IBM predicts next big 5 things in 5 years

nternational Business Machines Corp. on Wednesday unveiled its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” — a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM predicts that technology will evolve in the following ways:

You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D

In the next five years, 3-D interfaces – like those in the movies – will let people interact with 3-D holograms of your friends in real time, IBM predicts.

Scientists at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data and on technology that would allow engineers to step inside designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across an interactive 3-D globe.

Batteries will breathe air to power our devices

In the next five years, IBM said, scientific advances in transistors and battery technology will allow devices to last about 10 times longer than they do today. And better yet, in some cases, batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices.

Instead of the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on batteries that use air to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries.

You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet

In five years, IBM said, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet and even your tweets will collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of your environment. You’ll be able to contribute this data to fight global warming, save endangered species or track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world. In the next five years, a whole class of “citizen scientists” will emerge, using simple sensors that already exist to create massive data sets for research.

Your commute will be personalized

IBM said that in the next five years, advanced analytics technologies will provide personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and route information to travelers than is available today.

Computers will help energize your city

Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. With new technologies such as on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors could be recycled to provide hot water for an office or house.