Michael Dwyer looks at the big tech ideas that are just around the corner.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, where's my flying car with the robot chauffeur? I'm sure I was promised something similar by 2008, back when I was a credulous kid in the futuristic 1970s.

Fortunately the face in the mirror is easily distracted these days. Thanks to wafer-thin TFT (thin film transistor) components, this nifty bathroom wall accessory now doubles as a television screen.

We may be a way off Isaac Asimov's I Robot, but we've finally come within spitting distance of George Orwell's 1984.

Such high-tech promises are a long time in the pipeline, it seems. For anyone reared on the assurances of comic books, sci-fiflicks and cutting-edge research programs such as Beyond 2000, the absence of a fully automated, solar-powered, pocket-sized everything is a recurring new year's disappointment.

So what futuristic dreams are really, truly ready to transform our daily sojourn from the bathroom mirror and back again? Here are a few developments that are either open for business or so close around the corner we can just about smell them coming.

Home entertainment

The "Mirror Image" LCD video unit (www.ad-notam.com) slips behind a mirror, is impervious to humidity, requires no ventilation and projects crystal clear video onto glass. Better yet, when it is switched off, it vanishes completely.

German tech wizards Ad Notam suggest we buy several of these reverse telescreens for our lounge and bedroom walls, and even to set into kitchen surfaces and furniture throughout the house so the 2008 season of Big Brother has nowhere to hide from our unflinching gaze."

The observer has the impression that the information and surface have merged to form a single unit," Ad Notam gushes. That's what we've come to demand from information and entertainment technologies: old systems vaporised and spirited into something as close as possible to thin air.

Information

The newspaper you're holding may be next. Despite recent advances in ultra-thin and flexible e-paper/ e-ink displays, the lingering threat of e-books making paper publications redundant has failed to come true. This is perhaps largely because devices such as the iRex, Sony's e-reader and Amazon's recently launched Kindle (www.

KindleBookReader.net) are all substantial metal/plastic planks that fail to disappear when you've finished reading.

This year, a pocket gizmo called the Readius (www.polymervision.

com) will finally begin to deliver on years of e-paper promises. Its refreshable reading screen is a paper-toned film that rolls out of its mobile-phone-sized case to roughly the width of a paperback.

The flagship consumer model due to be launched in Italy later this year has 4GB of memory and a remarkable 10-day battery life, which means you could digest a decent chunk of Agatha Christie's canon without getting off your beach towel on your next holiday.

With a few media partners on board, you'll soon be able to wirelessly download newspapers and magazines into your hand - the one left empty, presumably, by the book you no longer need on the tram.

The developer of Readius, Philips subsidiary Polymer Vision, aim to lighten our personal baggage further with the ambitious mission to place "a rollable display in every mobile device" on the planet. That's a lot of rollable displays.

As with the mirror telly, the ultimate dream they're selling is convergence to the point of virtual invisibility: a book, a newspaper, a phone, a camera, diary, browser, media player and GPS system tucked away in one single, easy-tolose gadget.

Wearables

Wearable technology is the next obvious step into the hands-free future, and several comic-book promises inched closer to reality at the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Previous wearable innovations have included micro LED-infused clothing: a T-shirt that lights up when you're in a wireless hotspot, for instance, and luminous bedclothes suitable for reading by.

This year there were Dick Tracy-style wristwatch phone/browser/cameras and a new range of exploding and vibrating gamer vests. One of these nifty electro-flak jackets even sends a puff of air into your ear when a virtual enemy mortar whistles past your head.

But perhaps most spectacular of all was a new generation of electronic eyewear that took giant strides towards realising the Geordi La Forge look in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Israeli company Lumus trumped the pack with its LOE designer spectacles (www.lumus-optical.com). The amazingly thin lenses connect wirelessly to your pocket browser/GPS/media player to display high-resolution, full-colour video and graphics right before your eyes.

They say the effect is like watching a 15-metre screen from a distance of 30 metres, so welcome to your own personal in-head cinema - although the convenient transparency of the lenses also promises "situational awareness" when it comes to negotiating tram stairs.

Lumus chief executive Ari Grobman reckons the spectacles give users "simultaneous connectivity to what they want to see and what they need to see, offering a new way of living, communicating, working and enjoying movies, TV and video games anywhere and any time".

Thus the distinction between "what we want to see" and "what we need to see" literally melts before our eyes. It seems the "new way of living" is the facility to consume mobile infotainment anywhere, anytime, with both hands free - and just one pocket ever-so-slightly bulging.

Power

There's also encouraging news on the crucial matter of powering this compact and convenient future.

Alternative means of harnessing energy are springing up everywhere, from the household pantry to solar receptor stations orbiting thousands of kilometres above the atmosphere.

Sony announced last August it had developed a cell that generates electricity from sugar in much the same way that biological organisms synthesise energy. The leading battery manufacturer claimed that four 50-milliwatt sugar batteries are enough to run an MP3 player.

Also in Las Vegas this month, Dr Martin Aagesen, from the University of Copenhagen, introduced the electronics industry to a new crystalline material he calls "nano flakes", a substance that can absorb and convert roughly twice as much of the light spectrum as existing solar cells.

But those developments are small change compared to the solar energy solution sparking a new space race on several continents. In November, The Guardian reported that commercial entities in the US, Europe and Japan are competing to launch the first solar receptor satellite tower, a giant energy collector that could, according to the Pentagon's National Space Security Office, satisfy 10% of the US's power needs by 2050 (www.tinyurl.com/2lq8gx).

"Space-based solar power offers a way to break the tyranny of these day-night, summer-winter and weather cycles and provide continuous and predictable power to any location on Earth," the Pentagon report says.

How? By zapping concentrated and uninterrupted sunshine 40,000 kilometres Earthwards in laser or microwave beams to be collected by land-based antenna stations.

The Space Islands Group of California expects to have a prototype in orbit in 2009 delivering a steady 10-25 megawatt beam to where it's needed most - most likely a small town in Europe struggling with the increased demand of several thousand wall-mounted LCD mirror TVs.

Transport

Which brings me back to that flying car I glimpsed through the prism of futuristic optimism some 35 years ago. The ultimate commuter dream, it appears, will indeed blast off in select suburbs around the same time that Space Islands' solar tower blasts off into space.

The PAL-V ONE (www.pal-v.com) is described by its Dutch manufacturers as "a hybrid of a car, a motorbike and a gyrocopter: a personal air and land vehicle". Their description of a day in the life of the high-flying modern businessperson reads like a scene from You Only Live Twice - although no licensing issues, airstrip clearance procedures or other security irritations slowed down 007.

Testing the PAL-V as a zippy urban runabout, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said he'd "never had so much fun in a car". As for the "gyro-mode", the PAL-V people are the soul of reassurance: "Like a helicopter, it has a Very Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (VSTOVL) capability making it possible to land practically anywhere."

And there's also a gallant attempt at comfort for aviaphobics: "The autogyro technology means that it can be steered and landed safely even if the engine fails as it descends vertically rather than nose-diving."

At a pre-road cost of only $85,000 it seems churlish to complain, but having to fly/drive yourself to work is obviously a step down from the land/air robot chauffeur Bruce Willis got to abuse in The Fifth Element. That's why a car race outside the Californian town of Victorville last November was of particular interest to those of us looking to sail into the future with zero hands-on responsibility.

The Urban Challenge, sponsored by the US Department of Defence's research agency DARPA, has become an annual competition for driverless vehicles negotiating a simulated urban obstacle course (www.arpa.mil/grandchallenge). In just three years, dozens of highly competitive teams of developers have proved the robot-driven car a reality via laser scanners, infra-red detectors, GPS systems, stereoscopic viewers and hard-drives loaded with the Californian highway code, among terabytes of other clues to a failsafe journey.

Speed wasn't necessarily in strong evidence in November, but that was kind of the point as commentators enthused over the safety implications of the demonstration. Technology forecaster Paul Saffo was even moved to envisage a future in which human beings were no longer allowed to drive vehicles.

"The problem is that everything that makes us human also conspires to make us horrible drivers. We are emotional, easily distracted and too often just downright stupid," he observed. "In contrast, robots can be programmed with a cool, Spock-like logic and given sensory powers that would make even Superman swoon."

Except, of course, that none of the DARPA competitors can leap tall buildings in a single bound yet. The flying car with the robot chauffeur looks like a job for PAL-V TWO.