Partially inspired by my previous post, I was excited to read about ASUS making strides in wireless LCD’s. This has got me thinking of technologies that will intersect in the future for the masses. I can see a future where each home has their own hub, a sort of digital home for families. This would be similar to Drobo in that it requires very little input from the user and operates much like Windows Home Server, with storage and resources dynamically growing as they are plugged into the hub. The hub will function as essentially a mini-rack server when compared to IT server rooms of today. The hubs would be the complete digital environment, or Envi, and would come in different sizes from 1x1x3 feet and up. They would have different slots, from 8 to 64 cube slots. The Envi’s will have different zones that correspond to different physical area resources on the hardware hub and will all be bio-optically interconnected. It can have an Internet and multiple Intranets for computer resources allowed to access the Internet, as well as different networks for kids and adults. Obviously this has to be accessible for all types of users and this is where the physical layout helps users. It could have different slots for hardware in the form of cubes that are roughly 1.5 inches by 3 inches that would slide into a zone of the hub with anywhere from 15 to 30 cube slots. The Computing User-scalable Bio-optical Environment will look like a cube sticking out of the hub, or Envi. It would allow the users to scale with their needs. There would be cubes available for CPU’s, RAM, Graphics, and Storage (holographic crystals of course). The Envi’s health can be seen on the cubes with something as simple as red, yellow, and green LED’s or accessed on the network. It would also be pretty safe to assume that eventually the CPU cubes would have RAM and Graphics integrated so users would have to upgrade the Envi hubs to take advantage of the integrated technology.
This scalable resource pool would be accessed by wireless monitors, most likely paired with wireless power as well, which would give users the option of detaching the monitors to become tablet computers with full desktop-like access to the hubs resources. Kids could be given more of the graphics pool to play their games; adults could have more of the Storage pool to keep the families videos safe and those files tagged to keep them very redundant within the Envi locally and perhaps also stored online and all managed by the Envi’s interface. It would replace the current OS layer as the new low level layer between the hardware, with virtual OS instances that can be run on the monitors. There will probably also be some wireless USB (since it seems like it will last forever) variant built into the monitors that will control an input device. In terms of protocols, there could also be monitor connectivity to the home Envi through a cloud environment so in effect the monitor is the new laptop of today which would drop a lot of weight, especially if the user is near a wireless power source. For times when offline access is needed there can be a peripheral that is a base, with a cpu, storage, and battery.
This future from today forward is many lines that will intersect in some form. It is happening today with technology like Intel’s Larrabee GPGPU’s that use chips rather than graphics cards to render graphics. There is also a startup that just released a product called Power Mat, a type of wireless power that requires a very close proximity between the pad and gadgets.
So the future will have users back at dummy terminals, only with smarter brains behind them expanding with our growing digital environmental needs.
