Well, folks!
We all know technology is now changing in a pace like nothing else in this whole planet. It’s never going to be same, ya. As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the population in US but the search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. A fact that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago, it now has 350 million users and it’s counting.
Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of people.
What will drive all this accelerating change is precisely what has driven it this past half-century: the exponential growth in the power of information technology, which approximately doubles for the same cost every year. During 1965, people shared a computer that took up half a building and cost tens of millions of dollars. The computer in our pocket today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation per dollar since couple of years back.
Again, everybody must have noticed that electronic gadgets are getting smaller and smaller; a latest music player holds 1,000 songs and weighs 0.38 ounces. Another example of a mobile phone in your hand is now much smaller than it was a few years ago and can do much more. By 2020, memory devices will be integrated into our clothing. And, the very idea of a “smart phone” will begin to change. Rather than looking at a tiny screen, our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in air.
That virtual display will be able to take over our entire visual field of view, putting us in a three-dimensional full immersion virtual reality environment. We’ll be able to watch movies virtually and read virtual books. A lot of our personal and business meetings will take place in these 3D virtual worlds. The design of new virtual environments will be an art form. We’ll even have ways to touch one another virtually.