What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that colleges and universities should begin to take notice during the next 3 to 5 years? What institutions or companies are the leaders in these technologies?
- Augmented Reality - there's a light form of this, which we've already seen with art projects like YellowArrow. A heavier form depends on wearable computing and intensive graphics rendering, which has been piloted, but isn't mature in 2005 (Bryan Alexander)
- Haptics and other multi-modal technologies – gesture recognition, especially (Diana Oblinger) I think that gaze tracking, which is technologically simple and inexpensive will play an important role. We have working demos at IBM Research. (Jean Paul)
- Next generation presence-awareness – your technology knows what you are doing, where you are, and delivers information to you based on that, eg. my phone is not ringing because it is linked to my calendar and knows I am in a meeting – but if my spouse were to call, that call would come through. (Diana Oblinger)
- Seamless Connection of Student Owned technology transparent handoffs, authentication. Non computer devices begin to dominate as content access point _(Alan Levine); including seamless access with mobile devices to digital libraries, course websites, collaborative tools, etc. (Ruth Sabean)
- Next-generation folksonomic tools while the commercial tools (see above) are ready for use, there are important features (e.g., reputation systems, coupling to search engines) that they have not touched upon yet, and are essential to solving potential problems (e.g., folksonomic spam) and creating new academic uses (e.g., "living" knowledge repositories). (Ruben Puentedura)
- Techniques to display complex documents on displays the size of a (large) stamp There are 1.5 billion cell phones worldwide, but only 400 million PCs. These phones could be the opportunity to get access to the functionality of a networked computer and to participate in the digital world by using artifacts (SW) that permit one to display and interact even with complex ocuments. (Jean Paul Jacob)
- Gaze tracking Gaze information plays an important role in identifying a person's focus of attention. The information can provide useful communication cues to a multimodal interface. For example, it can be used to identify where a person is looking, and what he/she is paying attention to. On a computer screen, this can be used to understand what is of interest to the user. When looking at the first 10 hits of a total of one million hits in a search, the user's eyes will spend more time in the pages(hits) of interest, helping the system filter the remaining hits to choose those with the same key words of hits that the user spent time. (Jean Paul)
- Personal-Social Information Management Tools - there are plenty of personal information managaement tools around but I haven't found one that really cuts it yet. These tools need to be able to switch between outline and visual representations and need to connect an indiviudal's information/knowledge with their communities of interest and practice, with whatever else is out there in the world. (Nick Noakes)
- Voice Lecture/seminar Translation & Indexing - Podcasting is currently the rage and we have the tools to take audio and stream them from various sites. What's missing is the abilty to do voice-to-text as easily AND to have semantically meaningful indices created that point you to where in the audio stream a given concept or important text segment is spoken. But it won't be too far from now. See: .Spoken Lecture Translation (Phil Long)
- Access Grid and Related Mutipoint Videoconferencing - the access grid brings multi sites together in a way that can capitalize on adhoc world wide resources. SGI is working on a project that is similar but brings in local inputs and shares a set of inputs among sites without duplicating all equipment at all sites (Media Fusion) - (Len Steinbach)
- interoperability Standards - Making Abstractions that Work - Physical devices currently require too much customization to be easily connected to, operated and supported. The virtualization of peripherals is possible with interoperabilty software - making proxy's of devices like scanners that students can connect to through the web to operate specialized devices (e.g., a scanner). (Phil Long)
- Remote labs - physical laboratory equipment is often too costly, dangerous, or just doesn't scale sufficiently to be affordable. Students don't get sufficiently exposed to the messiness of real data from a variety real experiments (not simulations). Creating an software infrastructure that not only supports the remote operation of experiments, and doesn't penalize a faculty member who wishes to share their experiment with others possible is in development today (see iLabs
- 3D Visualization Tools - Computational power of today's PCs make it possible to do powerful real-time 3D visualizations. Interactive and pedagogically designed visualizations can bring breathtaking richness to otherwise abstract, highly mathematical and challenging phenomena, without the need to buy costly, optimized visualiztion engines to run them. (Phil Long)
- Engineering Biological Parts - Building biologically active structures has to date been highly technical, non-scalable,and extremely challenging. Treating bio-active building blocks like 'parts' and sequencing them together based on their known properties, can 'build' new biologically active structures. This isn't creating "life", but taking an engineers approach to buidling complex structures and applying it to biological phenomena. Student teams are doing this today and building a biologically active parts database to capture their experience and build on it for others. See iGEM and the Parts Inventory (Phil Long)
- RFID - tagging devices and enabling their inteoperation with software so that classrooms 'know the preferred lighting, projector position, and content that you wish to start with in your class is contextually discoverable, and operationally possible to coordinate through intelligent RFID tags and infrastruture. (Phil Long)
Revolution Controller
- Annotated Reality (example: Yellow Arrow as annotation of the physical world; example: 34 North 118 West, Stolpersteine
- Flash Disk Personal Environments - the ubiquitous flash USB memory sticks are everywhere. However, increasing memory density and biometric identification combined are leading to the idea that you might carry around on your 'personal computer stick' not just extra solid state memory but your entire application environment, maybe up to and including your OS. You'd plug in your personal computer stick into a generic processor box that is simply providing "cycles" and i/o options. Variants of the strategy for separating i/o from your personal computational environment have been around but they have in the past included bringing your CPU with you and plugging to some kind of i/o dock. If the cpu is just a grey box providing computational cycle a different cut at what you need to carry around emerges. Look for announcments from the memory stick vendors soon.... (Phil Long)
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