The NextGen PC Design Competition is a competition set up by Microsoft to allow people to design their idea of the next generation computer. "Influence tomorrow's digital lifestyle with your vision of the Next-Gen PC. Change the way people pursue their passions by designing the ultimate Next-Gen Windows-based PC. Give them everything they need to do what they love, easily, powerfully, and enjoyably. Introduce the Next-Gen PC. It's your design."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
indeed...
if one really want to innovate now, one would have to "merge" man and machine. what if the computer could be used hands-free, on the go.
want to know the distance between two points? mark them in space and let the computer do the calculations on the spot.
signs that are translated on the fly (or maybe read from a generic barcode in a corner and then displayed in a native language on screen or hmd).
these designs are just spins on the existing desktop or laptop. its not really that much out there...
now, if one could get weight measurements via a glove and picking up the item one wants to measure, then i would call innovation. a word that have been so watered down by the war of words between the corps that its not even funny...
change the default background from a single color, to a hi rez picture? innovation, marketing screams!
Member since:2007-09-06
Not the pop culture use of the term as a preface to denote "this is really cool, please listen too my advertising" but "Cybernetic" as a step up from Bionics which simply replicate existing human mechanical traits. As a monocular, I tend to watch advances in cybernetic eye replacement very closely though the last article I spotted was in Wired a while back.
mm.. yummy meat replacing cybereye; low light, ultra violet, infrared, flash suppression, full video recording backed by a real "lifedrive" storate database. hehe.. I've been daydreaming about real cybernetics since the 80s thanks to Gibson's story settings even though I can't bring myself to consider the surgery that is already required during install.
(When they plugged the first human trial subject into his new external cybereyes and began calibrating the interface he blacked out and didn't wake up for a few hours. They very literally crashed his brain by overloading the optic centers and had to slow the calibration down when they tried again the next day. There is video of him later driving a car around in the parking lot for the first time since loosing vision in both eyes.)
Member since:
2008-06-12
I agree. All the "innovation" of the past few years has just consisted of making things prettier and easier to use (i.e. appealing to the masses), increasing power (i.e. appealing to those that need to process high volumes of data, e.g. businesses, scientists, NASA).
It might just be the short-sighted cynic in me, but what else is there, really? Perhaps if the answer was known it would have been done already. Granted, some nice things come out of the above things. For instance, the first might help education efforts. The second could help us save the earth from global warming, find cures for diseases, &c. What I am basically saying is that technology is a tool (duh!).
This is not to say that I don't spend about half of my days reading tech news and playing around with my own machines. But my point is I just do it for entertainment and the "innovations" that I have seen in my (admittedly few) 10 years actively following the scene all fall into the above categories.