Pascal whispered:
"I've just remembered all these works-in-progress about designing stereoscopic TV screens and other "volume-rendering" image and movie viewers.
Clearly, we're getting there, like with HD-TV, digital, flat and wide screens. But dagnabbit dog'n'rabbit, it could hardly be any slower without going backwards!!!
I'd really appreciate it if I had one of these in my living-room BEFORE I go live on Mars."
Yup. Technology is advancing amazingly fast, but it will seem much less so if you read about burgeoning technologies before they come about. I used to read stuff like Scientific American, but after I realized that the things I had read about ten years earlier seemed no closer to becoming real, I gave it up as a bad job. More fun to be surprised by cool technologies you had no idea were coming. :)
4 comments:
Mark my words. 3D is now coming to cinema. The reasons are obvious:
1) Threaters are now in the process of switching to digital projectors anyway.
2) Given REAL D's invention (Z-Screen) you can add usable 3D to your standard digital projector for a reasonable cost.
3) This is the best and most practical solution anyone has come up to movie piracy.
According to Studio Daily, not only is James Cameron now shooting new films in 3D, but he is considering using a digital process to create 3D versions of Titanic and Terminator 2!
Quoting Studio Daily:
Cameron noted the business implications go beyond entertainment. “They could shoot live 3D that is so real that it’s practically indistinguishable from human vision as if you had been standing there,” he said. “Once you can use this installed base of 3D theaters to allow people to participate in world events that are happening thousands of miles away in 3D just like you were actually there, think of the immediacy. Think of the power of that.”
And then, with wry comic timing, he added, “Think what you could charge.”
I had to be around 10 when I first read about the "super-bicycle" extremely promising prototypes. Basically, it is a profiled vehicled propelled by direct human energy. The aerodynamic shell solves the main problem with conventional bicycles: exponential air resistance with speed increase, there's zero chemical pollution, and city dwellers would get regular physical exercise, effectively fighting the obesity epidemics. In the Seventies, these dream machines could already reach about 120 km/h with no excessive effort. Quite enough for safe modern life already, spare for firemen and ambulances. The ideal solution to individual transport was within reach 25 years ago.
No official news since then. How long does one have to wait for the Future to come? You know what? I'm beginning to consider feeling some frustration! No, seriously, I am.
Car makers still haven't bothered making vehicles that have their potential speed limited to the maximum that's legal all over the civilized world, a measure that would undoubtedly save thousands of lives each year.
"Science good, politics bad." -- (stolen from Orwell)
It's getting to a point that I'm starting to actually HOPE for a conflict between the West and the whole Arab world, so that oil squandering would finally have to be seriously dealt with!
After all, both World Wars did more for women's rights than dacades of peace-time militantism. They simply gave women a chance to show they could run a country just as well in the absence of men. All's not bad in love and war. :-P
Alas, I know I'm dreaming there: people can live without buying as much oil, but OPEC cannot live without selling it. They'll never go as far as official conflict. Because money rules.
"In the Seventies, these dream machines could already reach about 120 km/h with no excessive effort."
That sounds unbelievable.
---
it's in the minds of people. Nobody wants to buy a very expensive bicycle.
And nobody wants to buy a car which can't go fast.
"Nobody wants to buy a very expensive bicycle.
And nobody wants to buy a car which can't go fast."
Does anybody want to get crippled/killed in an accident caused by a reckless speeder?
Some day, "nobody", or rather everybody, will have to change attitudes. Shift paradigms. A vehicle is a means of transportation, not a silicone implant on one's frustrated ego.
Besides, I never said these "bikes" (with 3 or 4 wheels) would have to be very expensive. Much, much less than any current car. The principle is, a frame, wheels, an aerodynamic shell/body, and a well-designed gear box such as are near-universal on bikes today anyway. To move yourself and a light vehicle quite fast, you don't need to spend huge amounts of energy, especially on a horizontal speedway. Consider that you have a profiled Mini Cooper that seats one or two, makes without the engine and gas tank and big battery etc., with a lightweight carbon fiber body. All you'd really need is some simplified safety equipments like a few airbags, because such a light vehicle possesses much less kinetic energy in case of impact.
(Speed records ON SKIS are double those velocities.) If you've noticed, in motorcycle races, pilots who slip off the track (and are near-always ejected from the bike) are seldom gravely/critically injured in spite of their speed, they just roll and tumble in their padded suits and helmets. Why? Because they leave the kinetic energy of their heavy bike's mass behind. In a car, that important quantity of energy dissipates through deformation of the vehicle and trauma of the passengers.
I used to dream about a future less heavy-metal-hi-tech-everywhere à la Cyberpunk. Looks like the limit on planetary resources will grant me that dream.
Either that, or we'll all die in a few decades from pollution, starvation and climate extremes. ;-)
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