Pick up a dress that displays tweets. Put on those one-of-a-kind heels that you 3D printed at home. Check your phone to see exactly where your cabbie is — just four minutes away. Leave your purse behind because you don’t have to pay in cash. Don’t bother to check if you’ve locked the house; it automatically locks behind you. The music that was playing in your room starts playing through your earphones. Oh, did you forget to carry that gift for your hostess that you ordered off the Internet 20 minutes ago?
Technology has become so much a part of our lives to the extent that many of us cannot think of life without it. With the penetration of the Internet increasing rapidly every year, and tech-savvy Millennials who can afford to spend on it accounting for roughly 50 per cent of the base between Millennials, GenXers and Boomers in India, a number of trends are set to restyle technology for the common man in 2015. Here’s a quick look at what will be at the top of the list this year.
Wearables
Technology, for better or for worse, is all-pervasive and all-invasive. Disparate electronics have steadily insinuated themselves into our lives through various tabletop and handheld devices, Now these are being replaced by more sophisticated forms. As wearabledevices.com puts it, “the terms ‘wearable technology’, ‘wearable devices’, and ‘wearables’ all refer to electronic technologies or computers that are incorporated into items of clothing and accessories which can comfortably be worn on the body”. The most recurrent examples being Google Glass and the smart watches currently flooding the market.
However, from the consumer to the critic, everyone’s commonest reaction has been how “ugly” and/or “unwearable” it is. That is set to change in 2015, though. London Fashion Week in September 2014 showcased some truly fascinating wearable tech — like Studio XO’s glowing slip dress made of fibre optic-based fabric and high-intensity LEDs that let it light up and change colour. New York Fashion Week opened with CuteCircuit’s clothing line and bags that could be programmed to change design through the brand’s native app. And Rebecca Minkoff debuted her very trendy wearable tech accessories line. This year has already begun on a great note with the latest wearable tech products looking trendier than ever at the CES2015 (case in point, the Swarovski-studded Misfit Shine).
3D Printing
3D printing is part of the additive manufacturing (AM) family, which refers to the creation of an object by adding materials or additives to the object layer by layer. 3D printing has rapidly grown — and is still growing — to the extent that people are using it to produce firearms, jawbones (an actual jawbone was printed and fitted into an 83-year-old Belgian woman), prosthetics, automobiles, clothes, art, manufacturing components, and other sundry objects. Dutch designer/engineer Anouk Wipprecht has worked on a ‘Spiderdress’, as a self-defence aid that blends wearable tech and 3D printing. Soon you will even be able to print your own food.
Mobile wallets
2014 was the year the service-on-demand app came into its own. Apps for services like cabs, beauty treatments, food and grocery deliveries, housekeepers, even courier/gift services took over everyone’s phones (In India, think apps like Ola, Uber, Foodpanda). 2015, however, promises to make it all even simpler by allowing you to pay through your phone.
Apart from the usual Apple Pay, Google Wallet or PayPal, we now have sites like PayTm (you can link a PayTm wallet to your Uber account to pay for cab rides; or use it to one-touch-pay for mobile phone recharges, DTH recharges, even a variety of other items available for sale on the native site). Further down the road, of course, more such options will be available; making physical money, if not obsolete, at least largely unnecessary.
Internet of Things
Put simply, this is the interconnection of smart devices through unique identifiers without requiring a human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. For a detailed explanation, watch Dr. John Barrett, Head of Academic Studies at the Nimbus Centre for Embedded Systems Research at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT), at this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTIt1C5R-M.
While the phrase has been over-used as a buzzword, companies (Samsung, for example) are finally making big plans for it. At the just-concluded CES2015, Samsung CEO B.K. Yoon said that, by 2017, 90 per cent of Samsung products and, within five years, all of Samsung’s hardware — from air purifiers to ovens — would be IoT devices.
Which essentially means that every device inside and outside your home (that includes your car, by the way) will be seamlessly connected to each other. This, in turn, will lead to better healthcare, environmental monitoring, cyber security, even large-scale deployment as in the case of Songdo, South Korea’s prototype smart city that is nearing completion. Almost everything is to be connected and converted to a constant data stream to be monitored and studied without human involvement.
Drones
Apart from their traditional use for aerial surveillance, research, remote sensing and combat purposes, they are increasingly being used for things like commercial photography and cinematography (the most infamous example being that of Drone Boning, touted as the first-ever drone pornography video). In the world of professional sports, they were used to film skiing and snowboarding events during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. They even helped the police; the first drone-assisted arrest — that of a North Dakota cattle rancher — took place in January, 2014. And of course, don’t forget Prime Air, Amazon’s flagship delivery service that promises to “get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles”. Pending FAA approval, of course.
