By Danny Bradbury

At the dawn of 2001, the ipod didn't exist, the playstation 2 was just shipping and bill gates was wooing the public with the idea of mobile pcs you could write on.

Today, apple is more about music than computing, sony and microsoft are battling it out for the family room, and the tablet pc looks pretty but failed to change the mobile landscape.

What will the world look like when we hit 2011? Five hot technology categories will define the future of computing for you and your company.

1) Sensor Technology
Today's computer systems rarely understand anything about their environment but this will change in the coming years, according to industry experts.

We are already seeing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to merchandise in stores, and environmental sensors are being used to feed information to systems in niche applications like plant monitoring.

“But the biggest applications you will see are in telemedicine,” said Ian Pearson, CTO of the U .K.’s BT Group. An ageing population will increasingly
rely on home care, necessary to take the strain off an overworked healthcare system. Home sensor arrays will help monitor activity unobtrusively. Even
a simple microphone fitted to a water pipe and hooked up to a digital signal processor could tell whether someone filled the kettle, ran the shower or flushed the toilet. “The computer gets very good at working out what an average day looks like,” Pearson said.

The application could send an alert e-mail to a nurse or family member if behavioural patterns veer too far from the norm.

But sensors will become more sophisticated. “In six years computers will be small, low powered and completely networked, at least in high-tech countries,” said Hans Coufal, manager of device and systems innovation at IBM’s Almaden research laboratory in Silicon Valley, arguing that eventually
we will see computers as small as grains of dust.

“The military has been driving some applications with very low-power sensors and radios, but like the geographical positioning system, they will spill over into consumer electronics.”

Technologies like Zigbee will get us some of the way there. A protocol for creating wireless mesh networks of low-power sensors, Zigbee-enabled sensors
focus on long battery life, lasting for years instead of hours. They are designed to work together in a configuration of tens of thousands of nodes, and
can stay in communication up to 75 metres apart.

Zigbee sensors could monitor everything from motion to heat. For example, a Zigbee sensor could be attached to a light switch and would communicate the status of the switch through the Zigbee mesh network to a building management system whenever someone flipped it.

Venkat Bahl, vice-chair of the Zigbee Alliance, envisions Zigbee-compliant light sensors that could dynamically adjust light levels in a building to save energy. The price for Zigbee units is currently six or seven dollars, but that will drop.

2) Context Computing
Environmentally aware systems feed into another hot research topic: contextsensitive computing. If a computer understands where you are and what you’re
doing, it can make decisions on your behalf. In 2001, Microsoft demonstrated a concept system that used a webcam to watch a user at a desk to decide whether or not the individual was busy. It then used the information to decide which e-mails were forwarded.

We will see the beginnings of contextsensitive computing before sensor networks become ubiquitous. “Imagine a cellphone that knows my schedule and calendar and switches itself off when I’m in a meeting,” said Dirk Balfanz, manager of the applications and architecture area in Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center’s Computing Science Laboratory.

Even application interfaces could be context-aware. “If I’m in a meeting, my laptop might present me with some sort of interface that helps me take meeting notes,” Balfanz said. This isn’t unrealistic; Microsoft is already working on role-based interfaces as part of Project Green, the development of its nextgeneration business application platform.

3) Networking and Communications
For context-sensitive computing to really take off, it would help if people standardized on Voice over IP-based communications. VoIP will grow in popularity through 2011 mainly because companies and consumers want to save dollars on phone bills, but its true benefit isn’t cost, it’s flexibility.

Sadly, said Gartner analyst Steve Blood, implementations of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard used to set up Voice over IP calls are still fairly primitive. SIP is a VoIP signalling protocol which initiates, modifies or terminates an interactive session involving multimedia elements such as video, voice, instant messaging, online games and virtual reality.

For example, when you answer the telephone, the instant messaging (IM) software you were using should change your online status to busy. SIP can do that but doesn’t today.

As companies connect telephone, IM and video conferencing services via S IP this will change, and computers will modify their interaction based on user activities. In another example, the system would realize that a meeting with the boss is important and withhold all IMs, calls and e-mails.

This will happen as bandwidth, both to the curb and in the home, continues to drop in cost, creating an increasingly disruptive environment that will change business models dramatically. Wireless devices will also gain more bandwidth thanks to 3G networking technology, said Andy Fano, a consultant in
Accenture’s Canadian arm. The 802.11n highspeed wireless standard will be ratified sometime in 2006 and will deliver up to 600Mbps of bandwidth in the home. This will deliver more speed than users know what to do with long before 2011 arrives.

4) Content and Services
What will everyone do with their extra bandwidth? Personalize.

The rise of services like TiVo in Canada and phenomena like podcasting for Internet talk radio buffs has already captured the public imagination, but it is only the start of a growing trend in which people move away from traditional broadcast models, instead picking and choosing the content and services they require on their own terms.

“Gates already went on record as saying that the HD-DVD will be the last major form factor for (physical) media,” said Carmi Levy, analyst at Info-Tech Research. After that, Microsoft’s mogul believes all content will be digital, served up over a network.

This has already been happening to a limited extent with U.S. services like TiVo and the rise of video on demand and personal video recorders in Canada, but the interesting part comes when the delivery channels proliferate, said Accenture’s Fano. Just as computers moved from simply displaying paper-type documents to delivering multimedia, so portable devices like handhelds and iPods will move beyond video and audio.

What types of content? Fano compares old-school broadcast advertising with newwave targeted marketing and once again raises the issue of context sensitivity. “In the past the biggest challenge was getting the message in front of the customer, but now there will be all kinds of channels,” he said.

“If, in the long run, I can reach customers at any time and any place, the challenge is picking a time to reach them.”

As an example, he pointed to displays mounted on shopping carts, linked to a retailer’s wireless network. Forget about throwing as much content in front of the viewer as possible in 30 seconds, as TV commercials do, he said. “You’re in a store for 45 minutes, so what should we do? Think of it as an application that shuts up as much as possible.”

Instead, it presents you with a shopping list and uses information about your shopping history to point out sale items.

5) Hardware
In hardware, expect to see innovations in form factors for PCs and displays. At the chip level, both desktop and mobile computers will begin shipping with dual core technologies over the next year, essentially putting two processor cores on a single chip.

This will give multitasking and multimediaintensive applications more performance, which could yield particular results in small form-factor devices.

Wearable computers will be out of the labs by 2011, Levy said. The biggest challenge will be creating new input and output mechanisms, because traditional keyboards and keypads are already too cumbersome in a mobile environment.

New form factors could help users interpret information delivered by smart objects, said Jackie Fenn, a Gartner fellow in emerging trends and technologies. She said objects embedded with microprocessors and RFID tags will beam useful information to your personal device about the environment or
the object you’re looking at.

Your personal device could pick up a product code from an RFID tag in a store and quickly perform an online search to compare prices in other stores nearby. “That could be through a mobile device, a headsup display — Terminator style — or it could be an audio feed,” she said. “You can bring this information to people when they’re out and about and trying to make decisions.”

We may not see head-up displays widely deployed in eyeglasses by 2011, but we may see flexible displays designed for use on the move. Philips Polymer Vision recently unveiled a prototype mobile reader with a paper-thin five-inch display printed on a retractable roll. The Readius is essentially a digital scroll. “If you get a screen that rolls up into a pen and you can unravel it, it’s a better size to play with. I would expect to see that in the next 18 months to two years,” said BT Group’s Pearson.

Finally, said Gartner’s Fenn, expect to see robotics coming to the fore. Robots have generally been scoffed at in the west but Asian companies are investing heavily in the technology, she said. At the low end, firms offer robot vacuum cleaners, while at the high end, robots like Honda’s Asimo
walk, run and respond to commands.

“In the middle ground you have robots applied to do useful things like mobile videoconferencing, so physicians can check patients out when they’re
somewhere else,” she said, proposing robots that, like the sensor technologies mentioned above, help out the elderly.

A Brave New World
One thread running through all this is the idea that computers will conform to our needs more effectively. We’ve come a long way from the days before
Windows, when even using a word processor required arcane control codes. In the future, maybe we’ll finally feel that our systems are working for us, rather than the other way around.