IBM expects to see holographic phone calls by 2015

By 2015, your mobile phone will project a 3D image of anyone who calls and your laptop will be powered by kinetic energy. At least that’s what International Business Machines Corp sees in its crystal ball.

The predictions are part of an annual tradition for the Armonk, New York-based company, which surveys its 3,000 researchers to find five ideas expected to take root in the next five years. IBM, the world’s largest provider of computer services, looks to Silicon Valley for input, gleaning many ideas from its Almaden research center in San Jose, California.

Holographic conversations, projected from mobile phones, lead this year’s list. The predictions also include air- breathing batteries, computer programs that can tell when and where traffic jams will take place, environmental information generated by sensors in cars and phones, and cities powered by the heat thrown off by computer servers.

“These are all stretch goals, and that’s good,” said Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at the investment-advisory firm Discern in San Francisco. “In an era when pessimism is the new black, a little dose of technological optimism is not a bad thing”

For IBM, it’s not just idle speculation. The company is one of the few big corporations investing in long-range research projects, and it counts on innovation to fuel growth, Saffo said. Not all of its predictions pan out, though. IBM was overly optimistic about the spread of speech technology, for instance. When the ideas do lead to products, they can have broad implications for society, as well as IBM’s bottom line, he said.

Research Spending
“They have continued to do research when all the other grand research organisations are gone,” said Saffo, who is also a consulting associate professor at Stanford University.

IBM invested $5.8 billion in research and development last year, 6.1 per cent of revenue. While that’s down from about 10 per cent in the early 1990s, the company spends a bigger share on research than its computing rivals. Hewlett-Packard Co, the top maker of personal computers, spent 2.4 per cent last year.

At Almaden, scientists work on projects that don’t always fit in with IBM’s computer business. The lab’s research includes efforts to develop an electric car battery that runs 500 miles on one charge, a filtration system for desalination and a program that shows changes in geographic data.

Citizen Science
The list is meant to give a window into the company’s innovation engine, said Josephine Cheng, a vice-president at IBM’s Almaden lab. Many of the predictions are based on projects that IBM has in the works. One of this year’s ideas – that sensors in cars, wallets and personal devices will give scientists better data about the environment – is an expansion of the company’s citizen-science initiative.

Earlier this year, IBM teamed up with the California State Water Resources Control Board and the City of San Jose Environmental Services to help gather information about waterways. Researchers from Almaden created an application that lets smartphone users snap photos of streams and creeks, and report back on conditions. The hope is that these casual observations will help local and state officials who don’t have the resources to do the work themselves.