abhi Engle, Covad's broadband product manager. Real estate firms, for instance, could offer clients streaming video "walk-throughs" of new houses, a service impossible without broadband. And because DSL is an "always-on" technology, consumers won't have to dial up to shop.

Must-buy TV

Inter-active TV, already in the test stage, is another growing e-commerce avenue. Mark Schmidt, director of marketing for IBM's home networking unit, pictures remote-control consoles with built-in flat screens that will allow you to watch your favourite shows and order the products featured in them. Imagine watching The X-Files and being able to buy the shirt right off Mulder's back.

"We're very close to having a touch-screen monitor that you could carry around the house with you," says Mark Dwight, a product line manager at Cisco Systems. He envisions a "flat, smooth tablet" networked to other appliances in the home and jacked into the Web. "It takes [shopping by catalogue in bed] to the next level," he says.

As for the look of future online stores, tomorrow's shopping experience is likely to be more visually exciting and interactive. Forget about bland, 2D Web displays of widgets and bolts. Instead, look to companies like the Sharper Image (www.sharperimage.com) whose site features a 3D image of a CD player, which you can grab with your mouse, flip around to view from all sides, and even open up, to take a peek under the lid.

It won't be long before US fashion retail icons Gap or Lands' End let you upload a scanned photo of yourself to their sites, then produces a scaled 3D image of you from that photo. You could then "dress" your model in various outfits to assess the style, size or colour before buying.

After that, it's only a short step before you find yourself virtually strolling the aisles of an online car dealership and kicking the tyres of that 4WD you've been eyeing.

Page Break

"One holographic storage disk will hold millions and millions of holograms. You'll be able to store a large university's entire archives on 10 holographic disks. By the time it gets to the desktop, in the outer edge of 10 years, transfer rates will be up to 100MB per second. Audio-video applications will drive the need for this type of storage. People are going to need to store hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video, and we'll be able to make the media very cheap."

Kevin Curtis, program manager of holographic storage development at Bell Labs (a unit of Lucent Technologies)

Page Break

"In an ideal world, the computer will become invisible. The ultimate will be when almost any object that we buy, no matter how inanimate, will contain an embedded processor that will enhance its function. A coffee cup, with embedded sensors and processing, could monitor how many cups of coffee you have drunk that day, along with the amount of milk fat and sugar, and then upload this information into your personal health maintenance program. The program might also tell you if you are drinking too much caffeine."

Roy Want, manager, embedded systems division at Xerox PARC

Page Break

What does half a decade amount to on the Net? A lot. Just five years ago, David Filo and Jerry Yang began the Yahoo list, Microsoft registered the domain name MSN.com, and Netscape released Navigator 1.0. Today there are more dot coms than one-armed bandits in Vegas, and 150 million to 200 million people are online. What a difference the Web makes.

So how will the Internet look in five more years? For starters, the Web will be bigger, flashier and noisier.

Everybody in the pool

As sure as bugs in a Windows program, more users will be on the Internet five years from now. According to New York-based international research firm Jupiter Communications, only 37 per cent of US households were connected to the Net in 1998; by 2003 this figure will have risen to 63 per cent - and that's a conservative estimate.

Despite the current wave of interest in broadband connections (through DSL, cable, or satellite modems), Jupiter Communications analyst Zia Daniell Wigder says less than 25 per cent of future Internet users will connect to the Net that way, and widespread broadband use will take longer to achieve than most people expect. Analog dial-up connections will be free for the asking, Wigder says, and broadband companies will have to sell consumers on paying for a superfast Net connection.

Will the Web backbone snap under all that weight? Some industry observers warn that the Net could get bogged down as video, audio and other rich media become more popular. To keep up, we may need "a 100 to 1000-fold improvement in the backbone, and each server may need to be 100 to 1000 times faster," says Abdelsalam Heddaya, vice president of research and architecture at US-based Infolibria.

The Internet, part two

Of course, there's a big difference between having enough bandwidth available for the entire Internet and having it available to you when you need it. As the Internet has become increasingly commercial and crowded, its original users - academics and researchers - have had a harder time accessing the communication lines. To mitigate this problem, developers of a new project called Internet2 have set aside miles of fibre-optic cable to devote to researchers' use and to serve as a testbed for future Internet applications and technologies. The project's participants, which include Nortel, Qwest, and Cisco, expect technologies developed and refined there to facilitate searches on the Internet, improve the reliability of streaming data (video, audio and the like), and generally create a more stable Net.

Until now, the biggest obstacle to delivering high-quality multimedia over the Internet has been the straw-sized connections that funnel data through it. But even the narrowest consumer broadband connections will be roughly 10 times faster than the average 56Kbps analog modem. Fatter connections mean wilder, more graphic-intensive Web sites loaded with streaming video and audio clips. Net shopping for everything from clothes to cars will begin to resemble the real-world activity, since buyers will be able to look at products in detail - probably in 3D.

Shopping won't be the only area of change. In the future, you may get most of your entertainment - movies, music, videos - and news on the Internet.

The greatest gains offered by broadband connections may be around-the-clock access to data, resulting in an Internet that is always on in your house. For instance, instead of having to instruct Quicken to surf your bank's Web site and download your transactions, future versions of the program may retrieve the data as the bank's computer processes it. Combine this with the trend toward home networking, and your future abode is likely to contain lots of application-specific devices - all wired to the Net. The very concept of "going online" may give way to an era of instant, universal communication.

Page Break

Two decades ago, Coleco's handheld football game was as high-tech as portables got. Today we have an epidemic growth of mobile computing devices and digital doodads - laptops, pagers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, digital cameras, subnotebooks, mobile MP3 audio players, and handheld phasers with "stun" and "kill" settings.

Okay, maybe not that last one . . . yet. But at the current rate of development, we could soon be resembling well-equipped cyborgs. In fact, Xybernaut, a US-based company, already sells a full-featured wearable computer, complete with a Xybercam video camera and a small, head-mounted colour display that flips down in front of the user's eye (ideal for the utility worker hanging perilously from a telephone pole). It costs $US5500.

So how will we keep these cool devices from weighing us down? Wireless systems, advanced display technologies, and all-in-one devices will help keep ultraportables, well, portable.

And no doubt about it, wireless connectivity for notebooks is developing rapidly. Apple's new iBook supports a wireless LAN system called AirPort that allows users to share an Internet connection within 45metres of a hardwired access point. Similarly, Dell is making a wireless LAN card that'll be an option for its Latitude notebook line, and plans to offer similar wireless options for all of its notebook and desktop PCs. You can bet other companies will quickly follow suit.

Besides wireless, another key buzzword for the future of mobile computing is convergence. Qualcomm's pdQ smartphone is a good example of this: it's a full-featured digital wireless phone with a Palm III organiser built into the handset. It can autodial numbers that are stored in the Palm organiser, can display text messages as a pager would, and has all the standard apps of a Palm. Many similar wireless devices are currently in development (see "Next Microsoft," below, for details).

Wireless isn't just for far-flung communications, though. A new industry standard called Bluetooth is designed to let all your mobile devices swap data via radio waves, provided they're not much more than 12 metres from one another. You could, for example, take notes at a conference on your Palm device, then wirelessly transfer them to your notebook when you returned to your hotel. Look for Bluetooth-ready devices to appear by the middle of the year.

The displays on mobile devices will improve, as well. Bob O'Donnell, research manager for PC displays with IDC, says advances in organic LEDs (displays that use naturally fluorescent compounds) promise brighter, crisper displays for mobile devices in about five years. These screens will need less power, O'Donnell says, because, unlike traditional LCDs, they don't require a backlight.

Paging Dick Tracy

Look beyond the next five or 10 years, and you may see some prototypes of the sci-fi stuff currently being pondered in research rooms around the country. Robert Morris, director of IBM's Almaden Research Centre, says his group is banking on the PC wristwatch becoming the ultimate wearable computer of the future.

Researchers could use advanced technologies such as quantum computing to produce superpowerful, watch-sized machines requiring little battery power.

Working with voice command technology, wireless Internet access, and more hypothetical possibilities such as holographic projection displays, designers could do away forever with monitors, keyboards, and other computing peripherals. Users would store data on the Web, which they would access through wireless networking and view using holographic projection. A superfast microprocessor would process the information instantaneously before uploading it from the watch back to the Web. Such machines would do everything that the Joneses' PC does now, but updated for the age of the Jetsons.

However, there's no word yet on that nifty phaser technology.

Page Break

In the future," predicts the Web site for Matt Groening's animated show Futurama, "people will live twice as long, computers will die twice as fast."

Rumours of the PC's demise may be premature, but they aren't necessarily exaggerated. No one can say for certain whether the PC will survive the coming onslaught of supersmart alternative computing devices - ranging from wireless phones to household appliances. Such products could make the PC less essential, especially if they're simpler to use and don't crash as often.

In the short run, you can expect PCs to become smaller and more powerful, with thinner and lighter screens. Advances in voice recognition could ultimately make museum relics of your mouse and keyboard. While the ageing PC may undergo some cosmetic nips and tucks, it probably won't disappear altogether - at least not in the near future.

Moore power to you

Moore's Law, based on a 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that processing power will double every 18 months or so. That's been the case since Moore's declaration, and there's no sign that this torrid pace will let up.

"We expect Moore's Law to continue, even 10 years from now," says Intel spokesman Manny Vara. Intel's chip-release road map, which sets the tempo for the industry, calls for 800MHz Pentium III desktop processors in the first half of this year, and 1GHz chips by year's end. AMD plans to produce a 1GHz Athlon processor by October.

Current processor technology will eventually hit a brick wall, though. Researchers agree that existing lithographic techniques for creating silicon chips are limited - you can fit only so many transistors on a silicon wafer.

So let's get small. Really small.

Now you see it ...

Nanotechnology and quantum computing are two areas of research attempting to supplant the silicon chip. Still largely theoretical, these concepts involve using molecular, or even subatomic, particles as logic components. Instead of relying on circuits to perform calculations, computers would use the position of individual atoms or spinning electrons to crunch numbers, creating extremely powerful "microscopic" computers that would leave today's machines in the subatomic dust.

But what good is a microscopic PC? Robert Morris, director of IBM's Almaden Research Centre, says there are certainly practical applications for a minuscule computer - but, of course, not one that small. "Rather than making these things so tiny that you inhale [them] by mistake," Morris says, "we're putting effort into wearable computers." Microscopic computing would require very little power - perfect for a tiny, wearable PC such as a computing wristwatch, one idea that the research centre is pursuing (see "Next Ultraportables", page 60). And, says Morris, quantum computing power would be virtually limitless. It would allow for "massively parallel" computations of the sort foreshadowed by Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Will you need this much brainpower to run Microsoft Office 2005? Probably not; but potential applications for number-crunching on this scale could include heavy-duty tasks such as weather forecasting and genetic engineering.

Display's the thing

The near future of display technology can be summarised in three letters: LCD. Flat-panel LCD monitors have several advantages over CRTs: they're lighter, smaller and capable of higher resolution. Unfortunately, for the next few years at least, LCDs will be prohibitively expensive for many users. Bob O'Donnell, research manager for PC displays with market research firm IDC, anticipates that 15in LCDs won't hit the $1000 price point (down from the current $2000) until 2003. And they will still cost more than CRTs.

Nevertheless, flat panels are the future, and at least one company is looking to take them to the next level. Russ Wilcox is co-founder and vice president of E Ink, a company that aims to produce flexible, paper-thin displays within five years. E Ink's Immedia technology consists of liquid ink embedded in paper-thin plastic sheets. Microcapsules contain the ink, along with tiny white particles that respond to electrical impulses. A wireless antenna chip in the "paper" transforms radio waves into text and images.

Currently, E Ink is field testing display signs in JC Penney department stores in two US states. The signs - measuring 1.2 square metres and made of foam core and plastic - receive an electric impulse that causes the text and images to change. The company also plans to create an electronic book within five years, with flexible, plastic "pages" that could display downloaded text and erase and reprint themselves. "[The book] would have hundreds of pages you can thumb through, in which all of the text can change," Wilcox says. Attach the book to your PC, and it will download whatever you want to read.

IBM's Morris expects displays to evolve in another way: instead of smaller, 2D displays, he envisions bigger, 3D images. "One obvious extension would be the projection display," he says. "You could project right onto the walls and live in a sea of data [that surrounds you]." Morris predicts 3D displays for games, entertainment, and even medicine (perhaps offering doctors much more comprehensive views of the body through 3D CAT scans and X-rays, for example). Initially, such displays would be projected into glass or plastic cubes, but eventually they would be able to stand on their own.

Will drives thrive?

One impediment to generating 3D displays is the tremendous amount of code required to store and project them. Fortunately, as quickly as processors are advancing, storage technology is moving even faster.

"Right now [hard drive capacity] is increasing at more than 100 per cent a year, and I think that'll keep up for the next handful of years," says IDC's research manager for disk-drive storage, Danielle Levitas. By combining magnetic and new forms of optical storage technology, hard drives capable of holding 100 gigs per platter should ship by 2005, Levitas says.

Will we need all this storage if our lives become Internet-based? Morris says that if storage technology outpaces communication technology, it makes sense to keep data retrieval local. But if communication technology moves faster, remote servers will be the way of the future. Rather than storing data on computing devices, we'd grab what we needed from online storage depots. Imagine keeping your music collection online and downloading Tony Bennett and Limp Bizkit whenever you want, using portable players and MP3 files. Already, virtual Web drives like IDrive.com and FreeDrive.com offer up to 25MB of free storage.

Morris also envisions storage in another dimension. "We're very interested in the idea of holographic storage," he says. "Instead of storing magnetic bits on a disk's surface, we're going to the third dimension. By using lasers and their interference patterns, we're able to store information in a crystal and read it at a rapid speed." Holographic storage could produce faster data transfers and more efficient searches by using minute changes in light angles to scan vast amounts of data at once.

This is no pipe dream. Holographic storage already exists in research labs, Morris says. Its capacities approach those of today's biggest hard drives, and data transfer rates reach 1GB per second. The technology is so expensive, though, that it will be several years before consumers can expect to see any practical holographic storage products on the market.

FutureSpeak

Voice recognition is often trumpeted as the most natural interface for personal computers, and it continues to be one of the busiest areas of development in the industry. Louis Woo, president and general manager of speech technology powerhouse Lernout & Hauspie, says that hardware and software technologies have reached the point where speech input can be speaker-independent - that is, it requires no user training. Building on advances made in both hardware and software noise-cancellation technology, he says, omnidirectional computer microphones are emerging that can pick out voice commands from background clatter in a room. Woo expects voice interface systems to be part of everyday computer use within the next three to five years.

The touchy-feely PC

Computers are also quickly becoming adept at recognising faces, tracking gazes, and even sensing moods. IBM's Blue Eyes research program is built around such biometric technologies. "One of the things we're interested in is attentive user interfaces," IBM research director Morris says. "These are interfaces that pay attention to you as you pay attention to them."

One developing technology, gaze tracking, involves a computer camera mounted to your display, which follows the movement of your irises. Depending on where your eye focuses on the monitor, the computer "senses" what information you want and calls it up without requiring you to click a hyperlink.

Advanced face-recognition systems will have other applications as well. For example, an always-on video camera may be used to scan your face every time you sit down to type. If an unauthorised person tries to use your system, your keyboard will lock up. Or recognition systems may further customise your PC experience. "Your display could adjust the font size depending on where you are in the room," Morris says. "It could recognise the faces of various members of your family, and give customised information at a glance."

Another Blue Eyes project is a computer mouse that senses your moods. It will gauge a user's emotional state by measuring pulse, temperature, and skin responses through the fingertips. Potential applications, developers say, include video games and market research. The mouse could tell game-makers when a player is excited or frightened, and let marketers know how questionnaire respondents "feel" about their answers.

Lookers

While the personal computer industry has made great strides in function, form has largely been forsaken. Cabinets, monitors, keyboards, and mice are still beige and bland. We may be buying brand-new Ferraris but, for the most part, they still look like 1985 Ford Lasers.

Some new systems - such as Emachines' E-One and high-end, all-in-one systems like NEC's Z1 - exhibit cosmetic changes. Future concoctions may overhaul our perception of the PC by taking the machine out of the box. Intel, for instance, is touting the Ottoman PC, a home PC that packs a Pentium III system, a flip-up LCD, and a wireless keyboard into a funky footstool that's "inherently suitable next to any sofa or chair". Meanwhile, printer manufacturer Lexmark has partnered with a fine arts university in the US to design a future office work space. Among its stylish components: a see-through monitor, a folding wireless keyboard (which looks like a high-tech handbag) that you can tote around the office and use with any PC, a printer that sprays paper as well as ink from its cartridges, and a smart desk that senses your arrival and adjusts itself to your height.

Someday these gizmos may become a reality. In the meantime, as long as computers continue to get smaller, faster, and more affordable, we shouldn't complain.

Page Break

It's probably a good thing this isn't the case, since a system crash at 700MHz is a lot safer than one at 700km/h. Nevertheless, judging by current evidence, advances in computing technology will continue to accelerate at an unprecedented rate. In this feature we look forward to the developing technologies that will shape our world tomorrow and the players behind them. Will PCs survive Internet madness? Or will they go the way of eight-track tapes and the Apple Newton? Will Microsoft be a formidable force in 2010? Or will the company's OS empire crumble like the former Soviet Union?

Standing at the cusp of the millennium, we've arrived at the era depicted in many sci-fi masterpieces. Much of what was predicted has come true, and even become mundane. As we look ahead, the hype appears to be denser than the circuits on a Pentium III chip. What say you to molecular computing machines that you can't even see? How about a computer mouse that measures your moods (but, regrettably, doesn't change colour to match them)? Not all the conceptualisations featured in these pages will come to pass. But fasten your seatbelt anyway, because the next few years promise to be a wild ride.

The future look of important aspects of our lives can be found under "Next ..."

Next PC: exploring the digital frontiersNext ultraportables: small is beautifulNext Internet: bigger, faster and universalNext Amazon: hangin' at the digital mallNext Yahoo: the Wild, Wild WebNext Microsoft: where's Windows?

Next microwave: home digital home

Next virus: tomorrow's digital diseases

Next game: future playtime

Predictions and hypotheses from signifcant figures in their fields can be found under "Future perfect":

Future perfect: coffee talk

Future perfect: space is the place

Future perfect: www.mars.com

Future perfect: lost in a data cloud

Future perfect: perpetual persona

Page Break

Designing games isn't child's play. The electronic gaming industry has traditionally pushed the limits of computing hardware and led the way in many software advances. From yesterday's Commodore 64 to today's 700MHz Athlon machine, we marvel at what our computers can do, then wonder what games we can play on them.

Alex Garden, CEO of Relic Entertainment and creator of Homeworld, a real-time strategy game, says that games will continue to drive technology. "It's likely that the growth of gaming in the new millennium will be more singularly responsible for the development and public adoption of new technology than any other influence," he says.

What will faster, more powerful PCs mean for future games? Will we be able to virtually sing with Puff Daddy or explore Middle Earth with digital hobbits? Or will we simply play graphically stunning but nonetheless stale versions of Tomb Raider?

The Next Level

The latest line of 3D video cards and the gaming interface DirectX give some indication of what's in store. Graphics-card technology has improved faster than any other segment of the computing industry. In only a few years we've gone from watching the pixelated, jagged images of Doom and Doom 2 to the photorealistic aliens and marines of Half-Life. While newer games look better than their predecessors, they're still as mindless as Galaxian was in 1979.

In the future, graphics cards will do most of the lower-level game processing, letting the CPU focus on intensive work, such as controlling objects' behaviour (as opposed to just describing their shapes), says Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst for 3D graphics and multimedia at Cahners MicroDesign Resources.

Consequently, the behaviour of objects

will mimic reality more accurately. For example, if lightning struck a tree in a game, the trunk would splinter and the branches and leaves would sway realistically as the weight of gravity took the tree down.

Such effects won't be limited to PCs. Sony is touting the powerful Emotion Engine CPU in next year's PlayStation 2, which dedicates more processing power to artificial intelligence and to object behaviour than to graphics. As a result, we would see more games like the revolutionary (though flawed) Trespasser, whose dinosaurs act out of fear, hunger or anger instead of following scripted programming. Imagine a game of Quake in which your bot opponents anticipate your moves, rather than just react to them. Though games won't truly imitate life for many years to come, within five or 10 years improvements in hardware and Internet broadband may allow designers to create games that not only entertain us but also challenge us intellectually and emotionally.

Relic Entertainment's Garden sees virtual reality as part of those games. "The next really big immersive leap will happen when a low-cost, high-resolution head-mounted display system emerges. This will remove the final 2D screen barrier that we fight against every day," he says.

In this scenario, we'll fight intelligent, 3D enemies that seem as alive as we are. We'll run, jump, hear, and see, not with joysticks and gamepads, but with the ultimate gaming peripherals - our limbs, our eyes, our ears, and most of all, our minds.