Eventually, Mr. Yuen envisions devices built with Gemstar's electronic book reading patents to blossom into personal organizers, wireless pagers and phones and generalized portable entertainment devices for text, video and sound.
(To store all the images, and everything else, Bush envisioned a device called the "memex," short for memory extender).
The resulting "artificial leaf" was inexpensive to produce, and the researchers envisioned the device's being used in poor countries that do not have easy access to large amounts of energy.
Already, gazing through his telescope at night, he envisions the device exploring the solar system.
Such research could eventually lead to a "cure" for seizures, Dr. Iasemidis said, adding, "We envision a device that would automatically release a very low dose of an anti-epilepsy drug or an electrical signal that would block the seizure".
Adam Clayton Powell III, the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California, envisions a device embedded in your eyeglass frame that connects to the Net, accesses and plays video and audio and makes phone calls.
He envisions a device called the Memex, from "memory" and "index"; he talks about the compression of knowledge, how all of Encyclopedia Britannica can be put in the Memex, and we would use what we would now call metadata and hyperlinks to retrieve different bits of information.
We envision a device, where a stable and insulating membrane would be attached to an electronic read-out unit and embedded proteins would serve as actual sensing units.
The device was created by Paul Lieberstein, who originally envisioned that the device only had the rights to the 1993 film Coneheads.
As its design reflects, the mobile phone -- with a keypad like a conventional phone -- was not initially envisioned as a device for text messaging, said James E. Katz, director for the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University.
