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In future supermarkets, consumers will shop without having to pay cash or sign credit-card receipts. An infrared or microwave ``interrogator'' could register each consumer as soon as he or she enters a store and be ready with account information when the time comes to pay. Supermarket futurist Gary Lind, a partner at Arnold Ward Studios/Lind Design in Hempstead, New York, envisions ``intelligent carts'' that will use optical lasers to scan bar codes automatically as items are moved in or out of a shopping cart, thus enabling customers to keep a running tab. These carts might even be programmed to organize the customer's shopping expedition through the store, by scanning a handwritten list and sorting out the fastest route through the aisles.
The process of Home Shopping, now a three-part cable-TV, 800-number and credit-card transaction, is poised to move to a higher level of interactivity. Next: interactive-TV programs and in-store kiosks known as ``electronic mirrors'' with holographic images that enable buyers to see what clothes look like on them without actually trying anything on. Computer catalogs of homes will someday include virtual-reality ``tours'' of each room in a house.
Not all of this will take commercial root. The marketplace, for example, will weed out even technically feasible devices if they prove too complicated for the average consumer to use. For the next decade at least, the key to the consumer's heart will be less in the technology itself than in the masking of technology to make it more user-friendly.
The exceptions will be those applications that save lives or promote public welfare. Exotic technologies, like virtual reality, can lower the overall cost of complex medical procedures. A VR-like ``data fusion system'' developed by Medical Media Systems in Hanover, New Hampshire, enables doctors to re-create remote organs, like the liver, and ``watch'' the endoscopic removal of a tumor. Tests on animals are under way now; human trials begin in July. Even at $80,000, the system is cost efficient.
Far simpler combinations of technologies could be used to create highly efficient urban-transportation systems. Buses, subways and private cars would be superfluous under a plan proffered by Nobel laureate Arno Penzias at Bell Laboratories. In his vision, a fleet of passenger vans, each equipped with a global-positioning system and cellular phone (plus whatever amenities its operator chose to offer) -- all linked by computer to a central dispatching program, would provide total customized coverage of every street and every neighborhood in town, 24 hours a day.
Through the computer and the cell phones, drivers would receive destination instructions; using GPS, dispatchers would keep tabs on the real-time progress of each vehicle. Passengers would call up the service, be met with minimum delay, transfer only if necessary and relax while professional drivers took them to their desired destination -- say, that quaint little farmers' market on the far side of town, where the vegetables are always fresh but they don't take credit cards. In that case, you'd better hope there's an ATM around.