Step aside smartwatch: the smart backpack is next.

While we don't seem to have much of a problem answering text messages, making phone calls, or sending emails on a wrist watch, would we be doing the same thing with a PC strapped on our backs? What if this PC came equipped with a virtual reality headset, capable of letting us play fully immersive high-end 3D games?

First of all, no, we won’t see PC users wearing astronaut jetpack-like suits, moving in zombie-like patterns around town, pretending to shoot at imaginary targets, anytime soon. With that said, the “PC pack” is about to make an appearance at Computex, in Taiwan, as MSI, maker of one of the hottest lines of gaming laptops and PCs, is about to unveil the “Backpack PC”, an Intel Core i7 powered gaming computer packing an NVIDIA GTX 980 GPU.

The concept of a backpack PC has been a hard sell in the past few decades. Limitations of portable display resolution, heating problems, battery life concerns and sheer weight and size of a PC strapped on a person’s back, have been only a few of the issues holding back what could have been one of the biggest money-maker for chiropractors on this first sliver of the 21st century.

With this in mind, hardware is evolving, and what once seemed a dead-end road due to the little we know about Moore’s law, has suddenly turned into an open highway now leading to faster and smaller processors that are increasingly energy efficient and growing more powerful each year.

The Backpack PC, is not only more powerful than the average desktop computer, it’s also smaller and lighter, it is also expected to incorporate a desktop-class cooling system. One problem, however, still remains: battery power.

Considering that even the most energy efficient gaming PC still requires a power supply capable of handling between 450W and 700W, mostly due to the additional power requirements of a GTX graphic card, dear old Lithium-Ion might not provide enough power to get through 10 minutes of the latest release of Doom.

Taking a page from Tesla Motors?

As arduous a task as it may seem, it is not impossible to conceive a battery capable of powering a full desktop PC, for an extended period of time, anymore than it was to power Tesla’s first electric sportster, the Tesla Roadster for a 300-mile stretch, almost a decade ago.

Charging a laptop, like a MacBook Retina, is fairly manageable by plugging into power outlets available at any coffee shop. However it becomes a problem when charging a high-performance backpack PC on the go, which is the identical problem that plagues the charging of an electric vehicle. By this token, is the backpack PC and the electric car sharing a future of co-dependency with multi-purpose fast charging stations? The short answer is: probably not.

Let’s keep in mind that no matter whether a computer sits atop a desk, or hangs off our backs, it is still a computer with high-performance specs that cost a lot more than the average consumer laptop. No one wants to stroll around any neighborhood with three grand worth of computer equipment hanging from a shoulder.

Fortunately, the type of crows MSI is pitching to is VR gamers. While there is not much information in regard to other specs aside from the GPU and CPU, a “guesstimate” can be made based on competitor HP, which is also planning to release its own “Omen X VR PC Pack”, whose specs include 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, although the Omen X is currently a device offered to developers, rather than consumers.