Sci-Fi Technologies That Are No Longer Just Fiction

Let me save you eight clicks:

Laser guns, moving 3d holograms, levitation, hoverboards, mind reading machines, teleportation, invisibility cloaks, commercial jetpacks.

Most of these are kinda-sorta technologies that don't really do what you expect, anyway.

Those are all inaccessible to normal people. How about: Video Phones (Facetime, Skype) Minority Report style interaction (Kinect) Padd from Star Trek (iPad) What else?

Some of these seem like cheats -- either a science demonstration with a ton of PR spin or worse. The hoverboard, for example, is a piece of art that will only "hover" over its pedestal and won't support any weight. I saw a similar DIY project in either Electronics Illustrated or Popular Electronics 40-some years ago where a tin globe would levitate in a magnetic field. (If the globe dipped, it obscured a light beam aimed at a cadmium sulfide photocell which increased power to the electromagnet.)

As for the "teleportation", demonstrations of quantum effects have been around for quite a while. I remember having my mind blown back in the 1960s when I read up on how the tunnel diode <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode>; was a practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling.

The jetpack entry made me smile. Last year there was an episode of NCIS whose plot revolved around jetpack technology. McGee, the computer geek member of the team, was so taken with the technology that he had created his own video presentation of jetpack history and would inflict it upon his team mates in a manner similar to pictures taken on his vacation.