Future Functionality: Tomorrow's Technology Today

They may sound like science fiction, but these technologies are pure fact. From self-healing systems to electronic ink, robots to speech synthesizers, here are 8 tools to take you to the next level.

We developers are obsessed with the bleeding edge: the latest software, the hippest methodology and the next great device. Unfortunately, most of the buzz generated by industry soothsayers evolves into little more than vaporware. Rather than wax clairvoyant about tomorrow's trends, I prefer finding futuristic functionality today, not tomorrow. Whether it's in autonomic computing, human interfaces, mobile devices, robotics or virtual machines, the "tinker toys" named here are all available—and workable—now.

1. Self-Healing Systems
Autonomic computing aims to provide systems with detection and decision-support facilities to troubleshoot and repair malfunctions or faulty configurations without manual assistance. This results in less expensive overhead for large-scale distributed systems, while substantially reducing the break/fix cycle time.

While the full promise of self-healing computing systems is still on the horizon, work on this golden goal persists—with some encouraging results. As one of the largest and the most voracious proponents, IBM continues to develop the software foundation that will make autonomic computing a reality, releasing its Autonomic Computing Toolkit, which consists of the Integrated Solutions Console, Resource Model Builder and Adapter Configuration Editor. According to IBM's website, the toolkit is "a collection of Self-Managing Autonomic Technology components, tools, scenarios and documentation that is designed for users wanting to learn, adapt and develop autonomic behavior in their products and systems." In other words, it's a crystal ball of codified ideas and white papers that help visualize a standard on which software can autonomously alert problems and perhaps even predict issues before they arise. You can also download and explore several autonomic manager implementations from IBM's developerWorks website. As for other vendors, HP and Microsoft have also announced their intentions to provide smart system management and repair, but they have yet to match the buzz and the developer resources that IBM has generated to date.

Realm Systems' BlackDog takes the concept of a 256MB or 512MB USB thumb drive and combines it with a 400MHz PowerPC processor, a biometric fingerprint reader and an embedded version of Debian Linux.

2. On the Move
Cell phones have changed the way we live and work, and the revolution's not over: Why carry around a smart phone with a mere subset of your digital identity when you could tote your entire active desktop with you, available for reactivation on any PC with a USB port? Early-mover Realm Systems' BlackDog takes the concept of a 256MB or 512MB USB thumb drive and combines it with a 400MHz PowerPC processor, a biometric fingerprint reader and an embedded version of Debian Linux for a self-contained environment that activates itself upon insertion into the host system's active USB port. As with most 1.0 versions, the device's promise has yet to be fully realized, but software developers are already working their magic, prompted by Realm's Project BlackDog application development contest. It's not difficult to imagine this idea graduating to powerful PDAs that could offer a dual-mode option when connected to a host system; for example, BlackDog combined with an E Ink display, a long-lasting battery and an SD slot.

3. Post-It Computers?
Another interesting portable device is OQO Corporation's recently updated Windows XP-based model 01+. Packed with features such as WiFi, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and Firewire ports typically found in notebook computers three times its size, the OQO model 01+ offers a powerful, albeit expensive, prototype to build portable, next-generation data communication applications for mobile power users. Given the 01+'s small screen size, such applications would need to include scalable forms that could dynamically resize to the ideal font and Windows controls.

OQO Corporation's recently updated Windows XP-based model 01+. Packed with features such as WiFi, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and Firewire ports.

4. Steal This Radio
The ever increasing commute times in major metropolitan areas has prompted a growing interest in replacing one's car radio with a personal computing device. Damien Stolarz' Car PC Hacks (O'Reilly, 2005) is a good start for the developer who has several hundred dollars to spend and a spare car to hack. Chockfull of disclaimers, the book nevertheless provides the blueprints for moving the stationary desktop computing experience into the daily drive, as well as recommending a visit to MP3car.com, where visitors can opt to buy rather than build their mobile computing machines.

5. I, Robot
Thanks to DARPA Grand Challenge winner Stanford University's "Stanley," robots are no longer considered

The 914 PC-BOT model lets hobbyists create their own instructions using the base software that ships with the product. Right: The VIA EPIA M 1000 Mini-ITX motherboard.

RoboDynamics uses the same VIA EPIA M 10000 Mini-ITX motherboard as the 914 PC-BOT in its similarly featured robot with a very different external design. Standing nearly four feet tall, the MILO robot features a tilting webcam situated between two 8x8 LED grid displays used to simulate eye expression. The robot also ships with an API with extensible DLL support for highly customized application behaviors.

While the idea of owning a large-scale PC-based robot might appeal to technophiles with a few thousand dollars to spare, many curious software adventurers can pursue this emerging science on a much less expensive, smaller scale thanks to robotics company RidgeSoft. Founder Steve Grau is the author of the RoboJDE Java-based toolkit for the 6811-based Handy Board microcontroller. As Steve's wife and business partner Jenny Grau explains, "There was a lot of interest in RoboJDE, and many people were asking for a device that the Handy Board could drive. That's why we developed the IntelliBrain-Bot." The kit provides designers with infrared photoreflector sensors, wheels, a serial cable and the RoboJDE SDK. Though primarily designed as an educational platform for high school and college students learning robotics fundamentals, the device is an inexpensive alternative for anyone interested in exploring this rapidly evolving technology.

6. No More Paper
E Ink Corporation, the company closest to making the dream of low power e-paper displays a reality, has released a $3,000 Linux-based development kit showcasing its technology. What makes E Ink's product so attractive is its thin, flexible display surface and its ability to retain an imprint of an image even after power has been removed, like a flash photo effect on the retina. The development kit includes a 6-inch 800x600 pixel E Ink display driven by a Gumstix single-board computer, additional hardware and software with source code. According to E Ink's Robert Zehner, application engineer and lead project manager for the kit, "The primary function in the [E Ink developer kit] API is called display_image, which takes as an argument an 800x600 pixel 2bpp bitmap image. When this command is issued, the image data is transferred to the display. The hardware display controller is active only when an image update command is sent." What makes the display even more attractive is that it consumes power only when setting the display state via this function call, unlike LCD controllers that require continuous power. This means that once an image is transmitted to the display, it remains visible even after power has been removed.

What makes E ink's product so attractive is its thin, flexible display surface and its ability to retain an imprint of an image even after power has been removed.

Even though several companies, including Sony, have already attempted consumer-end solutions using the E Ink display, none have yet hit upon the killer app. Perhaps the new Chinese-based e-book device entrant Tianjin Jinke Electronics will strike a chord with users when it releases its v2 and v8 models.

7. Speaking Clearly
Another human interface technology that has been a long time coming is text-to-speech (TTS) conversion that sounds human in tone and inflection. Text-to-speech engines have existed for more than 20 years, but only within the last five has conversion quality approached the subtleties of spoken language. Two of the more impressive toolkits in this space are AT&T's Natural Voices and Acapela Group's array of text-to-speech engines. Both can be used within the Microsoft Speech SDK and are best applied in server-based interactive voice response (IVR) applications. However, a killer app has yet to expose TTS's full potential. Some proposals include combining it with mobile computing devices to translate incoming text streams into broadcasts for hands-free delivery during a commute. The flipside of the TTS story? Computer interpretation of spoken text. Some engine efficiencies are as high as 90 percent, but that still means that one out of every 10 words is misinterpreted. While Acapela and Natural Voices represent dramatic strides in the TTS realm, speech interpretation is still a significant hurdle to seamless human-to-computer spoken-word conversation.

8. Really Run Anywhere
Using virtual machines to keep applications running in a sandbox, shielding the operating system and other active processes in the event of a virtual machine crash, has been an accepted practice for some time. So have OS emulators. But it wasn't until the late 1990s that virtual computing became available on the personal computer. This revolution was led by industry leader VMware, with its 1999 release of VMware Workstation. Currently in its fifth iteration, VMware Workstation has become the de facto standard for virtual computing on the Windows and Linux platforms. Even Microsoft recognized this trend by acquiring the Connectix Virtual PC. However, VMware doesn't offer only virtual servers (its GSX, ESX and VirtualCenter solutions)—in a single pre-emptive move, it has dominated the market by releasing a free VM player capable of running any VMware-created virtual machine. This savvy step has several benefits, such as fast deployment of preconfigured applications in the running environment. The main boon for developers, however, is the ability to manage these deployed virtual machines programmatically. Imagine having access to a virtual grid space on a single PC. Replicating such a configuration in a physical data center would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. As such, programmers can author meta-apps that can control and perhaps even exhibit emergent behaviors as a result of such complexity. Additionally, different configurations of OSes (with Linux-based VMs becoming predominant due to the licensing issues associated with commercial operating systems) can be quickly assessed for revisions in a large-scale distributed computing environment.

Out of the Crystal Ball
So there you have it—innovative products to build your future computing dreams on. Who could have predicted the impact of the Altair, with its row of switches, and that first wooden case-enclosed Apple computer, on the computing workstations we take for granted today? Today's technology might spark future generations of self-repairing, sentient robots, driven by interchangeable CPU modules (executing the controlling software inside a protected virtual machine) and low-power flexible displays, speakers and auditory sensors, to do our bidding. Time to get to work!

Mike Riley is a Naperville, Illinois-based advanced computing professional specializing in emerging technologies and new development trends. Contact him at [email protected].