Officials at the British Telecom (BT) research laboratory at Martlesham in the UK said that in addition to these devices, other technological advances in the future include human standard voice synthesis, portable translation devices for conversations, 3-D video conferencing and thought recognition for everyday inputting.

According to BT futurologist Ian, technological advances would strongly affect the working environment in the office of the future. "People will increasingly be employed on short-term contracts with virtual companies or participate in virtual cooperatives," he said.

For many people there may not be any permanent office, instead they will work from home or in telework centres which will house the best of technology, with holodeck style meeting rooms and hot desks,predicted Pearson. He added that by 2010, computers will be able to understand all human languages, making it very easy for computers to interface with people.Charting the course computer versus human performance, Pearson said that man-machine equivalence would be achieved by 2015, after which computers would rapidly cross the human brain in terms of computing power. "Computers will then be able to produce perfect music as a result, even increasingly taking over the job of wealth creation," he added.

"We can expect a great deal of assistance from computers and robots in our future work, making us more productive," he added. Computers will also understand gestures and body language, and adding talking head technology and synthetic personalities will make the user interface cuddly and pleasant to use and even recognise when the user is feeling stressed, or depressed and may alter its characteristics accordingly, he added.

All this seems possible, largely due to the fact that British Telecom spends as muchas £270 million each year on research and development in areas like network and network intelligence, mobility solutions, systems and software engineering, multimedia and interactive services, speech processing & applications, information trading & internet, teleconferencing and telepresence.

According to John Ames, network integration manager at BT Labs, the company's success was driven by harnessing the talents of some of the most brilliant and creative minds in the world. BT is one of the largest graduate recruiters in the UK, with experts in optical fibres, software agents, speech platforms, radio and video.

Pearson conjured up images of a scenario in which future screen technology allows thin displays to lie flat on desktops just as paper does today. He predicted that today's desk will be replaced by a large immpressive screen that will be full of virtual equipment.

Part of the display may act as a scanner and some or all of it will be touch sensitive. Virtual equipment in virtual environments willbe the standard interface, with videoconferencing and internet browsing integrated into a a pleasant virtual world personalised for the user.