IBM’s “Next Five In Five” Forecast

Year end is always a time of forecasts and predictions, and technology giant IBM is wading in with its fifth annual “Next Five in Five,” its list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The list, according to IBM, is based on market and societal trends as well as on emerging technologies percolating in IBM’s global Labs. Here’s what Big Blue sees in our future as part of its drive towards a “Smarter Planet”:

Hanging out in 3-D. In the next five years, IBM says 3-D interfaces, like those in the movies, will let people interact with 3-D holograms in real time. The trend, enabled by more sophisticated and miniaturized 3-D holographic cameras finding their way into cell phones as well as new video chat capabilities along the lines of 3-D telepresence, will let give people new ways of interacting with photos, browsing the Web or chatting with friends. Scientists at IBM Research are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data, including technology that would allow engineers to step inside designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across interactive 3-D globes, and visualizing trends happening around the world on Twitter–all in real time and with little to no distortion. 

Battery Power. IBM says scientific advances in transistors and battery technology over the next five years will allow devices to last about 10 times longer than they do today. In some cases, IBM predicts batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices. How can that happen? The way IBM explains it, in lieu of the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful, the result will be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery capable of powering everything from electric cars to consumer devices.

IBM prognosticators are even going as far as to suggest the elimination of batteries all together by rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the transistor. IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor to less than 0.5 volts, making batteries obsolete in some devices like mobile phones or e-readers. These devices could leverage a concept called energy scavenging, used today in some watches, which would let them charge by simple movements like shaking.

We’re All Data Collectors. IBM says that in five years, sensors in phones, cars, wallets and even tweets will collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of the environment. This data will be leveraged to fight global warming, save endangered species or track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world. In the next five years, IBM says a whole class of “citizen scientists” will emerge, using simple sensors that already exist to create massive data sets for research.

Personalized commutes. In the next five years, advanced analytics technologies will provide personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and route information to travelers than is available today.
Specifically, IBM researchers are developing new models that will predict the outcomes of varying transportation routes to provide information that goes well beyond traditional traffic reports, which IBM researchers say only indicate where you are already located in a traffic jam, and Web-based applications that only give estimated travel time in traffic. Using new mathematical models and IBM’s predictive analytics technologies, the researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that can affect commuters to deliver the best routes for daily travel, including many factors, such as traffic accidents, commuter’s location, current and planned road construction, most traveled days of the week, expected work start times and local events, including weather, that may impact traffic.

Computers: The New Energy Source. IBM is working innovations in computers and data centers, including its novel on-chip-water-cooling systems, which will enable the excessive heat and energy that data centers give off to be redeployed to do things like heat buildings in the winter and power air conditioning in the summer. IBM officials point to a pilot project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the technology as a prime example. The project is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction.