I worked with machines similar to those machines, and generations of their predecessors, for 18 years. Such wireless terminals have been around in warehouses for inventory-control for at least that long, but have only relatively-recently made it into customer-facing applications.
Similarly with the wireless payment terminals that are showing up in more and more restaurants. The shift to chip-and-PIN credit cards is only going to accelerate their arrival, as it will be more convenient to bring the terminal to the customer rather than requiring the customer to go back to the payment desk. Before, the server took the customer’s card and returned with a receipt to sign.
I just read that the terminals Apple uses in their stores, which are Windows-CE-powered, are going to be replaced by iPhones with custom accessories.
Reading about Organic LEDs and Phosphorescent Organic LEDs gets me all excited as well. To think that the fancy HUD on the bridge of the Enterprise in this year’s Star Trek is actually attainable today!
I’m surprised nobody has said this yet… after reading this thread from start to finish: This is a great time to be alive!!
I would not be surprised to see something like that surface as a ‘wearable computing’-device within the next 5-10 years (if it even takes that long)… Perhaps some version of the ‘sixth sense’ discussed in this thread, fitted with goggles with transparent OLED screens (YouTube link) or perhaps some kind of virtual retinal display that creates an image directly on your retina, giving a complete augmented reality experience everywhere you go. All the information available via the net, transmitted to you literally in the blink of an eye. Perhaps the future is so bright I gotta wear shades!
Not just that, they called it ‘HAL’ to top it off (see post 2).
And as for forcefields, they’re useful sometimes, like when you want to get the shuttle out while keeping the atmosphere in (kind of what plasma windows are used for right now), or to seal off hull breaches when you don’t really have time to call up the brick-and-mortar crew, but at other times… Well, they look cool, and perhaps the federation needed to impress other species with their ability to totally disregard the energy bill. Kind of like how you don’t really need a Ferrari to get from A to B; they’re (mostly) human after all.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Things like the iPhone and BlackBerrys have been out for years but it wasn’t until I started shopping for a smartphone last month that I realized just how sci-fi they had become. I chose a BlackBerry and so far I can get GPS navigation on the fly, surf the net while at the store to look up prices and product information, send and recive emails and everything else a full fledged computer can do plus make phone calls all in a device that can fit in my pocket.
It’s supposed to be lighter. That way spaceships can have an extra layer of protection without the extra weight. And if all you need to create a force field is the field generator, then you can have ultra portable walls.
