Part two of our 2057 coverage. This time: 2057, the city. We bathe in datastreams as we walk through our city. Cars, streets & clothing exchange data around the clock and act intelligently to support us in whatever we do.

Read on …In the city of 2057, children (and adults) walk the streets with holographic companions (somehow reminiscent of people’s daemons in The Golden Compass). 3D virtual animals merge utility with entertainment being both playmate, gps device, guardian angel …

Klaus Schenke over at the Heinrich Hertz Institute is researching how to make 3D images visible for the naked eye. In his setup, hundreds of tiny vertical lines etched on a sheet of glass, act as lenses to fuse a left- and right-eye image into a 3D experience. Aside from making 3D visible, infrared scanning enable users to manipulate the 3D objects by means of gesture manipulation.

Yet what about projections in a room, an open space instead of via a screen. Remember, we see things because of and depending on how they reflect light. In other words, an image needs to be projected onto something in order for us to see it. At the University of California, researcher Tobias Hollerer and his colleagues developed a fogscreen which sprays tiny water-droplets to create a 3D screen surface on which images can be projected (see also the HelioDisplay). Also here infrared tracking allows people to interact with the 3D projections.

The streets (as well as subterranean areas) feature networked cars & driveways, turning traffic jams into a memory of a distant past. Automobile manufacturers are working hard to turn driving into a safer experience than it is today by making cars smarter, enable them to assist and override humans when necessary. At Audi in Germany (their RSQ concept car being featured in the movie) for example, researchers are working their way towards an intelligent driving experience by working out solutions to challenges such as making the car understand road situations to enabling it to predict a driver’s behavior and (inter)act intelligently.

Step by step driverless cars come closer to reality. Year after year, university teams compete with each other in the DARPA challenge, a race for driverless cars which need to make a trip through the desert (or the city, cf. DARPA Urban Challenge) on their own, without human assistance in decision making of any kind. (e.g. Cornell, Stanford teams). Robots on wheels.

Asimo, Honda’s walking humanoid robot – one of the actors in the movie – was a major technological challenge. The adventure to solve biped walking started in the 80’s and took many years. Whereas most current day robots are only able to fulfil preprogrammed tasks, robotics and AI/cognitive researchers hope to create adaptive, autonomous robots sometime in the near future, robots which can learn through experience and act independently, intelligently in a broad range of unknown/not-preprogrammed situations. Asimo recently learnt to make choices, i.e. plan for how to achieve certain goals on his own.

A tightly networked city, can be regarded a living organism with a nervous system (see also Chlorofilia 2106). The ways in which a city becomes increasingly dependent on tightly coupled datastreams and systems, like an organism on its blood flow, also implies certain dangers: network vulnerability through botnet attacks and other malicious hacker techniques, technology/power/physical infrastructure sabotage, cybercrime, viruses etc.

Badly intended individuals or groups are one type of threat, yet more than 20 nations already are actively developing computer attack programs, usable in case of war or conflict. The armsrace between good and bad will continue and get fiercer.

Large-scale networked camera surveillance systems (e.g. UK) are gradually becoming more intelligent in terms of recognizing and tracking individuals and goods (e.g. the work of Dimitrios Makris at Kingston university). 3D face recognition (e.g. the work of Henning Daum at Fraunhofer), predictive tracking, biometrics (iris scanning, voice recognition, skinscans, instant dna testing, etc.) … They will all be part of the future mix.

From smart cities to smart houses. The home of the future will recognize you, know your preferences, serve your needs on a personalized basis (e.g. advanced domotics). The intelligent fridge will keep track of expiration dates, stocks running out and order products on your behalf or suggest recipes based upon the fridge’s contents.

Also the future will need to store data of times past for times ahead, lots of it. CD’s and DVD’s rot, data formats become unreadable, … new technologies are needed. Holographic crystals can store up to 200 DVD’s worth of information for up to 1000 years as digits or as microscopic images in optically readable form (see holographic data storage).

Stay tuned for a link overview for 2057, the body.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 19:53 and is filed under experience, future, science, society, technology, trends, visions, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.