Imagining Tomorrow - United States Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's new visual information analysis tools

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2001 by Jim Thomas

NO ONE CAN ARGUE that computers have changed our daily lives--the way we communicate, work, shop, and even think. What may seem surprising, however, is that the most dramatic changes still lie ahead.

Today's adults can remember the days before there was a computer on every desk, catching up with an old friend meant sending off a quick e-mail message, and the Internet was the best place to find information about nearly anything and the easiest way to comparison shop. Pocket calculators went from nonexistent to give-away items at conventions and trade shows. Simple computers with limited capabilities stopped filling entire rooms. Now, there are desktop systems and handheld systems that are much more powerful.

While these advances have been impressive, even more major transformations over the next decade will affect many aspects of life. We will be walking around with computers in our pockets and talking to our information appliances. Even our clothing or shoes will contain information devices.

The changes on the horizon are the result of a combination of things--the availability of high-speed networks and information content, the ease of developing access tools, and advancements in wireless technology and small information appliances. For example, the cost of manufacturing a video camera plummeted from $200 to $2 between 1998 and 2000. At that price, people will be putting video cameras on everything, including cell phones, which will have video capabilities among their standard features.

Among other indications of the quick pace of change and development is the drop in the cost of one megabyte of memory for computers from $11 in 1988 to just under a penny in 2000. The amount of information that can be carried by a single fiber-optic cable doubles about every 12 months, and, according to predictions, 60,000,000 kilometers of new fiber will be installed worldwide this year alone. (A kilometer equals 0.62 miles.) On top of that, there is amazing growth in wireless and satellite communications, which adds even more capacity to transmit information around the world.

Regardless of how fast large quantities of information can move over the wires and how inexpensive it may be to upgrade and enhance computer systems, the first advanced video devices and other dramatic improvements will be in computer games. The commercial entertainment and gaming market is much larger than the need for personal computers. Face it; people put their money where their kids are. Playstation 2, marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., is several times faster than the Pentium processors in personal computers. This is a disruptive technology, one that leapfrogs beyond existing capabilities and shakes things up a bit.

As information technology moves forward, the entertainment industry will shift from presenting something to allowing individuals to experience it. People could be able to "travel" to Egypt without physically going there. Through the magic of information technology, they might be able to immerse themselves in images and sound, creating the feeling of walking around Cairo, talking to the locals, and seeing the pyramids. They might even get to sense smells, or do things that people can't do in real life, like stand on top of the pyramids or explore inside. The virtual trip to Egypt may require a visit to a local cyber travel provider at first, but the ongoing trend to expand the quality and variety of home entertainment options will continue to grow as well.

While many new technologies may first be put to use in the game and entertainment market, they will provide much broader benefits to society. These advancements should help us work faster, in addition to affecting our depth of understanding. The way we learn is going to change. Much like the virtual trip to Egypt, people could engage themselves in the work they are doing. They could become part of a scientific experiment as it takes place. Perhaps researchers will be able to put themselves in the middle of a computer simulation with all of the information displayed around them. People actually could see a molecular reaction and feel its force in an instrument through some sort of virtual reality technologies.

You might be able to go sit in "caves" and be completely surrounded by information and images projected on six-sided displays or walk-in cone-shaped enclosures. You may be able to get down and see things from all angles and actually experience science. Reading a physics textbook that describes how a ball bounces is one thing, but actually seeing a ball bounce is different. If you can hold a ball while it bounces and feel it move, that is different still. It is going to be much more fun to learn in the next 10 years--and the hope is that it will make kids more excited to learn about science.

The future will bring a lot of new and exciting ways for people to interact with information and with one another. As a result of this information revolution, we are facing the challenge of information overload. The information visualization technologies being developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for example, are meant to address this growing concern. These developments will help people sort through mounds of data--not just numbers, but text, video, audio, and images--to find what they need, identify relationships within the data, and explore trends.