Lots of promises from 2016 and the next upcoming future.

Predicting the future is always a harsh task. Technologies offer a partial view on our future ways of living, but their evolution is always inspiring. And 2016 already raises high expectations on a few main fields of interest.

It looks like this is the year when, finally, Virtual Reality will be less virtual and more real. In 2015 several announcements and demonstrations suggested the technology was nearing maturity and mass-market adoption. Hoculus already impressed with some rich demos and is going to start pre-orders on January 6th (Facebook formerly announced aquisition in 2014). In addition to this, the involvement of many small developing companies promises news in terms of futuristic customer experiences, which will go beyond gaming to spread new ways of living and communicating.

After having been able to penetrate mass markets as gadgets, Drones and Robots have grown their performances and new, concrete industrial uses (distribution and delivery of goods) are expected by big companies such as Amazon and Google (2017?).

On the Smartphone-side I expect the introduction of new incremental features that will have the biggest spotlight during the Mobile World Congress. Looking at a future a few years down the road, a concrete hypothesis by Vivek Wadhwa says by 2020 smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50. By then, "the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit.  This means that we will see another three billion people come on-line.  Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way".

After having allowed the evolution from the health to wellness paradigm, Wearables have long past the expensive fitness gadget format to become the enabling factor of transformation in baby caring and fashion, just to name a few fields.

This summary does not pretend to provide with an exhaustive picture of what will happen in the coming years. It is just a collection of trends that I think will mainly influence the way people interact, enriching the shape and content of their mutual communication, setting the stage for the day in which we will be able to over-communicate, that meaning we will create new ways to exchange and understand emotions.

DP

(Image credit Klaus Burgle)