Technology Marches On: Spray-On Batteries

[alex_greene]

A bunch of new links all proclaim the latest scientific discovery - a battery that can be airbrushed on.

Daily Mail BBC News Gizmodo Stuff Engadget Reuters Dvice

Household devices with built-in power supplies, graffiti that glows in the dark, cheap disposable e-papers, mobile phones and laptops that are little more than A4 sheets of flexible material like plastic or paper, screens that are as thin as photographs, photos that are animated video displays ... consider what this could lead to.

 

[Captain Jonah]

That’s the problem with technology.

Sci Fi becomes out of date so fast these days :roll:

Those wearable computers are going to be great when the screen is a Hud on sunglasses, the power supply is woven into your clothing, the keyboard is either 3D motion capture of you typing in mid air or perhaps the arms of your jacket are pressure sensitive and have keyboards printed on them.

You can already get throwaway mobiles that are sheets of cardboard, wafer computers are possible for fitting your personal computer into your jacket.

Once you have screen thicknesses down to paper the very nature of print changes, if you can have video on a page of paper how long before people stop reading books and start watching them. When the written word becomes replaced with icons and pictures. To an extent this is happening now where people are taught icons rather than how to read and write, a number of countries do this since they cannot manage proper education but high tech can draw you into this as much as low tech.

Personally I'm waiting for those TV screens and monitors you get by the roll, I want to sit and watch movies on an entire wall or an on line game with full wrap around since all 4 walls, the floor and the ceiling of my den are done in Video display wallpaper. After all you play something like Wow and the background from the ground to the sky everywhere is on your PC, it’s just the moving bits like monsters and other players that come from the server so you just need a decent processor to sit in your arm chair in 3d Wow or any of the shoot em ups.

A lot of what we talk about as being possible in Traveller will be possible this century. Allowing for the invention of Grav drives, FTL and Fusion power the children born today will have everything else that Traveller has in their lifetimes.

You sort of want them to invent some nice cheap anti aging just so you can live through this century to go from a pen and paper RPG to reality. :wink:

 

[alex_greene]

Programmable video wallpaper, wall to floor to ceiling, and HUD goggles designed to deliver a 3D experience ... Welcome to the holodeck.

In fact, pretty much every room can become a holodeck, as long as there's nothing there to interfere with the electronics or cause the paper to peel off, such as kitchens and bathrooms.

It'd certainly make office work far more interesting. Imagine conducting real world business through your avatar in a virtual world like Second Life. Even before we get into the future tech of haptics, this is a possible breakthrough in the way we do business in the future.

And that's not all. Rollup sheets of paper can be sprayed with battery paint and that paint applied in thick layers like a wafer biscuit to produce cheap, disposable car batteries for electric cars. You could carry a battery-powered portable internet wifi router in your pocket, just the thing for those moments when you're out of range of the nearest wifi point. MP3 and MP4 players would become very small; the limit of their size is dictated by the need to have a playback device, storage, controls, a phone jack and a USB / firewire connector.

 

[Mithras]

A lot of what we talk about as being possible in Traveller will be possible this century.

True. Basically, if we can imagine it, then the building blocks for it are already around us.

 

[AndrewW]

Once you have screen thicknesses down to paper the very nature of print changes, if you can have video on a page of paper how long before people stop reading books and start watching them. When the written word becomes replaced with icons and pictures. To an extent this is happening now where people are taught icons rather than how to read and write, a number of countries do this since they cannot manage proper education but high tech can draw you into this as much as low tech.

What's all this on my screen, I don't see any little pictures can't understand it.

Personally I'm waiting for those TV screens and monitors you get by the roll, I want to sit and watch movies on an entire wall or an on line game with full wrap around since all 4 walls, the floor and the ceiling of my den are done in Video display wallpaper. After all you play something like Wow and the background from the ground to the sky everywhere is on your PC, it’s just the moving bits like monsters and other players that come from the server so you just need a decent processor to sit in your arm chair in 3d Wow or any of the shoot em ups.

Don't forget a map of the Free Trader Whippet where you can move your 3D uplifted gorilla around and watch the grenade you launch fly across the screen and impact one of the Children of Orion hostiles that have boarded your ship.