Intel explains how it looks to the future

Intel is already planning for the devices of 2015, with the chip giant telling TechRadar that it keeps its concepts of the future grounded in immutable habits of everyday life.

Intel's Wendy March, a people and practices expert who works in the future technoogies research branch of Intel labs, explained that silison development is still a slow process, which means that Intel has to look ahead.

"We're looking at least five years ahead, but often in the five to 10 year span," she said.

"That starts to be a little strange because what's really going to happen in five years, even beyond three years, is quite hard to predict.

"But the development of silicon is a slow process we do plan a long way out for that."

The lunch of 2015

Intel Labs is already thinking about the world of 2015, but the company is keen to ground its research in the knowledge that people's everyday lives will not change that dramatically.

"Quite recently we were working with planners and architects for our architecture for 2014 and 2015 and thinking 'what will everyday life be like?'" added March.

"I think it's a very interesting balance that we bring from our ethnographic process in grounding future concepts in real life environments.

"Even in five years we're likely to still be having lunch so if you think about what your day is going to look like there are still certain things that you will be doing that you will want to do, but the way you are going to be doing them and the devices that are going to support you will be different, and that's what we think about."

Social trends

March explains that planning for future devices and services is more about keeping an eye on social trends, rather than trying to back a particular technology horse.

"Most of [tech development] is evolutionary," said March. "You can see certain trends happening, but there are shifts happening; there are technologies that just appear out of nowhere that you can't predict.

"So Facebook comes up and you are like 'oh, well who'd have known?'

"We're not crystal ball gazers; we can't say in five years this is definitively going to happen, but we can see the way that tech starts to unfold and the way in which some social trends are happenings."