Worst Vaporware and High-Tech Hoaxes

Step into the realm of make-believe as we run down these tech breakthroughs that never were.

As much as late-night infomercial fodder such as the venerable vegetable slice-n-dicer and the towel-cum-chamois hybrid infuriatingly dubbed the ShamWow have become the subject of intense ridicule, these gadgets have at least one thing going for them – they exist. If nothing else, we can rest easy knowing that someone, somewhere was able to dream up an idea, turn that idea into a product that does what it’s supposed to do, and bring that product to market.

Yet for every viable high-tech gizmo or service that sees the light of day, there are kazillions more never destined to get beyond the concept phase, or widespread rollout. Most die a painless death in the lab, where they are not subject to scrutiny or painstaking public analysis. A precious few flawed and wildly malfunctioning items somehow escape into the real world, their flaws and malfunctions exposed for all to see. And then there are those that are announced, and even demonstrated, but for some reason or another don’t ever emerge from the developmental womb. And yes, Virginia, there are even a few that exist only as ideas, though we, the innocent public, are often led to believe otherwise.

This then is the story of some of the more notable of those products. All are culled from the technology sector because we are, after all, a tech publication. And all were, for one reason or another, effectively DOA – much to millions’ delight and/or chagrin.

Action Gamemaster

The story and the legacy of Active Enterprises is a veritable cornucopia of ugliness. Headquartered in the Bahamas, but somehow based in Florida, Active began its gaming industry reign of terror in 1991 with the release of something dubbed Action 52, a collection of no less than fifty-two stunningly inferior titles – in a single cartridge – for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Ripped to shreds by the press and consumers alike for being virtually unplayable, Action 52 was nevertheless followed by a substantial marketing campaign that spoke of comic books, toys, future games, a TV cartoon series, and the pièce de résistanc – the Action Gamemaster. A portable gaming system that would not only play Active’s games, but also games designed for the NES, Genesis, Super NES, and the PC, the Gamemaster would also feature a TV tuner, AC and car adapters, a 3.2-inch LCD screen, and a hefty $500 price tag. Ultimately, none of Active’s plans materialized, and the company quietly vaporized not long after the 1994 Consumer and Electronics Show.

Betavoltaic 30-year Laptop Battery

Imagine if your laptop battery saw you through though an entire evening of online gaming, a week-long road trip, and then another week of lectures. Imagine if it remained fresh not only ’til the end of the month, but ’til the end of the year. And then imagine if it kept on chugging blissfully along, never needing a recharge, until you were old and grey. That was the promise of the betavoltaic laptop battery, a too-good-to-be-true device whose rumored existence and thirty-year lifespan fueled a ton of speculation and just as much cynicism back in 2007.

First discussed in the Internet publication Next Energy News, the betavoltaic laptop battery was based on theoretically sound betavoltaic fundamentals involving the decay of radioactive materials. That the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory was purportedly involved only amped up the hype. One problem: The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory website made no mention of it, and still doesn’t. Another problem: Experts weighed in from all over, poking monstrous holes in the concept. Today, the thirty-year laptop battery remains a dream. Or a hoax.

CherryOS

CherryOS popped onto the scene in 2004 as a Mac emulator that would purportedly allow PC users to run the Mac OS X operating system. It was said to be very fast and very efficient, and even the concept itself was ridiculously appealing because back then, Apple’s operating system kicked Windows around the block.

The idea and the product gained a ton of credibility when the developer, a company based in Hawaii by the name of Maui X-Stream, managed to get coverage in Macworld. The really cool news was threefold: CherryOS apparently ran at 80% of the performance of the host CPU (in other words, stinkin’ fast), it recognized and offered access to all hardware resources, and it would cost just $50.

At the height of the hoopla, the Maui X-Stream website received in excess of 300,000 hits a day. Unfortunately, interested parties that went to the site to purchase and download the product found they could do neither. Moreover, accusations began that CherryOS was in reality a rip-off of several open source codes (such as PearPC, a working but infinitely slower emulator), all wrapped up in new clothing. A variety of legal threats would ensue, and in the end, CherryOS slinked off to never-never land.

Duke Nukem Forever

In racing parlance, DNF stands for Did Not Finish. In gaming parlance, it stands for…well, pretty much the same thing. Duke Nukem Forever, the game that Does Not Finish, has been in development since 1997. That’s twelve long years. Why? According to George Broussard, one of the key cogs in the Duke world, "There’s of course been the hookers and the cocaine, there’s been a lot of mistakes, and a lot of lessons we had to learn, and most of all there’s been a lot of World of Warcraft." Broussard may have been joking, but dude, for the sake of all who yearn for another dose of Nukem (one of the first-person shooter genre’s most acclaimed, and humorous, franchises), get thy act together!

Currently, the official Duke Nukem Forever website (www.3drealms.com/duke4/) sports the following ominous words: "The release date of this game is ‘When it’s done’. Anything else, and we mean anything else is someone’s speculation. There is no date. We don’t know any date." Translation: Approach with caution.

(e)film

There was a time, not so long ago, when digital cameras were convenient, but woefully inadequate facsimiles of their old school analog "film" counterparts. Really, why would anyone truly serious about photography ditch their high-dollar analog SLR in favor of a digicam incapable of the same quality of lenses, mechanics, and photos?

But in 1998, the California-based company Imagek announced a product that, at the time, seemed to bridge the gap between the old and the new. Dubbed (e)film, Imagek’s concoction was essentially a cartridge that fit inside an analog camera just like a traditional roll of film, allowing users to record images digitally. But all was not unicorns and rainbows. The system stored just twenty-four images at a time, and was compatible with a mere seven specific camera models. Furthermore, it featured a comparatively tiny 1.3 megapixel CMOS sensor, thus reducing captured images to just 35-percent of the camera’s full frame.

But the worst was yet to come. Imagek (which had now become Silicon Film) missed several target release dates, then watched from the sidelines as digicams became progressively more sophisticated. Soon, the need for gap-bridging film camera peripherals all but vanished. Silicon Film took one more kick at the can a few years later, then itself vanished.

iLoo

Is an April Fool’s Day prank really an April Fool’s Day prank when that prank doesn’t transpire until a month after April Fool’s Day? Of course it isn’t, yet that’s precisely how Microsoft officials were trying to explain away the craptastic notion of something called the iLoo in May of 2003. The iLoo, you see, was purportedly an Internet-enabled, plasma- and keyboard-equipped outhouse apparently being designed specifically for the 2003 summer music festival season in Great Britain. iLoo "customers" would enter and utilize the iLoo as they would any typical outhouse, but with one exception: They could surf the web and check email while they went about their business. Ah…the very definition of multitasking.

Whether the iLoo was a joke between Microsoft employees, an actual concept that never should have seen the light of day, or a radical marketing gimmick that emerged, like many Microsoft products, a bit later than it should have, will likely remain a mystery. Yet the very idea of handling a wireless keyboard that’s previously been in the somewhat soiled hands of several hundred drunken, toilet-using concert-goers gives new meaning to the term "fear factor." And for that disturbing mental image alone, the iLoo remains one of the more bizarre hoaxes of the technology age.

Phantom Game System

The Phantom game system seemed so promising, so sensible, so downright perfect when announced in 2002. A unit that was configured to look and operate like a typical gaming console, but didn’t play console games. Instead, it played PC games. Any PC game, on any TV set. But that wasn’t all – Phantom developer Infinium Labs was apparently also ready to build a network where users could download complete games for rental or purchase. Talk about your forward-thinking concepts.

Indeed, it was so forward-thinking that Infinium was able to arrange investor involvement to the tune of seventy million dollars. The system was even demoed – albeit somewhat suspiciously – at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo. But that’s where it all ended. During the next two years, the company missed deadline after deadline and was continuously rocked by accusations of financial misdoings. By 2006, the SEC had joined in the act, accusing Infinium of being little more than a pump and dump.

Infinium soon gave way to Phantom Entertainment, which in 2008 successfully released a wireless keyboard/mouse device dubbed the Phantom Lapboard. It was the only component of the Phantom game system to ever become a reality.

Sakshat, the $10 Laptop

On the 23rd of September 2006, the Times of India reported on a story that left many shaking their heads. Apparently, Indian officials had grown despondent over the low-but-apparently-not-quite-low-enough price point of the laptops being devised by the One Laptop Per Child project. While many in the real world were astounded that a $100-$200 laptop was even conceivable, Indian officials had a better idea – a $10 laptop named Sakshat. [Insert off-color pun here.] In any case, what were you thinking? A laptop with 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, and other desirable qualities for just ten bucks?

Ridiculed by many as utterly impossible, the Sakshat was finally revealed in February of this year. And to say the cynicism was proven correct may be the understatement of the century. There sat a computer peripheral of sorts, sprouting cables like tentacles and featuring what looked to be a tiny LCD in the middle. Apparently the production cost had grown as the years went by, thus forcing the development team into cost-cutting measures – such as removing a keyboard, a true display screen, and virtually everything else you’d find in a real notebook.

Sky Commuter

The flying car – or at least the idea of a mechanical hybrid that could zip through the skies like an airplane and drive the roads like an automobile – has been with us for nearly a century, reaching its zenith in the sci-fi-driven 1950s. So when Washington-based Flight Innovations announced in the early 1990s that it was working on a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) flying car, many felt it was an idea whose time had finally come.

Measuring a mere fourteen feet in length and capable of carrying two passengers, the Sky Commuter was said to have a flight speed of 85 MPH, a user-friendly control array involving a single joystick and two pedals, and an eventual price tag – as a home-built kit – of just $50,000. But when the last remaining prototype, the final remnant of a project that apparently ate up millions of dollars of investment capital and gazillions of man hours, appeared on eBay in early 2008, it was a sad reminder that some ideas simply don’t have the legs to be seen through to fruition.

Still, the flying car concept is not dead. Indeed, Boston-based Terrafugia, Inc. just this year launched the first test drive/flight of its "Transition," a two-seat aircraft-car that cruises the skies at 115 MPH, runs on unleaded gas, and supposedly fits in a standard garage. It also transforms from plane to car in less than thirty seconds. Perhaps this is what Popular Mechanics envisioned so many years ago.

Steorn Orbo

The notion of a machine that develops power and creates energy all on its own, without using energy or power and without producing emissions, has long been the stuff of fairy tales.

And so it will apparently continue to be, despite the promises of Ireland-based Steorn Ltd. With its "Orbo," Steorn claimed it had "developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy." It even held demonstrations to prove the point, such as the event that took place back in 2007 at the Kinetica Museum Gallery of London, where people the world over were invited to tune in live via webcams. The demo, unsurprisingly, fell apart even before it began. Steorn officials used the term "slight technical difficulties" and identified intense heat from camera lighting as the chief culprit.

We’re told there have been many closed tests since then, complete with independent scientists, yet the findings of those tests have been kept under lock and key. And today, nobody outside this privileged circle knows how the device operates or even if it operates.

In Feb of ‘09, CEO Sean McCarthy announced the end of R&D and the beginning of a strong push toward commercialization. To which we ask – the commercialization of what?