Trek Tech Today
I remember when the Motorola StarTac came out — the first “flip” phone. It reminded me of the Star Trek communicators from The Original Series.
Now we’ve got the iPad — which resembles, even in name, the PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (We’ve got a lot of other things, too, including flat panel TVs and room controls, voice recognition…) Chris Foreman of Ars Technica wrote a great feature about the similarities.
The article ends on an interesting note: What’s really going to happen next? Unfortunately, Star Trek stopped innovating in the technical set design that’s guided our tech for the past thirty years or so.
Obviously, the “Minority Report” style of motion detection is probably going to start developing further. You’ve got the Wii’s motion input controls, and the coming Microsoft Kinect, not to mention the multi-touch interfaces that are in development for various purposes.
Voice control isn’t a very efficient method of input. However, one place I can see voice control used is for brief instructions — such as the household “lights: dim” instructions in ST:TNG — and in places where the other “input devices” on the human body are already in use, such as for helicopter pilots or in industrial applications. Another issue with voice control is privacy. We’ve got the Jawbone inductor microphone headsets, which work well when they’re in contact with your jawbone. We’ve already seen (literally) bleeding-edge scientists implant chips in their own bodies — and now they’re working on implanting computer chips in individual cells. How long before you can implant a Jawbone in your … jawbone?
