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Sharp is no stranger to glasses-less 3D technology. It was the company which gave Nintendo its screens for the 3DS and the company has also hinted that more handheld consoles are on the way with this 3D technology.

Although Sharp did not actually announce any glasses-less 3D gadgets, it did show of a few prototypes which looked more than a little intriguing,

To view the parallex barrier tech properly, you need to be round 30cm away from the screen – so this is great technology for the likes of phones and cameras.

The screens contain 800 x RGB x 480, when seen in 2D and 400 x RGB x 480 when viewed in 3D.

The prototypes we saw were impressive. There was a tablet-sized screen, around 7-inches, shown off with some animated 3D, and also a smaller 3.5-inch screen which could easily be ported to a mobile phone.

Seeing both these in action was great, although it is all about the sweet spot when viewing this content. A few times we were too far away, too close and moved our head the wrong way and the illusion of 3D was shattered. It is great to see 3D work without glasses, though.

The most intriguing non-glasses 3D tech, though, was the prototype camera on show. The camera had the parallex barrier panel on the back and images looked crisper than you would expect.

It could also shoot moving images and still video.

Sharp are in no rush to bring this technology to the masses but as we have seen with the 3DS, the panel tech is around and it is being picked up by the big boys of the technology world.

Sharp did also hint that screens as big as 9.7 inches will be in the market before long as well – which is the same size as an iPad.

Not that we are reading in to this at all...

The Apple iPad will be the main control centre for the kitchen of the future, according to Ikea who has peered into its crystal ball and predicted what the culinary world will be like in 2040.

The research, which comes from the Future Laboratory by way of Ikea, has looked into what the humble kitchen may offer in 2040 and comes up with three different scenarios which it has annoyingly called the Elementara, the Skarp and the Intuitiv.

Elementra!!!

The Elementara kitchen is what is called a 'back to nature' kitchen and will be filled with all things energy saving and green.

This includes areas in the kitchen which will 'encourage' you to grow your own food. Instead of refrigerators food will be kept in 'cold larders' and recycling facilities will be ingrained into the kitchen.

We can't help thinking that this isn't the kitchen of the future, more describing how our ancestors lived.

All that needs to be added is meat stored in salt and the constant fear that your 'grow your own food' patch in the kitchen will entice rats riddled with Black Death into your home.

Skarp!!!

Luckily, the boffins at the Future Laboratory (which is probably a shed in Sussex) have also come up with the Smart kitchen – or the Skarp.

Skarp is all about synchronised appliances, which will be controlled by an iPad-like device.

The kitchen will also be self-cleaning, which sounds awesome, and mobile phone apps will control carbon emissions and thermostats.

Intuitiv!!!

Third, and thankfully last, is the Intuitiv. This is a kitchen that matches your mood. With LED lighting changing to suit how you are feeling, aromatherapy piped through the walls which is synched to help with different times of the month and a hologram chef who will feed you happy pills every time you are feeling down.

If you think the above is absolute tripe – we are wondering how many thought showers it took to come up with the ridiculous names – then you only have yourself to blame.

The study was compiled by answers given by the general public on what it though would be in the kitchen of the future.

1,895 respondents aged from 18 to 65+ years old living in the United Kingdom, including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, were asked their thoughts.

We hope that every one of the 1,895 people were taking the Michael.

Sony is developing the latest flexible OLED screen tech, promising roll-out screens for mobiles and computers in the future.

Sony announced this month that it has successfully developed a flexible full-colour OLED display which can be wrapped around a small 4mm-radius cylinder.

Roll-up! Roll-up!

Sony has integrated Organic Thin-Film Transistors (OTFTs) and OLEDs in this 20-micrometer thick flexible substrate. A flexible on-panel gate-driver circuit with OTFTs and soft organic insulators means that Sony has been able to create the display without using conventional rigid driver integrated circuit (IC) chips.

The screen is 4.1-inches wide and 80 micrometers thick, with a resolution of 432 x 240 pixels at 121 pixels per inch (ppi) and the ability of producing 16.8 million colors with a peak brightness of over 100 cd/m2 peak and contrast ratio over 1000:1.

After 1000 cycles of repeatedly rolling-up and un-rolling the display there was no effect on the quality of the moving images on the screen.

Sony is showing off its new flexi-OLED tech at SID 2010 in Seattle this month.

James Cameron is continuing is plight to turn everything 3D by helping out NASA and equipping its Mars rover with a 3D camera.

Curiosity - the name of the vehicle which is set to travel to Mars - has a launch scheduled in 2011, but before it jets off the rover is going to get a camera makeover.

The people behind the rover's camera, Malin Space Science Systems, have enlisted the help of Cameron who turned Hollywood on to the idea of 3D with his mega-hit Avatar.

Cinematic 3D

Cameron will modify the existing cameras – which shoot HD – for 3D filing, using the technology he built from the ground up for Avatar.

Speaking about the link-up Michael Malin, from Malin Space Science Systems, said: "The fixed focal length [cameras] we just delivered will do almost all of the science we originally proposed.

"But they cannot provide a wide field of view with comparable eye stereo. With the zoom [cameras], we'll be able to take cinematic video sequences in 3D on the surface of Mars. This will give our public engagement co-investigator, James Cameron, tools similar to those he used on his recent 3D motion picture projects."

If all goes well, expect 3D footage of Mars to hit Earth sometime in 2011.

There's always a temptation to try to predict the course of future events, and the world of computing is no exception. With everything seemingly becoming bigger, better and faster year on year, there's an insatiable appetite for predictions, and some individuals seem dutybound to meet that demand.

Today these people like to call themselves futurologists, and while this might give the practice an air of scientific respectability, in many cases it has to be said with hindsight that using a crystal ball would have been just as accurate.

Intrigued? Then join us as we examine seven prophecies that fell short of the mark.

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it's possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years."
John von Neumann, 1949

Though the second part of this statement is certainly right, the first bit is unbelievable. Von Neumann was an eminent scientist and mathematician, and developed the computer architecture we still use today. Not a person you'd expect to make such a rash statement.

The fact that he couldn't think of any possible new applications for computers suggests a serious lack of imagination considering that, in 1949, computers hadn't been used for much yet.

In that year, you could count the number of operational computers in the world on your fingers. They had all been developed in universities and were deployed only for scientific purposes. It would be another two years before J Lyons and Company launched LEO (Lyons Electronic Office computer), the first computer designed specifically for business applications. So that's one more potential application, for starters.

Von Neumann's contemporaries weren't as blinkered, though. As he was uttering these immortal words, Claude Shannon – now regarded as the father of information theory – was working on some truly groundbreaking applications.

In 1950, he took one of the first steps in the development of artificial intelligence by demonstrating an electromechanical mouse that could find its way around a maze. The same year, he published a paper detailing how computers could be used to play chess. So much for von Neumann's prophecy!

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas J Watson, President of IBM, 1943

Computer historians dispute the validity of this quotation, but even if Watson himself didn't utter those words, there's plenty of evidence that computer experts expressed such a sentiment as recently as the early '50s. And the idea wasn't as daft as it sounds.

COLOSSAL MIS-JUDGEMENT: The first electric computer had yet to be built when Thomas J Watson predicted a market for five of them

Back in 1943, the world's first fully electronic computer of any sort – the code-breaking Colossus at Bletchley Park – was just in the process of being commissioned. It would be another five years before the first ever computer as we now understand the word (the Manchester Baby) was built, a further eight years before the first commercial computer (the Ferranti Mark I) went on sale, and 10 years before Watson's own company, IBM, launched its very first computer (the 701).

Of course, we all know that this prophecy turned out to be absolute rubbish, but the vast scale of the under-estimation might still be an eye-opener. Forget PCs (over a billion of them) and think of microcontrollers. They outnumber the world's population many times over, and each one is vastly more powerful than anything Thomas Watson might have envisaged.

"Computers in the future will weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
Popular Mechanics, 1949

Before you dismiss this prediction as coming from an unlikely source, we should tell you that Popular Mechanics has been one of America's leading science and technology magazines for over 100 years. And as you'd expect from such an August publication, the prediction was, for the most part, spot-on – the vast majority of today's computers do indeed weigh in at less than 1.5 tons. Not all of them, though – not by a long way.

Jaguar, the world's fastest supercomputer, is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and weighs in at almost 200 tons. That doesn't even include the massive air conditioning units that are needed to get rid of the heat that's generated by almost a quarter of a million processor cores, which consume 10 megawatts of power between them.

FAT-CAT: Even today, some computers weigh more than 1.5 tons – this one considerably more

To be fair, though, at 1.75 petaflops, Jaguar is about two thousand billion times faster than 1949's latest and greatest.

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

He really ought to have known better. After all, the company Ken Olsen founded was responsible for the first of two important milestones in the history of home computing.

Prior to the early '60s, a computer was one thing and one thing only – a mainframe. It would be priced in hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions, occupy a whole room and require a full-time staff to operate and maintain it.

In 1964 DEC launched the PDP- 8, which is generally considered the first commercially successful minicomputer. It was the size of a refrigerator, cost $18,000 and over 50,000 were sold – more than any other computer before it. For the first time, a computer could be owned by a single department, not a huge organisation, and it could be operated by people who weren't scientists.

Computers were starting to pass from a select few to the many. Even more surprising, though, is the fact that Olsen made this statement after the second of those two milestones had passed. That was in 1975, when the MIPS Altair 8800 became the first personal computer to sell more than a handful of units.

"640kB should be enough for anyone."
Bill Gates, 1981

He later denied it, but this was allegedly Bill Gates' take on the maximum amount of memory a computer would need. Even if he didn't actually say it, we can be pretty sure he believed it, as it seems fairly realistic in context.

Previous personal computers were based on 8-bit processors, which meant they couldn't address more than 64kB of memory. But even this would have been the stuff of dreams for most home computer users of the day.

Perhaps the best known British home computer that year was the Sinclair ZX81, which had just 1kB of memory.

To put this in context, let's bring it up to date. If you were offered a PC today with 2.56TB of memory, wouldn't you think it was enough for anyone – at least for a few more years?

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
Editor in charge of business books, Prentice Hall, 1957

The computer revolution might already have been almost 10 years old by this point, but computers were still pretty thin on the ground. With an estimated 100 of them in use in 1953 and 250 in 1955, this new technology wasn't exactly taking the world by storm.

What's more, the phrase 'data processing' refers to business applications, which were lagging well behind technical computing. Lyons, of teashop fame, launched LEO, the first ever business computer, in 1951. But by 1957, only one was in operation – and that was used by Lyons itself for valuation jobs and payroll processing. Even Big Blue was slow to make an impact on business computing.

Its first offering, the IBM 702 Electronic Data Processing Machine, was only in production from 1953 to 1954. Its replacement, the 705, broke new ground by being the first commercial computer to use magnetic core memory, but the number sold isn't on record. What we do know, though, is that back in the '50s, IBM was overshadowed by a company now long forgotten: Remington Rand, later known as Sperry Rand.

Its earliest computer, the UNIVAC, first shipped in 1952 and was designed from the outset for business and administrative use. It did well, but success was relative back in the '50s. By the time the UNIVAC was replaced by the UNIVAC II in 1958, a grand total of 46 devices had been sold.

Given that such machines cost between $1.25 and $1.5million (around $10million today), this gloomy prophecy wasn't too surprising. We bet he thought differently in another five years, though.

"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."
Dennis Gabor, 1962

Dennis Gabor wasn't your average scientist – he was a Nobel Prize winner. That award was for his invention of holography, but he also applied his considerable talents to the theory of data communication. So he really ought to have known what he was talking about, but it turned out he didn't – at least not on this particular subject.

It wasn't long before his error was exposed. Later that same year, AT&T launched the Bell 103, which was the first commercially successful modem. It was now possible to transmit data at 300 bits per second across an ordinary telephone line. In fairness to Gabor, this technology was still too slow and too expensive to be used for anything other than mainframe communication.

It wasn't until the early '80s that the proliferation of bulletin boards heralded the era of low-cost data communication that was available to Joe Public. Just a year after making this spectacularly inaccurate prediction, Gabor had a change of heart on the subject of forecasting the future.

In his 1963 book, Inventing the Future, he wisely stated that "the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented". This is surely a fitting place to conclude our investigation of computing's most unreliable and inaccurate prophecies.

Staying up to date with everything that's going on in PCs and tech is almost impossible, so these are the ten technologies that you should be most aware of, as they're the ones that'll make the biggest difference to your life.

1. 3D gaming

The fact that to get any kind of 3D image from a 2D screen means wearing a pair of sunglasses or worse means that three dimensional gaming isn't quite as convincing as multitouch and natural user interfaces, even though the two have been commoditised at almost the same time.

An Acer Aspire 5738 laptop with a 3D display costs about £550 at the moment, not bad for something with cutting edge technology that adds depth to any DirectX 9 game. The screen is of the polarised filter type, which is the new norm for extra dimensions.

Instead of using coloured filters splitting an image into two – one for each eye – the vertical pixel columns are alternated between left image and right image and shone through a piece of polarised glass. A pair of dark glasses with oppositely polarised lenses ensures that only one image is seen by each eye. The difference to a game is tangible too, something like WoW runs and looks incredible on the low-end graphics hardware.

It's over in TV land that the real push for 3D is happening, though, as LCD suppliers ask us to upgrade again to watch hyper-real cinema in the lounge. Compared to the other technologies we've talked about here, though, 3D requires a lot of effort on behalf of the watcher (those pesky glasses) and most of us are very lazy; hence the ubiquity of MP3 and standard definition movies, while Blu-ray and higher resolution sound standards continue to flounder. We value ease of use over quality every time.

In its favour, 3D doesn't actually require any work on behalf of games developers or publishers, as the stereoscopic image is created at the driver level. On the other hand, that means there's no massive push by the people who make and sell games to encourage us to adopt it.

2. Streaming games

The advancements in superfast broadband hasn't just helped the cause of downloadable games. It will also have no some small impact on the future of streaming games over broadband, or at least that's the theory.

There are several companies pursuing and a significant amount of money invested in the idea that one day, your precious PC will be almost entirely redundant as a games machine.

The concept is simple: all the game's data is hosted on a central server and all you will have to do is receive the display and send back input commands. It's a little like the technology used for MMORPGs, except that the rendering engine isn't on your PC, it's actually in the same server farm as the core intelligence.

This idea was actually mooted some years ago with the Phantom console, which never made it to the stores. It's looking unlikely that OnLive (www. onlive.com), Gaikai and Microsoft's own streaming project will end up as vapourware though, despite the obvious concerns about input lag: the delay that occurs every time you press a key. The signal has to travel hundreds of miles before a character even moves.

Proponents say that even twitch gaming FPS games are possible but we're a little more sceptical. There's another reason that at least one of these services will be properly launched soon, and that's vested interest by games publishers.

Because no content is stored on your machine, of course, it's impossible to pirate a streamed game, which is obviously an attractive proposition for them. In the immediate future, though, it is more likely to be a technology that runs like games such as Quake Live, which use a combination of some local processing power and some server-based cycles. That's certainly the route Microsoft is taking, and seems more achievable than relying on 'the cloud' at this stage.

3. Six-core processors

You won't have to wait long for this one. Intel's Westmere CPUs may be hanging around with the dregs of processor society at the moment, chucking their chips in with the integrated graphics crowd, but they're about to grow up – and fast.

Sometime over the next few months Intel will go two better than the current line up of quad-core CPUs by launching a six-core version of its high-end Core i7 line. Based on the existing Nehalem architecture, the headline feature is a process shrink down to 32nm, while the rest of the spec sheet remains largely the same. It could be a genuine upgrade.

Games programmers are getting much better at working with multithreaded code so that most major titles, like Empire: Total War and its forthcoming sequel Napoleon, will see a much bigger performance increase when given extra cores to play around in than the often sporadic leaps in frame rate we saw going from two to four cores.

Because the benefits will be in the amount of cores, rather than the speed of things you can do at once, Intel are encouraging some developers to add extra content specifically for people with a six-core CPU. Given the plethora of disappointments we've had lately with almost every technology that's promised to increase our frame rates, we'll reserve judgement until we have one in the office.

The good news is that these hexa-powered processors will fit into most existing X58 motherboards after a simple BIOS flash. The bad news is X58 motherboards are still very expensive too.

4. Wireless power

A few years ago we saw a demonstration by a team at Fulton Innovation of a product called eCoupled. Using the principle of electromagnetic induction, by which an electrical charge can be stimulated in a wire coil by placing another one nearby, the crazy boffins were able to display wireless power transfer.

Despite being high voltage, they said, it was safe, efficient and could be applied to any surface. The demo room consisted of a kitchen without plugs, but full of lights that could be stuck anywhere and a frying pan that heated up just by sitting it on the counter. Put a phone on the same counter and it began charging. Clearly, this was the future.

Fulton are still working on wireless power, but it's a different company that's beat it to the shops, Powermat – and its products are expensive for something that replaces a 50p mains plug.

The good news is that the Wireless Power Consortium are going to be finalising a standard for wireless power called Qi later this year, which should mean prices drop and manufacturers have the confidence to build the technology straight into devices, rather than requiring an adaptor.

If you think that's crazy, though, take a look at Airnergy by RCA. It's a tiny dongle that can turn Wi-Fi signals back into electricity for charging phone batteries and the like.

5. Wireless displays

The last two standards for monitors, HDMI and DisplayPort, didn't exactly have us all rushing out to upgrade our PC screens and graphics cards, so it's a safe bet that DVI will remain the cabled interface of choice for some time to come. What about connecting a monitor to your PC without wires though?

That's something that could be worth shelling out for. Two different technologies were on the show floor at CES, which should be available en masse this year.

The first, WirelessHD is being pushed by the usual line-up of TV and DVD player manufacturers as a replacement for HDMI. It uses a short range, high bandwidth in the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) spectrum to transmit HD video and audio from a set-top box or media centre to a TV screen.

The idea is nothing new, Philips have had a kit out for a while that does the same thing, but WirelessHD is a proper standard and should ensure maker A's TV works nicely with maker B's Blu-ray machine and so on.

Perhaps more relevant for us, though, is Intel's new Wireless Display, or WiDi. It's designed specifically for laptops in order to remove the hassle of cables when you want to dock them with a proper screen, and like WirelessHD sends the video signal to a receiver box.

Unlike WirelessHD, WiDi can't handle protected content and the like, but it is much simpler since it requires no new hardware inside the laptop. Instead of using a separate transmitter, WiDi is a software layer on top of the existing Wi-Fi chip, so it's much cheaper to produce. Providing there's no latency introduced to the picture refresh rate, this could be a killer.

6. OLED displays

Yeah, we hear you. Another year, another promise that OLED screens are going to take over. Haven't we heard it all before? Except this time it could be true.

Google's Nexus phone has just launched with an OLED screen, and by all accounts it makes the handset almost – say it in hushed tones – more desirable than the iPhone. Brighter colours, sharper resolutions, darker blacks, whiter whites; why is this OLED technology so superior?

Put simply, it's because instead of filtering the light from a white or blue lamp behind the screen, each pixel in an OLED panel produces its own light. You don't have to be an optometrist to see why this is better, but it is much more expensive to produce.

Still, it also means OLED screens are much thinner than backlit ones, for obvious reasons, and while you may not be using an OLED PC monitor by the end of the year there are a lot more laptops with the technology arriving.

7. Superfast broadband

There are two things about broadband you should be concerned about. The first is whether or not the Digital Britain report, with its three strikes policy, outrageous invasion of privacy and extra charging for bandwidth, makes it into law before the general election final hits.

The second is what's going on at your exchange. By early next year, 75 per cent of us should be living in proximity to a telephone exchange that has a fibre optic connection to the internet. It's all part of BT's 21CN project to replace the entire copper telephone and broadband internet infrastructure with a single ethernet-based network fit for the 21st century.

So far, it's been dogged by delays and problems, but it's finally picking up the pace and is being tested by ISPs all over the country. The idea is that it will increase competition for high-speed broadband and bring down access prices, as well as bring services like IPTV – of the sort Virgin customers enjoy – to everyone.

It doesn't just mean better access to large downloadable game files and lower ping times, however. Our biggest hope is that it will eventually encourage telephone companies to do away with the irritating £12 a month line rental charge for a phone we don't actually use.

8. Augmented reality

Actually, we're kidding ourselves with this one. Augmented reality: the ability to overlay information on a live video feed of the world, is very cool, and it's impossible not to love iPhone apps like Yelp that pull in details and distances to the nearest pub or restaurants as you point the camera in their general direction.

Holding your phone three inches in front of your face as you're walking around feels a little too ridiculous to catch on, though. Perhaps it's like handsfree and Bluetooth headsets. Not so long ago people still sniggered if they saw someone using a phone without holding it to their ear, and not so long before that mobile phones themselves were devices for sales dorks.

In a couple of years time, it may seem the most natural thing in the world to see someone walking around with a phone held at arms length, directing them to food or drink with their own personal dynamic GPS system, or pulling up interesting information about the buildings and people in front of them. Yes, that's right, people.

Twitter 360 is an iPhone app that directs you to geotagged tweeters on your friends list, while TAT (www.tat.se) is working on an Augmented ID program, so if people point a camera at you various bits of information from your social feeds floating around your head. Makes stalking a lot easier then. Scary.

9. Natural user interface

In his CES keynote presentation, Steve Ballmer made several references to the 'Natural User Interface' (NUI), which is a handy catch all to describe all the Wii wand-waving, multitouch point and Project Natal-style aerobics that are catching headlines out there.

The keyboard and mouse is by no means dead, but the sudden flood of cheap laptops and all-in-ones with a built-in, multitouch screen suggests that it won't be long before we'll all have something a little bit different on our desktops.

Over in the US, for example, custom laptop maker IBuyPower has already started selling high-end gaming notebooks with a multitouch screen, and French developer, Eugen Systems has incorporated Win7's multitouch controls into the heart of its forthcoming strategy title R.U.S.E. It's all very exciting, except for one thing.

Multitouch may be native to Win7 and no other operating system, but the implementation is nowhere near as smooth as it is on, say, the iPhone. PCFormat has yet to use a multitouch application on a PC that doesn't suffer from a bit of inaccuracy or sluggishness, and the key to the NUI is in the first word. It has to feel natural, unforced and invisible to the end user. That's what using multitouch on an iPhone is like, and that's what Windows must achieve. If the mouse remains faster and more trusted, that's what people will use.

There are some brilliant ideas out there, though. Project Natal, Microsoft's full body 3D gesture recognition system for Xbox 360, is by far the most ambitious prototype, and we can't wait for a PC hack.

At CES the prototype Light Touch projector, from Light Blue Optics (lightblueoptics.com), was a show stealer. Using a technique called holographic laser projection, this tiny projector turns any 10inch surface – flat or curved - into a sharp multitouch screen.

10. Long-term evolution

The idea of getting high speed, super-reliable mobile broadband from a cell tower to your laptop or phone via WiMAX is not quite dead in the water, but it's certainly in need of a bit of mouth to mouth.

Far from being the 'Next Big Thing' as it was touted a few years back, it's had a painful and traumatic incubation period, which has seen some US carriers begin to adopt it and, in fact, quite a few businesses use it for point to point communications, but public access has dwindled from trial areas to almost nothing.

Partly, this may be because the company which owns the licence to operate WiMAX licences in several cities, Freedom4, was recently bought out and the new owners aren't in any rush to monetise the technology. More likely, it's because the mobile phone companies are happy with the current HSPDA speeds and are betting on an alternative technology, which is known as 4G, or Long Term Evolution (LTE) to supply almost the same amount of bandwidth without completely reworking their networks for WiMAX.

Lucky Scandinavians living in Stockholm or Oslo with a TeliaSonera contract can already sign up for LTE, while O2 is planning on launching a 150Mbps LTE package in the UK some time this year. We don't expect WiMAX to give up without a serious fight, though.

In the US, mobile networks are beginning to fall over because of the volume of 3G traffic running over them, and WiMAX's new architecture could well be a way to increase capacity to cope with demand. In which case, expect to see it begin sprouting up everywhere.

Faster bits and bytes

Rather more prosaic than the technologies listed elsewhere in this article the internals of your PC are also being overhauled by the powers that be. There's a revision to the SATA standard out for disk drives, and USB 3.0 is appearing on motherboards to speed up the default peripheral connection.

They are big steps forward. SATA III doubles the bandwidth available to storage from a theoretical 3Gbps to 6Gbps, while on paper USB 3.0 is a ten-fold increase from 480Mbps to 4.8Gbps for cabled peripherals.

Motherboards sporting ports of both flavours are already available from most manufacturers. Although both technologies are much faster than their predecessors, neither is likely to have a huge impact on consumer PCs.

In the world of business where milliseconds are money, the upgrades may mean something, but for the likes of us, compatible drives and peripherals will be a while coming yet.

Windows 7 is 234 per cent more popular than its predecessor. It's official. OK, so that figure relates to the first few days of sales in the US, and the predecessor in question is Windows Vista, the Antichrist OS.

Even so, pathologically mediocre as it may well be, Windows 7 was well received. What interests me is how this reflects a broader malaise that continues to blight the PC industry.

What else but Microsoft's ongoing near-monopoly can explain the continued success of an operating system that sports a near-total absence of real innovation?

The broader problem involves the fact that the key components inside your PC, both software and hardware, are still owned by far too few companies. In just about any other industry of global import, the way Microsoft dominates the software landscape while Intel has the hardware platform largely sewn up and Google owns web searches would be viewed as unhealthy.

A handy analogue is the food industry in the US. If you've seen the documentary Food, Inc., you'll know what I'm talking about. According to the film's makers, key sectors in the US food industry have been whittled down from around 20 major players in the 1970s to just four mega-producers today.

Unsavoury practices

The result has been the emergence of a range of seriously unsavoury practices – the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of massive companies hasn't done anyone any good. Except those companies, of course.

Compare that to the PC industry and, if anything, the concentration of power looks much, much worse. It's a fact that both Microsoft and Intel, for example, have recently been subject to prosecutions for market abuses. But a plausible argument can still be made in terms of the benefits to the PC industry and end users.

Together, Intel and Microsoft provided developers with a single, unified platform and a massive customer base. Thus was born the astonishing ecosystem of PC-compatible applications and devices we take for granted today.

Moreover, I suppose we should all be grateful for what little competition there has been. Without AMD and ATI to keep Intel and Nvidia honest, for instance, we might now be marvelling at the power of single-core Intel Pentium 5 processors and Nvidia GeForce 4900 TI graphics.

Similarly, I scarcely dare imagine what horrors the Beast of Redmond would have sired were it not for the threat, however remote, of Apple's OS X and the opensource Linux operating system.

So, a lot of power and wealth may have been accumulated in the hands of a few thanks to the Wintel monopoly, but mankind has benefited enormously from the emergence of ubiquitous personal computing.

A democratic wave

Still, if I'm convinced it's all been worth it up to now, I'm equally sure the time has come for a more democratic wave of innovation. Fortunately, there are signs it's already happening.

Microsoft is increasingly under siege from all conceivable angles, whether it's the success of Linux as an enterprise OS or the arguably even more lethal threat posed by the humble web browser. Who needs a complex operating system if all your applications are hosted online?

Intel's hardware nut seems trickier to crack. Creating computer chips is a complex business – the idea of new entrants to the market is virtually inconceivable. However, the increasing importance of mobile devices might be the key.

Currently, ultra-mobile computing is dominated not by Intel chips but by ARM's processor architectures. Crucially, ARM's approach to producing CPUs is rather novel.

In fact, ARM doesn't really produce processors at all. Rather, it licenses out designs. This gives chip makers the option of simply knocking out an off-the-shelf design or fusing an ARM processor architecture with its own technology to create something unique.

As the remit for ultra-mobile devices expands over the next few years, so will the range and ability of ARM-based processors. Chips with all kinds of enhanced functions, from video decoding to cryptography acceleration, are likely to appear.

Intel recognises the threat posed by a plethora of purpose-built ARM processors and so has taken the bold step of licensing out the Atom processor architecture to TSMC, one of its main rivals in the chip production business. Again, the idea is to allow the Atom core to be combined with a range of third-party circuitry.

All of which means we're poised for a battle royal between ARM and Intel in the ultra-mobile segment.

Google, meanwhile, might just provide a similar foil for Microsoft. The result would be a perfect storm of hardware and software innovation. If that happens, the mediocrity of Windows 7 will be but a distant memory.

A Government study has picked out the kind of jobs that are likely to be commonplace by 2030, but the stuff of sci-fi right now, including spaceship pilot and avatar manager.

Commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills - and carried out by FastFuture - the wacky list contains some absolute gems that it believes will be common jobs in 20 years' time.

The list actually sounds a lot more like a 6th Form English project than a beard-stroking look at the future, but, in fairness, who would have thought Google Search Engineer or Social Networking Consultant/Snake Oil Salesman would be titles 20 years ago?

We tried to pick out our favourites from the list of jobs, but frankly we found most of them too funny to exclude so here's a slice of them.

In no particular order:

Quarantine Enforcer
Weather Modification Police
Climate Change Reversal Specialist
Old Age Wellness Manager/Consultant
Vertical Farmer
Nano-Medic
Genomics Developer/Architect/Baby Designer
Body Part Maker
Pharmer of Genetically Engineered Crops and Livestock
Insect-Based Food Developers
Population Status Manager
Monorail Designer
End-of-Life Planner
Mind Reading Specialist
Ghost Experience Assistant

Adult entertainment company Pink Visual is developing augmented reality tech in order to let viewers pretend to be joining in its porn movies.

The new AR software is currently being tested online and superimposes animated adult entertainment characters onto scenes captured by your web camera.

Porn stars in your kitchen

"Augmented reality will let people put themselves into the scene," according to Pink's Kim Kysar, who was showing off the new tech at this week's "other show" in Las Vegas - the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.

"There is also a way to get the girls into your kitchen, on your bed... We provide the images and you provide the scene."

The rudimentary use of augmented reality via user's web cams is based on Adobe Flash Player and controlled for now by the user holding a card printed with a Pink Visual logo icon up to their laptop.

Augmented reality pimp

"The Web camera takes in the room, then puts a porn star or stripper in the scene," said Pink producer Matt Morningwood.

He added: "If I get the girl any closer to being in your room I'll be a pimp, and I don't want to do that."

Morningwood thinks this is just the beginning and that the opportunities for bringing viewers into scenes (and porn stars into your bedroom) are limitless.

"I like it… Especially, the part where I don't really have to be in the room," said porn star Devon Lee.

A team from Fudan University in Shanghai claims that silver-plated nanoparticles suspended in water is the key to developing the ultimate gadget-freaks dream piece of clothing – the invisibility cloak.

Look out, Harry Potter, with our cloaks of nanoparticles suspended in water we will outwit you yet!

The fluid would contain "magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping."

Invisibility devices

The report adds: "In the absence of a magnetic field, such nanoparticles would simply float around in the water…if a field were introduced, the particles would self-assemble into chains whose lengths depend on the strength of the field, and which can also attract one another to form thicker columns."

The really interesting application of the property is the fact that it could then potentially be used to build "invisibility devices, directing light around an object so that it appears as if nothing is there."

Let's be clear here. This is still currently at the level of high theory, but the mere fact that scientists say it can be done already has us that little bit more excited about the future!

In the opening CES keynote this year, CEO Steve Ballmer and Entertainment and Devices president Robbie Bach repeated the "three screens plus the cloud" story that Microsoft has been pitching for a while, although they concentrated on the PC and TV screens, brushing past Windows Mobile with a demo of the already-launched HTC HD2, the usual vague hint from Ballmer about bringing "the Zune music and video service to other Microsoft platforms" and the promise of announcements at Mobile World Congress next month.

For the PC, the emphasis wasn't just on the success of Windows 7, although Ballmer produced some impressive stats about 50% increases in PC sales and 94% user satisfaction with Windows 7; it was about showing that the PC can compete with upstarts like ebook readers and instant-on smartbooks running Android.

"The quality, value and choice in Windows PCs simply can't be matched on any other platform," claimed Ballmer. "No matter what the source of the content, what kind of content, video, text, whatever, Windows PCs will absolutely offer the greatest variety and the most interesting content and entertainment experiences in the world."

Cool things

"There's lots of cool things out there," admitted Ryan Asdourian, a senior program manager for the Windows team; "there's Kindle, there's Sony, there's Nook – but all of this can be done on your PC". He showed off the Graphic.ly digital comic book reader software and the Blio reader, with a million books in the store (including interactive textbooks) and Ballmer gave a sneak preview of a an HP slate PC running the Kindle software. (The slate isn't the Courier prototype that got so much attention last year but HP CTO Phil McKinney confirmed to us that it is a real product that will be launching this year).

When Ballmer says "we're talking about something that's almost as portable as a phone, and as powerful as a PC, running Windows 7," the obvious comparison is to devices like the Lenovo Skylight and the 'proof of concept' Android netbook HP will show in the Qualcomm keynote (both running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform) or the Entourage dual-screen e-reader (which has a second Android-powered screen for watching video and browsing the web).

He also showed the Dell Adamo XPS waking from sleep fast enough to draw applause – and fast startup is one of the major advantages claimed for alternative platforms. PCs can be that small and light, is the Microsoft message; they can start up that quickly – and they can run all your familiar apps.

Similarly as Sony and Samsung and others announce internet streaming and premium video services directly to TVs (and the PlayStation), Microsoft demonstrated sophisticated home entertainment developments like version 2.0 of Microsoft's Media Room IPTV offering and Xbox offerings that will ship in 2010, from the next version of Halo to Project Natal.

Blue skies for research

Both Media Room 2.0, which lets you take programmes from IPTV services like BT Vision and view them on a PC, Xbox or mobile device and the latest Bing maps, with Silverlight-enabled transitions that zoom from map view to satellite imagery to 3D street scenes with optional weather effects like snow, are good examples of what Microsoft means by 'plus cloud'.

As Ballmer put it, "We believe in an approach that combines the power of immersive and intelligent software that runs on devices along with smart and intuitive services accessed instantly through the cloud".

But like Project Natal and the touch interface for the HP slate, they're also perfect examples of Microsoft's secret weapon – Microsoft Research.

For years Microsoft has been spending a significant proportion of its budget on a wide range of research (and collaboration with universities and other research centres). The Photosynth technology behind the 3D environments on Bing Maps that let you explore places in detail comes from MSR, as does everything in Project Natal except the 3D camera (which was developed by an Israeli startup Microsoft bought last year).

"This is why we send the Neil Armstrongs of our company, our world-class engineers, psychologists, ethnographers, physicists, chemists, vision specialists, and design gurus to the farthest realms of the sci-fi world," said Bach; "to think and apply rigorous science to computer vision, machine learning, user interfaces and language processing."

Being able to control your Xbox by moving your body is the culmination of 20 years of research and over a thousand patents on digital ink, speech, touch and air gestures (Natal draws on the touch features in Windows 7, Zune HD and Surface – another Microsoft Research project). Most of the technologies Microsoft Research works on don't see the light of day for five to ten years or more, but this is where the products that really differentiate Microsoft come from.

In the past, Microsoft has come up with fascinating technologies in research that haven't made it out of the lab – or that haven't really made an impact when they have. But more and more, Microsoft is turning research into successful features and products.

As Ballmer spent the first half of the keynote demonstrating, Windows 7 has done a lot to reinvent the PC, but Microsoft is still dependant on PC and device manufacturers and software developers to take advantage of the platform it's built. The technologies that come out of Microsoft Research may give the company a little more control over its own destiny.

And of everything Ballmer and Bach showed in the keynote, including the HP slate and the preview of Halo Reach, it was Project Natal that drew by far the most applause.

In what rates as one of CES's most compelling keynotes, Jen-Hsun Huang Co-founder and President of Nvidia drew rapturous applause from wowed tech watchers with his demonstration of the Tegra mobile chip. The processor is intended to give portable devices the power of desktops yet, in Huang's words, "only sip power". He described the chip's creation as: "the greatest undertaking since our foundation."

"Nothing short of a miracle"

Current mobile devices just aren't up to the job – web pages don't fit naturally onto small screens, they're generally under powered and so can't play HD content. If you're a gamer you can forget playing the latest 3D titles on your mobile. What's more, if you attempt to do any of these things you'll wind up with an unwieldy device which guzzles power. Huang's message was simple: "We need a new device." One with the power of a desktop yet with the convenience of a smartphone. We need a tablet PC and to make it happen we need a radically new processor.

Lifting the curtain on Tegra, Huang introduced the new chips as: "nothing short of a miracle." The chip, it's claimed, is capable of driving HD video and has the muscle to run games currently only seen on PCs and consoles. Despite its computational muscle the chip consumes about a twentieth of the power needed to drive a top flight PC. By comparison mobile phone processors are made to look puny with Nvidia claiming Tegra is ten times more powerful than the average.

"We need the performance of a PC and the power sipping characteristics of a mobile chip, " Huang said and Tengra is it. With the twinned benefited of very low power consumption and high compute power, Tegra powered tablet PCs should be amazing.

"It just works"

The chips frugality should make the next generation of tablet PCs very compact. Huang explained: "When you consume very little power you can make the industrial design exquisite…[Tegra needs] no power management, no heat pipes, no ventilation, just electricity. Turn it on and it works." It will, in short, allow designers to create a whole new form factor.

It's claimed early devices built on the chip are as frugal as promised. One managed to play over 140hrs of music – the equivalent of 200 CDs – without need a charge. If you're a video fan you can expect around 16hrs of playback before needed to recharge. Put it another way you could fly to any destination on Earth from anywhere and watch HD movies and never need to recharge.

In other demonstrations a Tegra powered tablet made easy work of a lavish 3D shooter running on the Unreal engine. The chips, according to Epic Game's founder Tim Sweeney, make mobile devices and PCs work in lock-step. Such is its pixel pushing power we can look forward to games running equally well on PCs, consoles and also tablet PCs.

Back in October 2009, TechRadar put on its felt-edged predicto-hat and tried to guess what would be grabbing the headlines at CES 2010. We called it: New Year gear to get you excited.

Our thoughts naturally turned to Microsoft's Project Natal, the Courier Tablet, legions of new Kindle-rivalling e-readers and Full HD 3D TVs. And, as this year's CES has unfolded, we've not been entirely disappointed.

There's been no Courier Tablet (sadly) — Microsoft has undoubtedly blown its chance of stealing a march on Apple. But here's are some of the gadgets that have caught our beady TechRadar eyes so far and set the global newswires buzzing…

1. Project Natal
Steve Ballmer's lack of charisma on stage still can't dull the excitement surrounding Microsoft's motion capture gaming hardware. Windows 7? Don't care any more. Windows Mobile? Microsoft doesn't seem to have any revolutionary ideas for this at all.

But give us the prospect of gesture-based, controller-free gaming by Christmas and we're already sold. Mr Ballmer? Mr Bach? Where do we sign up?

2. Samsung transparent OLED laptop
We love a good prototype and Samsung has delivered the goods again with a 14-inch transparent OLED laptop screen. Watch the video here to see the technology in action.

3. Sony Bravia LX900
The minimalist 'Monolithic' design of Sony's new LX900 Bravia is only the first thing to catch the eye. It isn't just the company's flagship HD TV, it's a showcase for some of the new technologies that are vying to become standard issue telly-features in the coming decade.

So the LX900 can also cope with 3D TV, boasts integrated Wi-Fi (802.11n) and all manner of TV widgetry from onscreen Twitter apps to streaming catch-up TV services.

4. The HP Slate
Steve Ballmer described HP's new 'Slate PC' as "almost as portable as a phone and as powerful as a PC running Windows 7″. Yes, we agree that it looks lovely. And yes, it's a triumph of micro-engineering. But despite its high-profile showing at CES, what are the odds that people will actually remember it once Apple has unleashed its own tablet device?

5. The world's fastest 3D TV
What happens when you put a variant of the PlayStation 3's Cell chip into a Toshiba HD TV? You get a TV that can convert 2D content into 3D in real-time. How about that for the ultimate HD TV experience?

6. The world's biggest 3D TV
3D TV was always going to dominate this year's show. So what better way to show off the technology than by super-sizing it into a 152-inch 4K x 2K 3D plasma display? Panasonic's giant TV set is the world's biggest 3D TV. It uses the full HD x 2 frame sequential method to alternately reproduce full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) images for the left and right eyes on the display frame by frame. Active shutter glasses required.

7. MSI dual-screen e-reader
It doesn't matter that the intriguing Courier tablet was a no-show at this year's CES. Because MSI has come up with a thin, dual-screen tablet/e-reader/slate of its own.

Featuring two 10-inch multi-touch displays and a full-size virtual keyboard, the Atom Z530-powered device was spotted on the show floor running Windows 7. It's early days — so no official name, no price and no release date.

8. Powermat wireless charger
While Powermat was one of the highlights of CES 2009, the fututistic wireless charging technology is now available to buy. New for 2010, Powermat is working to integrate its technology into batteries so that devices will work with the charger without messing around with add-on sleeves or backplates.

9. LBO Light Touch
Not only are slates, tablets and e-readers out to get the traditional keyboard, now pico projectors have started to taunt them too.

Light Blue Optics has been using CES 2010 to show off its Light Touch system – "an interactive projector that turns any flat surface into a 10-inch touch screen."

Using proprietary holographic laser projection technology, the Light Touch can project a screen onto any flat surface. An infra-red sensing system then enables you to interact with the projected display just like a touch screen.

10. The Parrot AR.Drone
Finally, what tech enthusiast wouldn't want a remote controlled Wi-Fi helicopter with two onboard cameras. And you you can pilot it using an iPhone. Genius. Take a look at our pictures.

TechRadar's latest poll suggests that twice as many readers would like to get their hands on a PlayStation 4 than they would the next iteration of the Xbox - although neither console was the top result, as we asked which future gadget you would like to get your hands on.

With nearly 3,000 votes cast, it was gaming machines that picked up the big votes, with 35 per cent opting for a next-next-gen console.

But top, with 22 per cent of the vote, was the 'pen that's also a flying car' option that we put in as a joke.

Bunch of realists

Leaving that option aside, the other votes are still illuminating (and not least that anyone would NOT want a pen that's a flying car).

With the PlayStation 4 a creditable second (and a lot more feasible than the pen) polling a fifth of all votes, it was nearly double its rival the Xbox 720 – which picked up 11 per cent.

That was still good enough for third place, unlike the Wii 2's four per cent of the vote – suggesting that our readers are hard-core gamers rather than casual ones.

A pair of Apples

In fact Apple picked up both the fourth spots with 8 per cent for both the much mooted Apple Tablet and the next generation of its iPhone, narrowly ahead of a Android 3.0 phone (7 per cent).

Six percent opted for a Ultra-HD '4K' 3D TV, five per cent are after a Windows 8 PC and rock bottom – along with the Wii – was a quad core netbook.

Let's face it, you'd be mad not to plump for the pen, right?

TechRadar's latest poll suggests that twice as many readers would like to get their hands on a PlayStation 4 than they would the next iteration of the Xbox - although neither console was the top result, as we asked which future gadget you would like to get your hands on.

With nearly 3,000 votes cast, it was gaming machines that picked up the big votes, with 35 per cent opting for a next-next-gen console.

But top, with 22 per cent of the vote, was the 'pen that's also a flying car' option that we put in as a joke.

Bunch of realists

Leaving that option aside, the other votes are still illuminating (and not least that anyone would NOT want a pen that's a flying car).

With the PlayStation 4 a creditable second (and a lot more feasible than the pen) polling a fifth of all votes, it was nearly double its rival the Xbox 720 – which picked up 11 per cent.

That was still good enough for third place, unlike the Wii 2's four per cent of the vote – suggesting that our readers are hard-core gamers rather than casual ones.

A pair of Apples

In fact Apple picked up both the fourth spots with 8 per cent for both the much mooted Apple Tablet and the next generation of its iPhone, narrowly ahead of a Android 3.0 phone (7 per cent).

Six percent opted for a Ultra-HD '4K' 3D TV, five per cent are after a Windows 8 PC and rock bottom – along with the Wii – was a quad core netbook.

Let's face it, you'd be mad not to plump for the pen, right?

If anywhere could be expected to be in the vanguard of the imminent Augmented Reality (AR) revolution then it would have to be Japan and where else but in the nation's myriad department stores?

AR machines are already on the streets of Japan, being used to help lazy shoppers try on clothes virtually and find out more about products from a range of shops under the same roof.

Sign me up

Printing and display specialist Toppan is using an AR machine to encourage shoppers at one chain of stores to virtually browse products and sign up for reward points programmes.

Meanwhile, trading firm Furutani Sangyou has installed its 'Magical Mirror' in a department store in Tokyo.

The machine superimposes clothes from various retailers in the store on a live video image of anyone standing in front of the onboard camera.

While the idea is to save time trying clothes on, it's really more of a proof-of-concept for now, although big business will doubtless be interested in seeing how AR fares in the eyes of consumers before pressing on with more ambitious schemes.

Home Cinema Choice has managed to grab some time with the next, next generation of displays – Sony's 360 Holographic Viewer.

Part of the TechRadar network, HCC is out in Japan to check out the latest technologies- and the 360 viewer certainly falls into that category.

Holographic pictures are already enthralling people, with the cylindrical unit showing a static image that looks like it is solid and hanging within the tube.

The pictures are apparently currently quite pixelated, and a little on the small side, but changing the angle of viewing, or walking around the full colour image did not break the illusion.

Mesmerizing entertainment

"With a remote control, I could select from an internal library containing hundreds of such images, flicking them up as if though were TV channels," writes HCC's Steve May.

"I could also trigger them to either rotate or freeze. It proved mesmerizing entertainment. Not some much 3D as 4D."

So will we all be seeing holographic pictures in our house in 2010? Almost certainly not – but progression for the unit will see animated pictures and a larger device.

The obvious next step is to add animation, engineer Hiroki Kikuchi added, suggesting that bigger, moving images were 'a year or so away'.

Via HCC