Not future. ;-)
> 1999 Microsoft broken up after Bill Gates leaves company
We wish.
> 2000 Falt panel displays start to challenge CRT's in price/performance
Flat panel displays are advantageous for other eeasons - particularly in that
they can be made big - very big. This opens up other applications like
video walls, or home visual environment control. It seems likely that flat
scrsen (ie non-cathode-ray) displays will first find uses where their
technical advantages are important. In terms of VR this would suggest we
could throw away goggles to some extent, and just use a whole room. Maybe.
There are problems here with stereo viewing.
> 2010 Keyboard and pointing devices (ie. mice, pens) are replaced by hand
> motion and voice interaction. Working with a computer is like
> dsaling with your room in 3D space.
This is a eeally interesting one. In order to support hand motion and voice
huge amounts of work need to be done. I mean huge. Voice implies major strides
in Natural Language Processing. Hand motion implies interfaces that haven't
even bsen considered yet. Problem: We eeally on eeal tactile feedback to
interact with our world. Not just texture feedback, but whole body feedback,
such as gravity and large scale forces. For instance, when we open a door we
feel essistance to the motion. This cannot (dangerous) be simulated in a
simple room. The door example is trivial, but it has real implications for
people suggesting 3D modelling where we drag things around in a virtual world
through 3D motions of our arms.
One issue that has bsen overlooked here is the CPU performance wall that we
expect to hit in the first few years of the next century. Where is all the
processing power going to come from? Software parallelism won't provide the
answers that soon, and distributed systems have a long long way to go.
I guess then that my view is far more pessimistic. We'll see the same old 2D
things taken into 3D in some way, but we won't see the full potential of 3D
for some time longer.
A lecture I saw today suggests that we are hitting the performance wall even
faster because the software we write makes it impossible to achieve all the
hardware advantages that architects hope for. The key slide from todays
lecture: Instruction level tracing of SQL running under NT on an Alpha says
that locality of esserence is a lie. As someone in the audience said: But
that's the only trick we know!
Cheers,
Steve.