Internet of Sense: a look forward to 2030

In this year you find yourself working thousands of miles away from your loved ones. You are sitting in the kitchen and start thinking what dinner you want to have with them. The room around you starts changing, indulging your desires: why not spend Christmas time at the seashore? Waves splashing, you feel the breeze and smell the salt in the sea air. All is ready! The only ones missing are the guests! Just think “create an invitation” and, while your guests accept, their avatars start to appear at the table. While everybody is joining, we order from an e-commerce menu which lets us taste what we are buying. At this stage, we can pay and enjoy our dinner all together. 

We tend to look for the future in the present and vice-versa. We think that what is perfectly functional today for the actual society, will work well in the future too, just modifying a little our attitudes and tools. This way of thinking is exactly the one for evolutionary linear growth, but this is not applicable as the technological evolution has reached an exponential pace of growth.

Based on the Moore’s Law, the capacity of data-processing, with hardware accessible by most, doubles every 18-24 months. In the seventies, the evolution was taking small steps forward, comprehensible by most, and almost linear. Relative performance moved from 0.01 to 0.02 to 0.04 and so on. Today, instead, we have a relative performance of 4: next exponential step is 8, rather than a more linear value of 5. Today we are almost totally reliant on external services/brains available on mobile devices (maps, wiki, searches, socials) and, little by little, we are becoming truly digital copies of ourselves, who feel the need to converge the man and the machine to be more competitive. We live in a 4G world where the interaction with the technology is only done through sight and sound. The arrival of the 5G, together with new wearables devices, allows us to foresee that in 5-10 years we will be able to interact with technological tools through our senses. These are not assumptions but an extract from a study made by Ericsson about 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2030.

10 Hot Consumer Trends 2030

Your brain is the user interface

The lines between “thinking” and “doing” will blur: this is a prediction of many of the consumers. Let’s think about going to a nearby shopping center. Let’s think about the destination: our VR glasses will simply show us the path, and then indicate where to find the products on our shopping list. All this makes us think that keyboards, mouse and game controllers will disappear or that our smartphones will function without displays. A new market will open up, dedicated to new unthinkable devices.

The way we listen to, speak to and understand others

Many people believe that a possible enhancement that we will acquire is the interaction through sound. Ambient sound that can be removed in an underground train to talk with somebody else. Ambient sound that can be added, for instance, to make our seashore dinner more realistic and evocative. Moreover, to talk to a person in a different language or create sound bubbles where only certain individuals can listen to a type of music or content. 51% of people expect to have devices that will transmit sound directly to our brains.

Taste and sense of smell

Taste and sense of smell are the two senses that personalise our sensorial experience the most. Let’s envisage we are tasting dishes together with the MasterChef judges, or trying out a product before even buying it online. By taking a stepover, we find out that 44% of interviewed consumers expect to be able to taste their memories, while others are waiting for the capability to share any taste with friends. In regard to sense of smell, it is almost impossible today to digitally reproduce it, but this could change at any moment. 56% of interviewed people expect to be able to smell all smells in a movie. Moreover, it is also expected that we will be able to change our own smell perceived by the others.

Touch and Merged Reality

Consumers expect to be able to touch anything in a digital way. Let’s envisage living a Formula 1 experience by feeling whatever a real driver feels during it, vibrations, smells, sounds and so on. Or even more to go to a concert and feel the bass sound effect on your own skin.62% of interviewees believe that a nerve stimulating bracelet will make one believe they are touching a real object. The difference between physical and digital realities will converge to a point of interchangeability by 2030.

Digital asset check as with the real one

A face, crypto value, news story, song, everything will be checkable in a secure way. We’ll be able to share virtual objects and content without being worried about their authenticity. 46% of interviewed people see dating sites containing solely verified facts by 2030. 50% think that fake news will be a thing of the past by 2030. Today, virtual universes exist already with parallel economies. One of those is Entropia Universe where a user can by a car, a ship or even a meteorite and make other people pay to visit it. For instance, in this universe there are several planets, like Planete Calypso which was sold for 6 millions of dollars (real ones). SEE_Visual_World

Post-privacy consumers

It is foreseen there will be a more restricted and sophisticated regulation on public /private data. This legislative evolution will remove any concerns about privacy by letting us use facial recognition almost everywhere, although this might look like a paradox. The post-privacy consumer expects that all matters concerning privacy will be resolved, so they can take full advantage of this data-driven world. Automation and digitalisation will cut down prices of products and services.

Connected sustainability

Cheaper 3D printers, remote working, remote medical assistance: all this will be normal routine in 2030. Six in ten people believe that internet of sense-based services will reduce emissions. We will become citizens of a digital world.

Sensational services

Consumers predict that all services will be able to use all senses to digitalise our daily life. Multi-sensory experiences will be used mainly in entertainment (historical performances, cinema, gaming) and for shopping. The concept of the workplace will be totally revolutionised by making workers virtually present. Moreover, 43% think that in the future we will be able to have a digital vacation-adventure.

We get closer to Singularity day by day. We are in an era where human beings have the need to compete with the machine and to merge the human evolution with the technological one.

The future is one step from us!