Death of the desktop PC

Your walking to work and you reach into your pocket retrieving a small device not much bigger than a cell phone. Its flexible and transparent much like the inner window of an airplane. The device sits perfectly in your hand. You notice how well the little weight it has balances in your palm without gripping the device. You remember dropping it yesterday causing a noticeable abrasion on the screen but today there doesn't appear to be any damage. As you slide the device open with your thumb, a 3 dimensional display unfolds like a fan from the center of the screen. It hovers at a 30 degree angle just an inch or so below your thumb. In the center is an enticing illuminated floating orb. It resembles your favorite piece of fruit. You peel away a section of its outer layer revealing an item called "Transit tool". You lift the device just above head level centering the transparent panel on a sign marked "Transit assist". The device recognizes what bus your waiting for then says to you "the 15 downtown will arrive in 7min". There are several other buttons situated along this display just below the orb; their purpose changing as you peel away different sections of the orb. The functionality in each layer comprises everything from entertainment and recreation to safety and self enrichment. You marvel at the fact that you could schedule a doctors appointment, pay for a candy bar without going to the register, and run a diagnostic check on your car's fluids and tires in a matter of seconds with just a few flicks of your thumb.
After a short bus ride you arrive at your desk and place your device in a dock. The orb grows legs and arms, waves good bye, and hops off the device disseminating in a burst of white particles. You do a 180 in your chair to face a rather large surreal holographic image of a Dali painting in motion. The small glowing orb in cartoon like fashion leaps into view and the painting slowly fades away. After a moment of jazz hands (and a rather adorable "tada!") the orb (whom you've affectionately named Harry) retracts its little arms and legs returning to an inanimate state awaiting its next instruction.

It sounds like the works of science fiction but the technologies I describe here are very real, and in the not so far off future, will reinvent the computers we live and work with. Breakthroughs in Nanoscience, cloud computing, and even Holographics! are bringing some exciting changes to hardware components, software environments, and overall sex appeal of consumer electronics. By the end of the next 2 decades we may witness the death of the desktop PC; a device that is relatively unchanged in appearance for the last 15 years.

Nanoscience, a field of study credited for such innovations as self-repairing materials, nano storage, and carbon nanotubes, is giving engineers new frontiers to explore for product design. Scientists are already racing to replace silicon components with ultra-light, incredibly strong, and highly conductive materials. Materials produced from nanotechnology are perfect replacements for silicon based circuit boards. Graphene, a nobel prize winning material revolutionizes the 3 proponents for computing: data storage, transistors, and energy storage. Imagine computers so small they could fit into your contact lenses or on the head of a pin.

Cloud computing will one day allow people like you and me to run Mac, windows, Linux, your tivo, your microwave, your car, your tooth brush, and flush your toilet all from one device. A good way to think of the "cloud of the future" is to imagine web pages you visit as fully functional desktop PC's. Each web page is a customizable computer with all the processing power several of todays computers. You have access to thousands of application and and software environments all through a device the size of an iPhone. With a combination of a technique called Virtualization and the cloud, displaying and submitting information are the only roles your computer is tasked with. The processing, storage, and handling of said information will be performed over an internet connection; stored in a dust free, super cooled, climate controlled data warehouse hundreds of miles away. The cloud will remove the need for many of the physical and software components that burden people like you an me with things like component damage, Operating system failure, and Virus infection.

Putting the final nail in the desktop PC coffin is Interactive Holographics. Interactive Holographics is the next big frontier interactivity and perhaps the biggest technological challenge faced by engineers today. A group of researchers from the University of Arizona have announced a recent project allowing holographic images to be quickly written and rewritten to a single digital medium. Researchers also stated during an interview after the conference that in the next 15 years holographic televisions for the general public are a feasible reality. Another recent invention worth mentioning (and more closely related to the device in the introduction) is this lovely piece of touchable holography. Both these beasts are still decades away from true holography but just 5 years ago this wasn't even possible.

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