Yet despite its immense capabilities, practical quantum computing is still a long way from reality, says Steven Koonin, provost at Caltech and a quantum-computing researcher.

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Both of these advances are helping to build the foundation for practical quantum computing, and point to the possibility of consumer grade quantum computers in the future.

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Beyond that trend, Sowah says that the movement toward cheaper, more practical machines is about computing technology meeting the needs of people, instead of vice versa.

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But their demonstration of dipole trapping at least shines a captivating light down the path to quantum computing becoming a practical technology.

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We've already spent some time interacting with the company's new depth-camera and eye-tracking technology, but now we wanted to dig deep to understand the thinking behind the system and what technical and practical limitations that need to be addressed before we can get to the computing future of Star Trek.

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Although they are decades from being practical, according to researchers, quantum computers may one day add previously unimagined computing power to such complex tasks as database-searching and breaking secret codes, tasks that now require powerful supercomputers.

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