Ever wondered where the big ideas from the big players come from? ZDNet talks to three science soothsayers about what the (technology) future will hold.

Almost daily, we hear about the latest breakthroughs from technology gurus at Microsoft, Intel, and other big players in the tech sector. What we don't hear about is where their big ideas come from.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre; and Starlab are among the top think tanks in tech research across the globe, and many technological innovations were born within their walls.

According to these science soothsayers, technology is just beginning to change our lives, with plenty of advances to come.

Fun and games with robots

Professor Rodney Brooks, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder of the lab's Humanoid Robotics Group, sees a future in which robotics plays an increasingly important role in our lives. No, not everyone will have a C-3PO-like personal assistant--at least not until 2010, when high-end robots like this may start showing up in the homes of well-heeled early adopters. The first robots will be about fun and games.

	My Real Baby A joint project from Hasbro and iRobot

Too-real toys
Brooks believes the first robots to establish a wide household presence will be robotic toys, such as the one he developed with two former M.I.T. colleagues and Hasbro called My Real Baby. The name pretty much says it all, and so does this eerily lifelike baby doll: She can laugh, cry, coo, burp, and make a variety of babble noises and words. She can even sense when her skin is being touched. One wonders if the kiddies will cuddle with her or run screaming.

By 2005, Brooks predicts many homes will have robot vacuums and other simple cleaning machines that, by then, will have dropped into the reasonable US$100 to $200 range. By 2010, he envisions easy-to-use plug-and-play robots in every home. Well, it's about time.

Rich Gold Manager of the RED lab at PARC

Rich Gold, manager of the Research in Experimental Documents (RED) lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), agrees that toys present a hot developmental field in 2001. Gold invented one of the first autonomous computerised people available in stores in the early '80s, Activision's Little Computer People for the Commodore 64 game console. He predicts that all toys will have speech chips by the end of the year. Just imagine that preteen who lives on your block blowing by you with his scooter bellowing, "On your left!" or worse.

The writing is on the wall

	Reading Eye Dog Photograph courtesy of Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre

One of the main focuses of Gold's RED group concerns the future of reading. The group's robotic Reading Eye Dog can read documents aloud and could, in the future, be widely used as a reading assistant for the visually impaired. A camera in the dog's eyes photographs reading material placed before it, optical character recognition software translates it into text, and the dog reads it aloud in a friendly doggy voice using a text-to-voice synthesiser. The doglike attributes of this robotic reader are a result of human nature--Gold says the robot wasn't very popular before he was made to look and sound like a dog.

Another of Gold's future-of-reading experiments is the Reading Wall, which is representative of the type of interactive exhibits that Gold believes will reenergize public spaces by 2010. The device's three 16-foot-long walls display text on the history of reading as a color plasma screen moves along the length of the wall, uncovering images and more specific historical information frame by frame.

More predictions

Richard Wheeler Research scientist in Starlab's Bits group

Richard Wheeler, a research scientist in Starlab's Bits group knows what won't fly in 2001; namely, technology fads that he feels do not make inherent sense, such as online grocery shopping and e-books. Wheeler suggests electronic book technology will not be widely adopted until we further develop video screens that look and feel like paper. Xerox PARC lab's recent spin-off, Gyricon Media, has already developed a type of reusable electronic paper, as has E Ink.