Star Trek Tech That Exists Today 207
Esther Schindler writes "When Star Trek hit the air waves, talking computers were just a pipe dream. While teleportation remains elusive, several once-fictional technologies are changing the way people live and work. Here are some ways in which we're approaching the gizmos that Star Trek demonstrated. Speech recognition? Check. Holodeck? Sort of. Replicator? Workin' on it."
iPhone (Score:4, Informative)
What about the white iPhone 4 [mrericsir.com]?
Re:What was the TV show about this? (Score:5, Informative)
No, really, I think that's it.
nothing like a holodeck (Score:5, Informative)
Look, until we can whip matter up to our exact specifications, we can't rightly say anything we're doing is remotely similar to a "holodeck".
Sorry but fancy images on a 2D or pseudo-3D screen aren't what they're hopping about in TNG/DS9.
Re:Not really... (Score:5, Informative)
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series.
And these actually exist in real life. One of the hospitals in my home city uses a Vocera [vocera.com]communication system. You press your lapel button, say the name of the person you want to talk to, and it opens a fucking communication channel between the two of you.
People overlook the simple things. I thought the most impressive part of Iron Man was the AI. "Holy fuck, his computer is telling a joke when it's not helping him design a suborbital flight suit." "Now it's bringing up the files on everyone he's flying past?"