As long as there’s compelling science fiction out there, we can keep reaching for more and more elusive technology to integrate into our daily lives.
We see bits and pieces of a sci-fi dreamscape already present in so much of the everyday – just consider your smartphone as a single example.
So much of what it can do was either silly, impossible, or impractical ten or twelve years ago. But now we expect to use our phones as flashlights, calendars, and gaming devices, all kept secure by our own fingerprint.
Thankfully there’s still plenty of people drawing inspiration from the fantastic, making science fiction into reality, then making that reality into a business.
Here are some of the most impressively high tech concepts that we think will successfully stand as businesses on their own.
The Myo lets you interact with your computer as if it’s from ‘Minority Report’
Myo is a gesture control armband that turns your real-world movements into computer instructions. By monitoring electrical impulses in your arm, Myo lets you navigate your Mac or PC computer with waves of your hand and the use of gestures.
Price: $149
Holographic storage sounds like it’s right from the future
Conventional computer storage works bystoring bits as magnetic or optical changes on a physical surface.
Holographic data storage turns this paradigm on its ear by recording information throughout multiple layers of an object, even storing multiple data sets by recording with lights set at different angles.
GE has demonstrated some practical applications of holographic storage, storing 500 GB of data on a Bluray disc
Google Glass gives you Terminator-enhanced vision
It’s like something out of Star Trek – a computer that sits on your face and overlays useful tidbits of data into your field of vision as you ask for them. It was released to developers in February and will be available to consumers at large in 2014 for between $300 and $500
Oculus Rift takes you to other worlds
The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that replaces your entire field of vision. The most immediate and obvious applications here are for games. Who wouldn’t want to quite literally step into and run around inside his or her favorite game?
Price: $300
Google’s driverless car is on the way
Already street legal in a few states in America, Google’s driverless car technology is an exciting premise that might soon make the roads as safe as they can possibly be. The idea is that a computer can be far more precise than a human, thus making accidents a thing of the past.
No word on when we can expect to see them for sale, but it’s on the way.
Quantum computing
Quantum computing uses the weird quirks of the super-small subatomic world to run calculations that are far more complex than conventional computers could handle reasonably. By harnessing small particles that can exist in multiple places at once and move forwards and backwards in time, scientists can make huge progress on tough problems.
Get this – one theory of how a quantum computer works is that it runs calculations in other dimensions.
X-ray vision may come to your smartphone
Terahertz radiation penetrates solids the same way that X-rays do, writes Mashable Scientists have built a microchip that can send and receive these signals, which means the formerly oversized machinery using terahertz radiation to see into things can be shrunken down to fit inside your smartphone.
The Hyperloop is still only hypothetical, but it could disrupt a huge business
The Gaetano Group 