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.

A SOLAR-POWERED MAYFLOWER

This is one MARS mission that is firmly grounded on Earth. Plymouth University researchers are designing the Mayflower Autonomous Research Ship, or MARS, which will set sail across the Atlantic Ocean in 2020, 400 years after another ship named the Mayflower made the same journey.

The original Mayflower took several months to transport settlers across the ocean, leaving Plymouth, England in July and arriving in what would become Plymouth, Massachusetts in mid-November of 1620.

The project is still in the design phase, and will take at least 2.5 years to build, so its unclear how long the new trip will take. If it succeeds it will likely be the first unmanned boat to make the crossing, though unmanned airplanes andunderwater gliders have already made the trip.

All we know so far is that the mission will carry no pilgrims, or passengers of any kind. The ship will be solar-powered, and will be a roving science laboratory, taking data and doing experiments on the high seas, in some cases utilizing drones stored on board.

The cost is estimated to be in the multi-million dollar range, and funds are still being raised for the project. We can only hope that its crossing is smooth sailing--unlike another solar-powered venture that ran into trouble earlier this year.

3D-PRINT GLASS

The process of making glass was already amazing. Take tiny grains of sand, melt them at staggering temperatures with other chemicals, then carefully cool it into a brand new solid, ready to be a vase, window, bottle, or bead. It'spossible to make glass on your grill in the backyard but generally it's a skill reserved for craftsmen or factories. Then, there's MIT.

MIT's Mediated Matter Group has figured out a way to put molten glass through a 3D printer, creating beautiful sculptures. They call their system G3DP, and it is incredibly beautiful to watch.

A SURFBOARD MADE BY A ROCKET SCIENTIST

Edison Conner, a former SpaceX rocket scientist and co-founder of Varial Surf Technology, tried for years to create a durable surfboard from aerospace material. In his eyes, the surfboard industry was ripe for disruption. Makers had clung to one manufacturing method for more than 50 years. For strength and flexibility, they created a spine from a strand of wood (known as a stringer) and glued it into a polyurethane foam cast. The cast was sanded and wrapped in fiberglass and resin.

Conner and the other engineers at Varial tried something different. They replaced the wooden stringer with an ultra­rigid foam similar to the type used in helicopter rotor blades and in rocket-propulsion systems. The foam is 30 percent stronger, with seven times the stiffness (or modulus) of conventional foam. It’s also 25 percent lighter. That means surfers have a board that’s easier to control and more durable.

Varial’s chemists altered the poly­mers of the foam, producing high levels of crystallinity. The crystallized foam consists of structured, rigid latticelike polymer chains. Crystallization also makes cell walls thinner. That lets chemists pack more cells into a tighter, more-angular (or poly­gonal) cell structure. The structure is stronger and firmer than the looser, more-bubblelike cell structure of conventional polyurethane foam.

Aside from strength and durability, the new boards have more action (or buoyancy) in the water. “They are ultra light, which I love in smaller waves,” says top pro surfer Shane Dorian, who won the Billabong Ride of the Year Award in 2015.

“Ninety percent of the time, I’m surfing head-high waves or smaller, so the responsiveness of the light boards is amazing.”

SMART HOME SENSOR

Wearable technology does a fine job of keeping tabs on your personal fitness. But to measure the health of the place where you live, you need a different tool. This device monitors the temperature, humidity, noise, and light level for any room. It can even track the number of people who enter. Within the casing, a collection of sensors sends information to an Arduino, which interprets the input and displays the data on a small screen. Based on the device’s readings, you can turn on a dehumidifier, lower the thermostat, or crack open a window—whatever it takes to keep your home environment 

Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit

Since the dawn of electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.

What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.

Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.

Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.

When is it coming? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.