Megatrends don’t simply happen on their own. They start with disruptive technologies that completely change the status quo, like gunpowder, the airplane, and the microprocessor. The trick lies in identifying potential disruptive technologies early on and then predicting where they might lead.
Back in 1976, I was part of a group at Tektronix tasked with retraining oscilloscope sales and field engineers to sell microprocessor development systems for the Intel 8008 microcontroller. Part of the challenge was to point to potential applications. After much head scratching, we told those engineers that perhaps these strange chips could be used to control elevators or washing machines.
Obviously, we hadn’t quite put our fingers on what effect they would have. So how many new technologies have the potential to similarly change the electronics we use every day?
WEARABLE COMPUTERS
One of tomorrow’s megatrends may be reflected in a recent Stanford University seminar. Leah Buechley, a post-doc at the Craft Technology Group of the University of Colorado’s Computer Science Department, offered her educational goals in “Computational Textiles and the Democratization of Ubiquitous Computing.” Specifically, she wants to involve non-technologists in creative applications for microcontrollers in clothing. Functions could be decorative, like flashing jewelry, or artistic, as part of a performance.
In her paper, Buechley describes “a reconfigurable costume [that] consists of a torso piece and an assortment of sensing appendages that can be snapped to the torso. Sensors in the appendages include muscle-flex sensors, accelerometers, bend sensors, and touch sensors. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, via a Bluetooth module embedded in the torso, where it can be used to control or generate music, video, and other multimedia content.”
Assembly seems relatively simple. “The costume, built using my version 2.0 e-textile construction kit, is form-fitting and stretchy,” the paper explains. “The electronic modules are kept as small as possible so they do not interfere with the dancer. The costume was used in an improvisational performance in May 2007 to control a player piano.”
To make that kind of design practical, Buechley investigated sewable conductors and developed the LilyPad, a fabric socket for an Arduino microcontroller (Fig. 1). Arduino is an open-source platform based on Atmel AVR microcontrollers and peripherals. It runs the Processing programming language and integrated development environment.
Like Arduino, Processing aims to get people in the electronic arts and visual design communities over the “math is hard” hump. The programming element is derived from Wiring, a C/C++-like language. The development environment is Java-based. Buechley chose Arduino because it already had an established user base and ready-to-use hardware (available from www.arduino.cc).
To reach out beyond what she has personally accomplished in small classes with middle and high schoolers, Buechley developed her LilyPad from a labor-intensive, cottage-industry fabrication of cloth, conductive thread, and circuitry to a mass-produced product that’s now sold online by SparkFun Electronics (www.sparkfun.com/commerce/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=lilypad).
A complete LilyPad kit, consisting of a mainboard, power supply, tri-color LED, light sensor, USB link and mini USB cable, and spool of conductive thread costs $86.65 in single quantities (Fig. 2). Since the products are intended for group projects, significant quantity discounts are available.
MAGLEV PEOPLE MOVERS
In April, NASA celebrated Yuri’s Night, an annual commemoration of the first manned space flight on April 12, 1961. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin met an untimely end in a training accident in 1968, but his adventure is remembered around the world. I attended my local event, a kind of science fair for grownups with the flavor of Burning Man, at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
NASA has a number of green-energy programs, and a company involved in one of them, Unimodal Inc., would be presenting that evening. Unimodal’s SkyTran project, a proposed mesh of overhead people movers that would cover entire cities, would be disruptive in its own way if realized (Fig. 3). Underlying SkyTran, however, is a potentially disruptive propulsion technology much closer to being realized in production hardware.
SkyTran will deliver “zero-emission public transit with the convenience of a car but without the need for government subsidies to build and operate the system,” says Unimodal. “On SkyTran you travel the city in a small, computercontrolled, magnetically levitated vehicle. The elevated network of solar-powered guideways provide you with fast, on-demand, point-to-point, non-stop, personal rapid transit.”
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