What's in store for everybody's go-to computer? Watch the cool video from MIT's Media Lab for one vision.
March 16, 2009 (Computerworld) For those of you who want the world at your fingertips, the wait is almost over.
The future PC promises to put nearly everything you could need or want right in your palm.
Think of a souped-up version of today's smartphone, with a monitor that unrolls into a larger screen and a biometric security system that lets you access everything in your professional and personal life from anywhere, with all the data residing in the cloud. Wave it at your car to unlock the door. Order and pay for your morning coffee with a touch of a button. Plug it into a docking station and project that big presentation to your clients. Book a weekend getaway with just a few clicks.
"PCs are going from engines or tools to portals and enablers. The vision of what they'll be in the future is a partner. They'll be participating in the higher cognitive tasks of what people do to get their jobs done," says Andrew Chien, director of research at Intel Corp.
The personal computer has been a corporate workhorse for decades. And while it has evolved, becoming slimmer and more mobile, in many ways it still resembles those old terminals tethered to the mainframe. But the next decade will bring dramatic changes, as the PC evolves past the standard desktop and laptop units to amalgamations of computing devices and their peripherals.
This future PC will be smarter, too. It could discreetly remind you of the name of an acquaintance and alert you when it's time to take your medicine. It will be your colleague, your butler -- and possibly your friend.
We talked and corresponded with a dozen or so experts in R&D, IT management and academia to get a feel for what they're expecting the PC to look like a decade from now.
A New Look
One thing everyone seems to agree on: The PC of 2019 won't look like today's laptops. "I'm not seeing people carrying anything that looks like a book," says Dan Siewiorek, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "It would be like a phone or a ring or watch. It will probably take multiple form factors."
Siewiorek says function will increasingly influence what PCs look like. An older person who needs help with independent living, for example, might carry a PC in the form of a wristwatch and use it as a virtual coach that reminds him about appointments or medicine schedules.
A technical worker might have her PC in her eyeglasses, allowing her to access and view information through embedded monitors and share what she's seeing with colleagues and supervisors via a camera in the glasses. Siewiorek says he can even imagine how PC technology could revolutionize the way, say, offshore crane operators or airplane mechanics do their jobs.
The changing ways in which we work and live -- and the blurring line between the two -- are driving the changes we will see in our computers.
"The PC of 2019 will be nothing like the PC we know today," says Wen Xiao, CIO of global service delivery at London-based telecommunications giant BT Group PLC. "It will be smaller and ubiquitous. Its function is less of computing and more of access control and communications. The computing capabilities will reside inside the cloud and be accessed on demand by [the] individual user."
He says younger workers, and certainly those who will enter the workforce in the coming decade, expect their data -- not just their devices -- to travel with them. They need their PCs to work wherever they want them to, and they don't want to worry about storing and transferring data.
Xiao says virtualization and cloud computing are already enabling that new level of mobility, and the trend is expected to accelerate. "The computing [and] data-storage functions will all be virtualized -- device-independent, location-independent data and applications stored somewhere in the cloud, and on-demand software applications," Xiao says.
That, in turn, changes what we need from hardware. "Its main purpose is no longer computing but identification," he explains. "As a result, it will be super small or most likely combined with other devices, like mobile phone, key, bio-ID, etc. What's inside is a unique identification of the user."
Bill Schilit, a research engineer at Google Inc. and associate editor in chief of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Magazine, says he, too, sees "the trend more and more off the desktop. We see people using just their cell phones or a very thin client on their desks or some sort of docking model, where you take your cell phone and plug it into a keyboard."
Moreover, the PCs of the future will put the accent on "personal," he says (emphasizing that this vision is his, not Google's). Consumer demand for games and instant access to everyday information -- announcements of school closings, traffic updates, weather reports -- will drive adoption, he says.
"We're going to see a lot more people using computer phones/smartphones and a lot more software for them," he says.
Shape Changers
The PCs of the future could be more flexible in every way -- even physically. For starters, they'll have adjustable screens that users can stretch, roll or unfold to open.
"So you can contort that device and make it bigger, maybe widen it to 6 inches tall and 10 inches wide so you can watch TV or access information through wireless broadband or peer-to-peer technology," says Sam Driver, an analyst at research firm ThinkBalm in Little Compton, R.I. "Then say you take that device to your office, you can stretch it and start working, and you can have it communicate in the office with printers and other devices."
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