The idea of "beaming" someone up was that a person could be dematerialised and then converted back into matter at their destination.

Although scientists can't teleport humans yet, they can teleport balls of energy known as photons. Teleportation is based on a phenomenon known as quantum en...

• The mobile phone. In Star Trek, the communicator was often used to communicate back to the USS Enterprise. In 1973, the first mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper.
• The universal translator. To understand galactic foreigners, Star Trek charact...

• In Blade Runner, a huge digital billboard appears on one of the buildings. This pre-internet concept inspired Andrew Phipps Newman, the CEO of DOOH.com. The company is dedicated to providing live, dynamic advertisements through the use of digital billboards.
• Blade ...

In the 1990 film set in 2084, the main protagonist Douglas Quaid is on the run from the enemy and jumps into a driverless car.

The idea that a car can take you to your destination using its onboard satellite navigation is becoming popular. At the forefront of driverless ca...

• A hologram: As seen in the first Star Wars movie, a hologram is a 3D image made from the interference of light beams from a laser onto a 2D surface. In 2018, researchers created a real hologram. At present, it can only be done on a very small scale.
• Bionic ...

Back to the Future, Part II presents a hoverboard that Marty McFly "borrows" to escape.

The first real hoverboard was created in 2015 by Arx Pax. The company invented the Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) that provides levitation of a hoverboard.