Ten years ago this month, Google's first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018? Nature asked some researchers and business people to speculate — or lay out their wares. Their responses are wide ranging, but one common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases.

Bill Buxton

Principal researcher, Microsoft,Toronto, Canada

ELECTRONIC PAPER

I subscribe to Melvin Kranzberg's second law of technology: invention is the mother of necessity. Although technologies are created to fulfil needs, each also creates them; the next generation of technologies will deliver the promises of what we already have.

The history of communication technologies over the past century tells me that anything that's going to impact on the next ten years is going to be ten years old already. (The components that made Google possible ten years ago were already there ten years earlier, with the creation of the web.) One prime candidate is electronic paper, displays that are as easy to view in ambient light conditions as paper and that consume hardly any power. It started with E Ink a decade ago; now we are seeing it in devices such as Amazon's Kindle, which I would say has not yet matured but has certainly reached late adolescence. Kindle and other readers are really like the Ford Model T in terms of what will be available in five years.

I think with this technology will come a dramatic change in our attitude towards paper. Our attachment to paper and books is wonderful, charming and quite understandable. I can't stand reading stuff on my computer. But this technology will make us question whether we can really afford the 500,000 trees that are consumed by publishing and newsprint in North America each week.

N. Spencer

Vincent Hayward

Professor of engineering, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France

HAPTICS

Ten years ago, if you mentioned the word 'haptics' most people would think you were talking about some form of liver disease. Interfaces that provide tactile feedback have been in an innovator-driven 'push' mode; they have been technologically challenging, expensive and restricted to niches. Now there is a public pull, thanks to the spread of touch-screen devices. The objective is to make the interface more intuitive and less reliant on vision — something you can use without looking at it. Haptics makes that possible.

Two or three mobile-phone manufacturers have products on the market with haptic features, and some car companies are doing the same. The feedback acts like an acknowledgement, so you can feel when an onscreen button has been pressed. But also there is something more basic. As animals we operate on the basis of anticipation. Visual interfaces reduce our ability to anticipate because we are touching something that is not there; there is no anticipated sensation and the sensory consequences to our movements are unsatisfactory. Haptic feedback gives us what our minds anticipate; it completes the control loop.

Right now haptic displays are mostly capable of creating only single isolated sensations of contact, or of toggling through menus. But texture, shape and 'compliance' will become more refined and affordable. A dry, flat screen will be able to simulate the feel of fur or wetness.

Ian Pearson

Futurizon consultancy, Ipswich, UK

VIDEO VISORS

We're crying out for technology that will allow us to combine what we can do on the Internet with what we do in the physical world. That's why the Nintendo Wii has been so successful. One technology that springs to mind is the video visor, which gives you a computer image superimposed over the world around you.

These have been around for a few years, but they currently have pretty low resolution. The resolution will improve and the cost will come down; at the same time demand will grow because the visors can provide information to people on the move. People have their iPhones and Blackberries with lots of data and functions but they want bigger displays. Wearing visors may seem odd at first, but then people used to stand out when mobile phones and Bluetooth headsets first came out. Now everyone uses them.

When you start to combine visor graphics with more accurate global-positioning data, as will be provided by the European Galileo satellites, you can overlay online information onto the world around you. So as you're walking down a busy city street you will be able to see reviews of shops and restaurants, adverts for services, other people who have similar interests to you, or whatever.

When you are wearing a visor your surroundings can have a completely different appearance: a burger restaurant can look like a giant burger without flouting planning laws. You could be seen as your Second Life virtual avatar. Or Johnny Depp, or Claudia Schiffer. You get the best of both worlds.

Sam Schillace

Google, Mountain View, California

BETTER BROWSERS

Prior to Google, everyone said search was done. But the point was that search could have been a lot better. The same is true of browsers today.

On the web, simplicity matters more than completeness — the platform needs to be simple, ubiquitous and good enough. The browser is that platform. It means any screen you look at can be a window into your own personal, private cloud of information. I use three different computers every day but don't worry which of them a particular file, picture or e-mail is on, because they are online and my browser can find them.

The current generation of browsers can already run some pretty sophisticated applications without having to install software, and it's starting to extend to mobile devices too. The next generation of browsers, and the web applications that run on them, will make communication and collaboration even more transparent and let me focus on what I really want to do — connect with the person at the other end and get work done together. It will turn the web into a superconductor for interactions with other people and change the way we work pretty radically.

Interviews by Duncan Graham-Rowe