18 Technologies Straight Out of Sci-Fi That Became Real

‘Automatic doors’
18 Technologies Straight Out of Sci-Fi That Became Real

It can be easy to forget sometimes that we live in the future. Sure, we may not have flying cars or replicators — yet — but an average day in your life would be beyond the wildest dreams of someone living 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. They were still struggling to convert their CD collections to MP3 and learn T9 texting. Who could have possibly imagined… well… all this?

It turns out, a lot of people could, and they did. The science-fiction canon is full of books, movies, and TV shows featuring devices and technologies that seemed futuristic at the time but now are mostly just annoying to keep charged. That's why u/hiatusart asked r/AskReddit, “What used to be a science fiction but [is] now a real thing?”

LetterOfPower 9y ago Time travel Edit: Oops, I don't think I was supposed to say that yet.
Jampine . 9y ago Automatic doors
jdman929 . 9 9y ago Virtual Reality headsets
 . 9 9y ago 3D printing.
QwertymanJim . 9y ago Video calls
Satcat1005 . 9y ago . Edited 9y ago The ability to see things far away live via a screen.
. 9y ago Ear Buds were written about by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.
ThatGuyNamedRob . 9y ago Rockets landing safely and upright after being launched into space.
intensely_human . 9y ago Walking into a room and handing someone a tablet to show them what you've been working on.
Tweaney . 9y ago My Mum was watching i-Robot yesterday and I noticed he pays for his drinks by swiping a card. That's pretty much Contactless Cards now?
elcarath . 9y ago Universal translators are getting better every year, although we're definitely not at the level of the Babel fish yet.
Cellar Door 9y ago Douglas Adams inventing an ebook: Не also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice.
GoldenJoel 9y ago You know what I've noticed? E-Cigs are the most cyberpunk think ever invented, but even in sci-fi most characters still smoked real cigarettes. In the Fifth Element, Bruce Willis was smoking weird cigs, but they were still tobacco rolled in paper.
Lt_Rooney 9y ago Modern heart monitors and similar devices at hospitals were largely inspired by the biobeds in Star Trek. The idea that Dr. McCoy could simply look up at a screen just over the patient's bed to get a look at his vital signs was sci-fi, until someone decided it was a really good idea and surprisingly easy to implement.
Edymnion e 9y ago When Star Trek: The Next Generation first showed Worf ordering the computer to play him a Klingon opera, neither voice recognition nor computers with enough hard drive capacity to even store a full high fidelity song like that were things. Now I can tell my phone to do the exact same thing.
 . 9y ago I work with a hand-held XRF gun. You point it at a material and it gives you an elemental breakdown of its composition, then cross-references it with a library of known substances to identify the material. The technology is old, but it's only recently that you could get it in a hand-held form. I refer to it as the tricorder.
Mirrorboy17 . 9 9y ago Things like self-service scanners in shops or automation in general. One of the biggest themes in older sci-fi films was technology that did things for you, and ordered things when you were low. We have a fair bit of that now, people even take it for granted
cj_would_lovethis . 9y ago . Edited 9y ago All citizens carry a card that allows them to spend credit from a central bank on goods and services without paper money changing hands. -Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, 1888

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