In Depth: Straight outta sci-fi: the movie tech we wish they'd make

Posted: Published on October 5th, 2013

This post was added by Dr Simmons

Hollywood loves to delight us with fantastic gadgets and amazing technologies, but it also has a tendency to go over the top. Remember the truly dreadful portrayal of tech in films such as The Net?

So how much of the sci-fi we see on our screens is actually possible - and if it's possible, how long is it before we can have it?

Let's find out the truth about our favourite on-screen inventions.

This one's organic rather than man-made, but it's still amazing technology: the only obvious drawback of Douglas Adams' Babel Fish is that you have to stick a fish in your ear (oh, and the theological arguments that resulted from the "bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance,") but the upsides are many: instantaneous, accurate translation of anything said to you in any language.

Is it movie bollocks? The fish bit is, obviously, but Google Translate is getting there: the latest version can translate handwriting as well as text.

Knight Rider's KITT (it's short for Knight Industries Two Thousand, which must have sounded amazingly futuristic back in 1982; in the 2008 movie the number was upped to three thousand) could see the road ahead, communicate with David Hasselhoff, play music and video and even let the driver play video games. KITT's memory capacity was a massive "1,000 megabits".

Is it movie bollocks? Not at all. Cars might not have KITT's, ahem, winning personality, but self-driving cars are mainstream now: many mainstream vehicles use crash-avoidance technology to compensate for driver error and, of course, Google is running fleets of autonomous vehicles.

Go here to read the rest:
In Depth: Straight outta sci-fi: the movie tech we wish they'd make

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.