Once upon a time, not so long ago, the idea that you might store your entire music collection on a single hand-held device would have been greeted with disbelief. Ditto backing up all your essential computer files using a memory stick key ring, or storing thousands of high-resolution holiday snaps in one pocket-sized camera.

What a difference a decade makes. The impossible has become possible thanks to the lightning rise of a memory technology with the snazzy name of "flash".

So where is the technology that can store our high-definition home cinema collection on a single chip? Or every book we would ever want to read or refer to? Flash can't do that. In labs across the world, though, an impressive array of technologies is lining up that could make such dreams achievable.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

The iPhone’s familiar touch screen display uses capacitive sensing, where the proximity of a finger disrupts the electrical connection between sensors in the screen. A competing approach, which uses embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers, is just now coming to market. But researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have already figured out how to use such sensors to turn displays into giant lensless cameras. On Dec. 19 at Siggraph Asia — a recent spinoff of Siggraph, the premier graphics research conference — the MIT team is presenting the first application of its work, a display that lets users manipulate on-screen images using hand gestures.

A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines.

"Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

"The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares.

Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes.

How do you find an image or video on the Internet or YouTube without a text description? Along with his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, Dutch researcher Theo Gevers has developed software that can find objects and concepts automatically in images and video clips.

The team from the University of Amsterdam took part in three major international competitions, testing and comparing computer search engines. These competitions looked into which search methods could best detect concepts in images and video clips without text descriptions. Concepts include objects such as persons, animals, vehicles and events such as explosions, demonstrations, fire, violence etc. The team scooped first prize in all three of these competitions (with over 60 teams from both industry and academia), winning ImageCLEF, PASCAL VOC and TRECVid. The world-leading image and video search system uses advanced automatic image understanding, rapid indexing and intelligent classification techniques. Supercomputers are used to address the enormous volumes of data.

How do you look for an action scene or a pretty cat? At the moment, we use text for this. For instance, you can type in the word "cat" and a search engine will start to look for images linked to the word "cat." But if the image or film clip is not described by text, then searching against text becomes impossible. The team from University of Amsterdam has changed this by using an automatic computerised search for objects within the image itself, rather than for the text.