But the rest of the world has also been up to the task, as year by year, our surroundings become a little more Star Trek, something for which video games are partially to thank.

Now is not yet the time to reveal that I own an Enterprise or once dated a green-skinned woman. I can admit, though, that with the help of lists and that one thing they didn’t seem to have in Star Trek – the publicly-accessible internet – that the world seems ever closer to embracing the technologies and trappings of Star Trek.

We can see the Star Trekification of our world around us, from the preponderance of hands-free in-ear communication devices that make Lieutenant Uhuras of us all, to the increasingly broad acceptance of grown men, in the workplace, wearing untucked shirts.

I haven’t played multi-layer chess and merely owning a Klingon dictionary neither makes me a Klingon speaker nor does it make Klingons real. I do not believe that slingshotting around the sun would get us back to the ’80s, though I’m not sure anyone has tried.

But I did learn from one list that MIT was already making a tractor beam and the University of Washington was making a Tricorder.

We don’t have holodecks yet, but who is closer to making us feel like we do than the makers of video games, specifically the architects of geographically variable spaces such as World of Warcraft and PlayStation Home?

We don’t have beaming yet either, though again I have to credit video game designers working on everything from No More Heroes 2 to Grand Theft Auto IV with at least having the foresight to model vaguely realistic worlds where a journey can be shortened with a quick teleport.

Star Trek had replicators that immediately generated whatever food you hungered for. Even before Star Trek was out, America had restaurants called Automats which faked the effect by wheeling requested food your way. Food on-demand? That’s still far off – at least until the delivery guy has access to a teleporter – but that notion of on-demand is otherwise omnipresent. We can just about bark at a computer, tap a few keys and get whatever music or movies we want.

Instantaneous satisfaction was the underlying theme of so much of Star Trek tech. Let’s get to that planet’s surface now. Let’s get the food we want now. Let’s skip the boring parts of driving, flying, sautéing and frying.

It wasn’t just the doing that needed to be done faster in Kirk’s future. It was also the knowing.

Knowledge was one of the three best Phaser settings in Star Trek, one of the most effective tools for making peace and keeping one’s starship intact. How did you attain knowledge? You used touch-screen computers, which we now use to for everything from money withdrawals from ATMs to manipulating interactive talking cookbooks on the Nintendo DS to surfing the web on an iPhone.

You could learn things in the Star Trek world by flicking open a Tricorder or, in The Next Generation, by tapping a pin on your chest. Someone would usually be within communication distance to tell you where you were, whether you could eat a nearby plant or how to not get killed by the Ferengi. Yeah, we got that. Mobile phones again, and the internet in the palm of our hand.

A week ago, Apple announced an iPad, one of the most Star Trek-looking devices yet manufactured in the real world. It did not diminish Star Trek that this most Star Trek-looking device was denigrated by people across the nation. It’s just a sign that Star Trek helped people dream for the ever more exotic thing, the magical futurism of a world with ray guns and advanced ways to talk at long distances. That’s a world we can see ourselves more easily living in and, because we already have in some ways, exceeding. An iPad? Looking as it did like a thing from Star Trek, a PADD, appeared to be something we should make better — and that some who own an iPhone believe we have already bettered.

The Star Trek vision of advanced high-tech living differs from the medieval-style futurism of Star Wars, which delights its fans with some of the most advanced knights, swords and ghosts ever imagined. Star Trek’s future has long seemed more attainable, more in the vector of where we were going if not specifically pointing to our exact future. A light sabre would be nice but doesn’t seem like something we’ll be getting. The stuff in Star Trek? It feels like it’s just a matter of time.

We’ve got emotional robots incoming that could make us our own Commander Data.

We’ve got computers that already embarrass what was on any Star Trek show and even better GPS and sliding doors, which another good list of Trek Inventions Made Real include as key inspirational breakthroughs.

We’ve got MRIs and laser-based surgery that can be completed without breaking the skin, a sense that we’re on the verge of McCoy-level medicine, even if we haven’t figured out, like McCoy how to get our doctors to work for free.

Star Trek has propelled some of our real technology. A 2004 Sam Francisco Chronicle article offered an example:

“When I designed the UI (user interface) for the Palm OS back in ‘93, my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels,” said Rob Haitani, product design architect for Palm-One Inc., the Milpitas firm that makes the popular handheld personal computers.

Step by step we get closer. Last year, for example, came reports that Warp Drive might be possible, once we figure out how to manipulate the 11th dimension, a feat that would apparently involve converting the equivalent of the mass of Jupiter into energy.

Back to something more imaginable, this week we have the launch of a Star Trek virtual world in the form of Star Trek Online. It’s not quite a holodeck, but it’s getting there. It’s not close to a starship bridge, though it enables the kind of instant long-distance communication that Kirk, Picard and the rest would find more familiar than rotary dial and landline phones.

A Star Trek video game capable of connecting hundreds of thousands of people by computer through a virtual cosmos brings us a shade closer to Star Trek status and lets us explore the balance of Trek technologies that made that fiction so engaging: The ability to transport, to communicate and to fight in the most advanced ways.

Throughout the week, Kotaku will look at all things Star Trek, including hands-on impressions of the new Star Trek Online video game and some broader looks at what the Star Trek phenomenon means to people who love video games. Look for the tag Star Trek Week and join the conversation.

We’ve seen recently what it looks like playing board games on a futuristic table. Today, though, we’re going to look at a board game being played on a futuristic wall.

Using advanced projector technology, this is how Settlers of Catan could look like in the year 2027. The hexagonal tiles are linked to projectors, and when you move them, the game is able to keep pace.

It’s a little rough, yeah, but imagine the possibilities once it’s ironed out. Panzer General. Advance Wars.

What Nerd Games Will Look Like In THE FUTURE [Gizmodo]

When R.U.S.E. was first announced with a trailer showing to players battling it out on a giant touch table, we were skeptical. Then they showcased it at E3 on Microsoft’s Surface, and we were impressed. Now that multitouch gameplay is closer to coming home, as Ubisoft and Microsoft team up to ensure your fingers can do the walking in Windows 7.

“Making images interactive is at the core of the video game industry, and over the last few years we have been striving to make this interactivity as intuitive and direct as possible. Today, thanks to Windows 7 and its full multitouch support, the barrier between the player and the image has been removed: they become one”, said John Parkes, EMEA marketing director. “As a strategy game relying on a clean and intuitive interface built around the zoom, R.U.S.E. was the perfect candidate for Ubisoft to demonstrate how multitouch improves and streamlines the way games are played”.

Of course you’ll still need a touch-ready monitor, but hey, in a couple of years they’ll just be handing those out to people in the street.

CNN walks us through a number of experimental programs being tested by Homeland Security’s Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.

The different systems check a person’s heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and, yes, fidgeting.

There are a number of different devices and technology involved in all of this detection, from thermal imaging to cameras used for eye tracking. But the most interesting to many of you will likely be the improvised fidgeting monitor.

Researchers took a Wii balance board — a device people stand on to interact with certain Nintendo Wii video games — and altered it to show how someone’s weight shifts. Studies are now under way to determine whether there is a level of fidgeting that would suggest the need for secondary screening.

Fortunately, the screening wouldn’t rely strictly on a person’s Wii Fit Age to determine if they’re a terrorist or not. Instead, screeners would look at all of the body signs before unjustly labelling a nervous flier a possible suicide bomber.

Will airports screen for body signals? Researchers hope so [CNN, thanks mjarantilla]

According to the Financial Times, Sony boss man Sir Howard Stringer will be announcing the company’s plans to invest in 3D LCD TVs at the IFA show in Berlin. And he’ll also be announcing Sony laptop computers, PlayStation 3 games and Blu-ray players that will be compatible with the technology.

With the PS3 already capable of playing 4D games, according to former PlayStation exec Ken Kutaragi, one has to wonder “Why the step back?”

Sony plans to put 3D televisions in homes by the end of next year [FT]

America’s Army, known for portraying a realistic take on today’s wars and United States military operations, is now bringing in new machinery that you’ll be able to play with… eventually. While you’ll only see the Fire Scout’s shadow on some of the games maps and hovering over grounded planes on others, the America’s Army team hopes to make it more interactive in future versions of the game, allowing you to “call upon the Fire Scout for intelligence and support.”

Mike Howell, business development manager for Army systems at Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector, is thrilled to see the Fire Scout’s inclusion in the game:

“Fire Scout’s introduction in one of the most popular computer games in the world is an exciting venture for us. We are happy to support the U.S. Army with this educational tool that provides some insight into what it is like to serve in the U.S. Army.”

If this addition of the Fire Scout is any indication, we may be able to look forward to more realistic gadgetry in future versions of the game.

Northrop Grumman’s Fire Scout Featured in Popular America’s Army 3 Computer Game [CNN Money]

But the HD World does. A custom F-16 fighter simulator, it runs off 120 dual core PCs with 120 $US400 graphics cards inside them, all chained together.

All that processing power gets you 10,000 “entities” on screen at once, realistic explosion and destruction effects and “20-40 visual acuity”, which is apparently as close to photo-realism as current projector technology can manage in a situation like this.

Oh, and it all comes wrapped in a 180-degree screen, along with a fully authentic replica of an F-16 cockpit.

If it didn’t cost millions and millions of dollars, I’d already have one on order.

Ultra-HD Military F-16 Flight Simulator Runs on 120 PC Graphic Cards [Gizmodo]

The “Future Soldier 2030″ being planned at the Army’s Soldier Systems centre in Natick, Mass., is the subject of much oohing-and-ahhhing in today’s New York Post. The basis of tomorrow’s fighter is a “soldier as a system,” philosophy that more or less regards soldiers as battlefield assets like tanks or planes.

Some of this “system’s” features include a HUD inside the helmet; voice commands that unlock a weapon or set it to less-than-lethal force, a powered exoskeleton to increase a soldier’s movement endurance and even “neural prosthetics” and “drugs that aid cognitive ability.” The Army allows that those enhancements might be “controversial now, but perhaps ubiquitous in 2030.”

I suppose it’s only a natural evolution, the Army’s designs somewhat trailing the epochal history of combat games; from flight sims to drone aircraft, FPSes to cyborg soldier.

Soldier of the Future [NY Post, and graphic; thanks randlsa]

Big, fancy LCD and plasma TVs are just wonderful for 360 & PS3 games (well, most games). But for older games – and by old, we mean old – they’re not so hot. And this is why.

This write-up by NFG (of the selectbutton forums) goes into astonishing detail on just why fixed-resolution displays aren’t up to the job of displaying retro games the way they were meant to be displayed.

See, old cathode ray tube sets (ie your old TV) could handle the resizing of pixels – which is what your old 8-bit & 16-bit games were made of – just fine. But newer TVs need to digitally “fudge” the picture, and the way they go about fudging it results in a distorted, often ugly image. As you can see above.

Sure, this won’t matter for 90% of you (who probably don’t even notice anything wrong), but if this kind of thing gets your goat up, the full run-down is below.

Aspect Ratios, Scanlines and Modern Displays [via GSW]

CCP has announced plans to phase out the current Classic Client for EVE Online in favour of a new system that could require users to upgrade for the first time in a decade.

The dual-client nature of EVE Online in its current form allows players with more modern PC technology to enjoy spectacular graphics, while an older Classic Client allows the game to be played on pretty much any system from 1998 onwards. It’s a great system for stubborn PC gamers who haven’t seen the inside of an electronics store in 10 years, but not so much for CCP, who have to basically create all graphics twice every time they add something to the game. Not anymore.

Starting with the launch of the next expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha, CCP will discontinue support for ShaderModel 1, replacing the Classic Client with the new Premium Lite Client, which uses downsampled textures from the Premium Client, allowing the company to cut their graphics work by half.

After that, CCP is looking at possibly discontinuing support of ShaderModel 2 with the Winter 2009 expansion.

So how many people will be affected by these changes?

We know this will affect some players out there. What we don’t know is exactly how many. We estimate that about 95% of all subscribers currently have hardware that is SM2 compatible. We further predict that in q4 this year over 97% of subscribers will have SM3 capable hardware. This means that an estimate of anywhere from 3%-5% of current subscribers would have to update their computers or graphics cards to be able to continue playing.

Seriously? 3-5% of EVE Online players are running on computer systems from the previous century? Maybe we should start a video card drive for these poor unfortunate souls.

i can totally run that on my Amiga [EVE Online via 1UP]