Item 3: The Mag-Lev Suit.
During a particularly suspenseful scene, Jeremy Renner is rigged up in a chain mail Magnetic Levitation Suit that he then uses to save the world. By floating.

To be totally honest there’s nothing exceptionally mind blowing about a Magnetic Levitation suit except how little real world purpose it would serve. I mean, most of the applications I could think of for this suit/lev-bot combo would be easily achieved with actual things. I’m going to go so far as to say that the only instance I can think of where I would really need to have this suit would be the exact situation in which it was used in the movie. But, whatever. Is it possible?

Absolutely. Magnetic Levitation has been around for a long time. We often use it effectively (#ShanghaiMagLev) to lift objects many thousands of times heavier than Jeremy Renner. There are some issues that one would come up against though. If you’ve ever held two magnets of opposing polarities close enough to where they repel, for example, you’ll understand why stability would be a problem. Then if the lev-bot were using electromagnetic levitation like we’d see with superconductors, the device would have to be cooled to extreme degrees to stop overheating. No spoilers, but anybody who saw the movie will get why—unless the bot was strapped with some incredible super-coolant—there’s no possible way that could’ve been a superconducting magnet. There have been recent experiments by NASA, looking to simulate anti-gravity, where scientists created a magnetic field strong enough to levitate the water molecules within the body of a living mouse. Whoa. RIP NASA. What morons thought it was a good idea to quit on Outer Space? It’s only, like, 99.99999…. percent of everything. OOF! I need to calm down.

So! While it’s theoretically possible that a suit like this could be created, it’s unlikely that anybody’s going to take the time to think up solutions for the above problems anytime soon. Mostly because, like I said, why would you need an extremely limited levitation suit?

Item 4: The Car.
There’s plenty of information out about the BMW i8, scheduled for release, so I’ll just breeze through the basic specs:
The car can run on electricity only for 22 miles. Able to recharge in two hours from a domestic power source, it gets an unheard of 87mpg, and still satisfies the Wild Child in all of us with a 0 to 60 of just four seconds. Whatever! What I’m really stoked on here is the Windshield Display technology. Now, in the movie we saw a full, gesture controlled 3D environment, but for a few obvious reasons (#hugedistraction #askingforit #recklessmajority) that won’t be a option on the consumer models anytime soon.
What we can look forward to is a still very impressive full color 3D Heads Up Display that provides basic information to drivers without the need to take your eyes off the road. Like with the technology for transparent displays mentioned in my last post, HUD in cars has been around for a bit now. But as we’ll see the future of this is still wide open.
At CES 2012 (Consumer Electronics Show) this week, Audi presented their take on it with a three-panel gesture controlled setup that boasts stunningly clear graphics. Also showing some promising in-vehicle displays were GM and Mercedes-Benz, but still, none of these will be anything close to what we saw in M:I-GP.
The real obstacle here is distractibility. The tech we’re talking about is good to go as far as components are concerned:
1.Transparent displays are going to be what’s up as this “the-winner-is-thinner” computing trend comes to a head. (Samsung was doing a little bragging at CES with their Transparent LCD Smart Window #AwesomeScience). How much thinner can you get than a window?
2.Gesture control isn’t perfect yet. But with the technology introduced by the Microsoft Kinect game system, which will be built-in to new TVs (Samsung again), there’s no reason why they couldn’t slap it into a car.
3.GPS navigation systems are old news in cars. Here they just need to make an eight inch leap from the dash to the windshield. No biggie. If only the driver could keep their eyes on the road.
But if it’s all the driver’s fault for being so easily distracted, then what’s keeping us passengers from having some fun? According to Toyota: Nothing! The Toyota Window To The World concept turns the backseat windows into actual transparent touchscreen display. Using cameras and sensors mounted onto the car’s exterior Toyota is able to provide an interactive experience while on the road. Passengers will be able to use multi-touch and graphics technology to doodle on the glass, zoom in to specific portions of the world beyond, and even point at real pieces of the landscape which the window/computer will then translate as text in the local language wherever you’re driving. I.E. you pass a house in Mexico and get a little ‘casa’ floating across the display. Actually cool! I predict this is going to forever change parental road annoyances from “Are we there yet?” to “Do we have to get out of the car? Don’t wanna!”
While the Future of Stuff can never come too soon, we can safely say that splattered bugs on your windshield are about to get a whole lot more annoying in just the next few years!

In my next few posts, we’re going to take a look at a few of the cooler technologies featured in M:I GP to see how close they are to you:

Item 1: The Contact Lenses.

Seems that since he left the island, Josh Holloway has ditched his makeshift glasses for a sweet set of contacts. Those Heads Up Display (HUD) Lenses were the coolest, and, aside from the sweet car (see my next post), they win the prize for most obviously marketable gizmo. Transparent displays are nothing new. But how realistic is sticking that sucker on your eye? The quick of it is: Not very. But we’re on our way.

Researchers at the University of Washington recently completed a successful test of a contact lens LED display. Granted, the thing could only manage a single pixel and the pictures of it sitting on anesthetized rabbit eyes are a super bummer, but hey: Science! The point of this test was to prove that the technology is possible. It is. Now these guys will start figuring out how to implement multiple pixels and, hopefully, fix the whole “extended use could lead to lactate build-up and corneal swelling” issue.

For now, if you’re okay with not having a computer screen snug up against your peepers, here are a couple of gadgets that might do the trick:

According to a press release from the Recon Instruments team, astronauts out on spacewalks use paper checklists on their arms. Seriously? Paper? What a let down, astronauts. Thankfully, Recon invented this fancy, non-paper Micro Optics Display and NASA says they’re gonna give it a whirl. For us planet-bound humans, Recon sells these things in special goggles for skiers. The display shows the wearer graphical ski related data like speed, altitude, air time, and location (just in case you get a little too high up the slope). Also, with smartphone connectivity you can get calls/texts, hook up to GPS, and control your music playlist telepathically [not factual].

In a much more sinister, Big Brotherly, instance: Brazilian police are testing glasses that will allow them to capture the biometrics of 400 faces per second. The data is cross-referenced against a central computer storing some 13 million faces. If there’s a match the glasses will highlight the perp in Robocop Red for further crime-stopping. That’s just the most interesting feature. The glasses enable their wearer to identify a suspect up to 12 miles away! What? They hope to use these for quick response crowd control during the 2014 Olympics.

Item 2: The Gloves:

One of the most exciting scenes in the movie was when Tom Cruise Spidermanned (read: scaling walls) his way all over the Burj Khalifa. Apparently he was actually doing that. Tom Cruise was actually jumping around the 123^rd story of the tallest building on Planet Earth. Of course, while in the movie he was using these neat gloves, the actor was in fact hooked into all sorts of wires, harnesses, and safety machines. But if you were, say, an actual person without the aid of special effects, would those gloves work?

Lo! There are real immediate technologies that would make these gloves totally possible…soonish. For now the focus has been on building wall-climbing robots that use something called electroadhesion, a technology made possible by SRI International. Other notable SRI projects include the computer mouse, HDTV, the Internet, and, most recently, Siri.

Now look. I’m not going to pretend that I understand how this thing works. If video presentations are to be believed, the science behind this may work only when mumbled in a slow, heavily accented, monotone. The basic principle is the same as when you rub a balloon on your head and stick it to a wall. But here the balloon is a robot, and your hair-static is “a plurality of electroadhesive gripping surfaces, each having electrode(s) and each configured to be placed against respective surface regions of a foreign object.”

In August 2011, SRI received a patent for their electroadhesive system. It’s very dull and jargony and stuffed to the brim with exceptionally boring ways that this innovation could be used in the real world. Typically that’s what’s up with patents. Where it gets interesting—after eight pages of “the electroadhesive gripping system of claim [1-]28 wherein said first and second…gripping system…end effector…” yadda yadda—is claim 32 (of 33), “wherein said electroadhesive end effector resembles a human hand.” Bam!

According to the text, this “end effector” (i.e. Glove) would be used to help people with arthritis lift heavy bags. Actually! But, come on, if old people are lifting bags with battery operated gloves, then you know that Special Ops dudes are scaling the walls of evil somewhere.

To be continued….