As you may know, the rate at which computer processor speed is increasing is increasing. Also, computers are getting smaller and less intrusive in the creative process (think tablet pcs, touch screens, etc.). Technologies like Ocular Rift are taking the 3d virtual space off the screen and wrapping it around us. Overall, as technology improves it becomes more transparent and less noticeable.
With processing power increasing exponentially, the notion of photorealistic, realtime rendering seems only years away. Will Blender eventually be a virtual 3d “Matrix”-like space that instead of just looking at on a screen, we will be immersed in?
Once this happens, what will our editing tools look like? will they still be physical buttons we have to press that float in mid-air around you as you work? or will they be invisible, controlled by signals coming from our brains?
Once our editing tools are seamlessly connected to our minds, our capacity for what we can create seems infinite. We will rapidly be able to create vast, incredibly detailed creations, just by imagining it.
What do you think the future of Blender will be like?
We will just be used as batteries by the machines that run the world.
Or we will have to eat each other for food.
Or we will be forced to battle to the death for the pleasure of our alien leaders.
But Blender will look and operate much the same way as it does today.
I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
The speed has crashed into relativistic limits[1] and has flatted out to 3/3.5 GHz [2] (see this page from 2007, five years ago).
Nowadays increase in performance can come only thru increased parallelism, which means more hardware which means more energy consumption. There are improvements in efficiency but they cannot go forever so sooner or later we will slam into the limits of what you can practically do without asking for a dedicated power substation and then the run will be over, full stop.
In addition, the number of tasks requiring an ever increasing amount of power dwindles and in many cases there is no rational need for more processing capability. The current PC sale crysis is due to the fact that late 00’s machines have more than enough computing power for ANY task that mundane users do (your cell phone is more than enough to post pointless tweets, you dont need ExaFlops for that purpose).
I predict that the computing power that common people will practically be able to get is going to top within a couple of decades at most.
P.S.: somewhere, uncle Albert (Einstein) is chuckling :evilgrin:.
[1] light travels ~30 cm/ns in vacuum so at 3 GHz light travels 10 cm per clock cycle. Remember that you have to go round trip and that in materials eletromagnetic waves travel roughly 50% of the vacuum speed; on your main board even the RAM chips are more than 1 clock cycle away from your CPU.
[2] IBM did release a 6GHz processor but the line has been discontinued and the fastest beast around is a ~5.4GHz chip. Intel topped 4GHz and now is in the 3-3.4 Ghz range.
True, and not true. New interface peripherals could become popular and might outshine the old mouse & keyboard one day. And in that case the entire blender experience would change.
What am I saying… maybe? Definitly!
However it’ll take some time before we get there.
Ofcourse you’d need to define what you’d call a keyboard.
A touchscreen keyboard vs a regular peripheral keyboard:
They both work as a keyboard ( press area to input character), however 1 takes up less space ( but doesn’t feel as good as it’s counterpart).
Nowadays increase in performance can come only thru increased parallelism, which means more hardware which means more energy consumption. There are improvements in efficiency but they cannot go forever so sooner or later we will slam into the limits of what you can practically do without asking for a dedicated power substation and then the run will be over, full stop.
Who is to say that the CPUs of the future will even remotely resemble the ones we have today? A thousand years of innovation could bring us new materials to make CPUs that can perform hundreds of times faster while consuming minute levels of energy…
yeah! you dont need to work, just imagine!
yes, this is the future of the amateur blender users… in imagine
I detect facetiousness…
you don’t think we will be able to control computers with our brains some day? It seems like the logical limit of human/machine interaction to me…even for the professional blender users
quantium computing should be about ten years away. add atleast another ten before it becomes affordable for the comman man. and even then it largely wont matter for blender when it is achieved. blender is just a tool, it will always only be as good as the person useing it. you could give me leanardos brushes and paints, i’m not going to be able to give you back the next mona lisa you could give me brushes and paint superior to what he had access to and i’m still not going to paint the next mona lisa. tools are only as good as the artist useing them.
But graphene transistors may still be 10-20 years away as far as becoming a common sight in PC chips, companies and universities are still trying to find out how to manufacture these at high rates which will be required if they are to promise supercomputing power on the cheap.
There’s also been research in other areas like optical-based architectures (replacing electrons with light), diamond wafers (allowing speeds that would otherwise melt silicone), dna-based computing, atom-sized transistors ect…
