Mercurial

I have been thinking about the latest Harry Potter movie, and that famous phrase from Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

So, Harry Potter, my dear, your magic is getting to be not so advanced. Just a little bit more sophisticated that what exists today, but really, advanced? Not quite.

Let's take for example, the Invisibility Cloak. If you do a google on that, you will soon come to find the active optical camouflage experiment from a Japanese researcher. What Harry sports is just a sophisticated version of it.

Next, the moving pictures, which are actually two parts: the artificial intelligence that propels that character within its programmed constraints, and the ink dot technology that allows for a foldable flat screen full of changing images.

The same goes for the map of Hogwarts, coupled with some voice recognition. You activate it with a voice command, how quaint, and then see every person that is in the place. Which is easy, really, just a little bit of RFID technology, say a chip embedded on the person skin, and a detector embedded on the "parchment". Same technology we already have, marginally better.

What about the hippogriff, the nice winged horse with eagle claws and head? Genetically modified organism. Weird, and highly implausible - there are practical reasons about why we don't want flying manure - but, if you could get a sufficiently strong frame for the animal, you might get one of those. Or a flying robot, whatever you want.

The brooms. Mm. That one is hard. Perhaps some sort of reaction machine, coupled with amazing Segway style gyroscopes and navigators. Tough, though, because of the incredible energy requirements.

The magic wands are glorified PDAs without a screen, that can fire projectiles, and also seem to be closely coded to their owner - DNA testing, possibly. They have really lousy voice recognition, though.

Dementors! Now we have a nice one there. Flying terrifying things, that suck life out of you. Politicians, may be? The flying we can get easily (this ones are big), and the sucking thing could just be some sort of radiation and EMP pulse directed at your brain.

We can get pretty much anything we want with some off the shelf applications, a little bit of improvement on existing technology, and a promise from theoretical research, such as quantum dots.

Remember, in the year 2000, we will have flying cars.