Driverless car

Total Recall, Demolition Man, Minority Report and I, Robot have all featured driverless cars. According to Hollywood, in an unavoidable dystopian future, cars cannot and should not be operated by humans because we're are too risky and cause accidents. 2013's Skynet, or Google it's currently known, have taken on a similar ethos and begun creating an autonomous car. 

Google are a bit hush on the specifics, but it seems that the car operates by using sensors to detect its surroundings and 360 cameras to map out direction, not dissimilar to the Google Street View car. It is operated by a piece of software ominously called 'Google Chauffeur', which sounds absolutely terrifying. Google's car has already done test runs around San Francisco and it completed over 300,000 autonomous driving miles with no problems.

Ford has also jumped on the driverless bandwagon by developing a car that takes over the steering wheel when you are about to crash, which is great news for drink drivers. 

Robocop Visor

This is RoboCop country. The augmented reality and digital overlay that helped Officer Murphy dispense justice was probably one of the most entertaining aspects of RoboCop. Real-time information on criminals and remote access to police records could have even been the first time we saw mobile internet in action. 

Although, if it had been 2015, Robocop would've had to walk around a bit, holding his head up toward the sky, hoping to get signal. Nevertheless, officer Murphy's justice visor isn't science fiction any more. Web giant and trend setter, Google, built Google Glass, a pair of glasses that work as a real life HUD - giving you access to the internet and thus real-time information on things in your line of sight.

Directions to a shop, directions in a shop, emails and texts displayed in front of your eye, aggressive Facebook stalking of people you don't know, Google searches and video recording are all available with a few spoken commands. The only downside is that you will look like an idiot, which wasn't a problem for Robocop because he was awesome. 

The future movie tech

Acid trip ideas from the tall-towers of Hollywood-executive offices usually don't make it any further than the silver screen. But when they do, when they do, boy howdy - they're exciting. 

Real life science is always aping the brain farts of Californian movie producers and, on occasion, the boffins produce the goods. We live in an exciting time when the fantasies of our childhood are starting to become a reality. Alright, we haven't seen radioactive arachnids or time stopping devices (yet), but we have dipped our hands into the magic hat of robotics and pulled out bionic arms and self assembling robots.

Smartphones can now actually do most of the wildly inaccurate tasks Jack Bauer expected his mobile phone to do in 2001, and the US army wants to have a genuine crack at making Iron Man. Imagine if the US army - or anyone else for that matter - attempted to make a robotic exoskeleton suit 50 years ago? It probably would've looked like something out of The Wizard of Oz. A man, quite literally in a large tin. But in 2013, we can expect something a lot more mouth watering. Here we look at the top 10 movie tech that made it to real life.

gold vending machine

Some inventions are so ubiquitous that it's difficult to imagine they started as an idea scribbled on paper and then a patent application submitted to, say, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Aluminum foil, adhesive bandages, the ballpoint pen, the computer mouse, the microwave oven -- these are just a few examples of great ideas that became indispensable products we now take for granted.

Nevertheless, of the 520,277 applications that inventors filed with USPTO in 2010, chances are that not even half will be granted patents, and far fewer will become commercial successes [source: USPTO]. For every new gadget that becomes a household name and changes our lives, there are thousands of others that languish in patent office files, unappreciated except perhaps as curiosities. Some of them are ingenious, but plagued with small but fatal flaws. Others are too outlandish to ever gain widespread acceptance. A few are simply ahead of their time.

In that spirit, here are 10 of the most outré technological advances from recent years -- inventions that push the boundaries of innovation, yet seem unlikely to gain widespread acceptance. Enjoy them with a caveat: There were people who scoffed at the notion that the motorized carriage would ever replace the convenience of having a horse, and others who figured that nobody would ever need or want to carry a telephone