Holographic 3D video calling from cell phones by 2015: IBM prediction

IBM's latest prediction with regards to technology says that by 2015 we'll be talking to holographic 3D images of callers projected by our cell phones, and that your laptop will be powered by kinetic energy. It's an annual tradition for the computing giant, to produce a list of ideas that its 3,000 surveyed researchers expect to enter use in the next five years.

Additional ideas on the list included cities heated by excess heat from servers, advanced city traffic monitoring software which could predict traffic jams, batteries that "breathe" air, and environmental information sensors proliferating into cars and phones.

Josephine Cheng, a vice president at IBM’s Almaden lab in San Jose, CA, said:

“All this demonstrates a real culture of innovation at IBM and willingness to devote itself to solving some of the world’s biggest problems."

Naturally, IBM doesn't hit the mark on all of its predictions.  Take a look at IBM's first set of predictions, made in 2006:

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
• Real-time speech translation - once a vision only in science fiction - will become the norm
• There will be a 3-D Internet
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
• Our mobile phones will start to read our minds

By the way, holographic video conferencing has been around since 2008. The new prediction is for cell phones to be able to project that sort of thing, quite a bit more advanced. You can watch a video of holographic video conferencing below.