What the future looks like inside the lab that brought us Siri, the mouse, and the Internet itself

Editor’s note: Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace, is working on a book with Shel Israel about the how sensors, wearable computers, and other technologies will change our future, titled “Age of Context.” That got them invited to visit SRI International, Silicon Valley’s most important lab. This is where tons of companies and technologies have been born, from Siri to Nuance to the Internet itself.

What is the future going to look like? One way is to get a tour of the best research lab in the world. Out of these buildings have come the Internet (it was one of the first two nodes on the Internet), the Mouse, Nuance, HDTV, and Apple’s Siri.

In other words, what they are working on here for mostly military or large companies will affect our future as they commercialize the technology developed here. The work at SRI isn’t about just technology, either, they have extensive research going on in life sciences and in one of the videos of this tour you see a new cancer detection system.

Anyway, let’s dive into the videos and see what we can learn:

This team found a way to identify cancer cells in a drop of blood. Could this technique have saved Steve Jobs’ life? It’s very possible. Hear more about this new discovery in the video, or visit the website to learn more about what SRI is doing.

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How good can something like Google Glass become? Here is part of our tour of SRI, the famous Silicon Valley research lab that brought us the Internet, mouse, Nuance, HDTV, Siri, robotic surgeries, and much more. In this video you’ll see binoculars that can tag, track, buildings and people as well as play war games where we see virtual people on the ground, along with vehicles. Really amazing. Read more about it on the SRI website.

Here you see SRI is inventing a new way to work, called “Bright.” It watches you at every step of the way. Helps you work by watching how you work. Learn more on the work being done at SRI.

Here we see the latest in face detection and what it might be used for (better speaker training, for instance).

Here you see how CubeSat’s, or low-cost satellites, which are small and can fit into ballast spaces on rockets, are changing the types of science that can be done from space.