2015 has been a great year of some
emerging technologies, Let’s see what 2016 has for us:-
1) Virtual Reality
2015 has been an interesting year for Virtual
Reality as developers have been getting their hands on hardware and have had
time to develop and understand what does and does not work
for consumers of VR.
2016 will see a major milestone for VR and
that is the release of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift. In
addition to Oculus releases the Playstation VR, codenamed Project Morpheus,
will be released in the first half of 2016 with a potentially huge reach.
It's been getting a lot easier for creators
too to create content for VR.
Facebook have introduced support for 360 degree videos which has
been snapped up and tried by big organisations such as the BBC,earlier in 2015
you can bet that 2016 will see more and more VR content being created in 2016. .
A question remains though and that is will the smartphone,
via something like Google Cardboard, rule VR or will dedicated hardware
rule?
2)
Personal Fitness & Health Tracking
Over the last couple of years, and
particularly in 2015, fitness tracking has really developed. It's been led by
new and young companies such as Fitbit and Withings. As a slight aside, Fitbit looks like it had a
bumper Christmas with it's apps trending on the App and Play Stores and
it's shares jumping on opening on Monday. With a huge range of smartwatches now
available with fitness tracking as a major feature and lots more coming for
both Android and Apple fans (Apple Watch 2 for example) I think 2016 promises
to be a bumper year for fitness and health tracking.
Apple's health kit has gone some
way to helping people understand all of their data from a huge range of devices
and measurables but it still requires some analysis by the user to get
actionable evidence out. Given that the vast majority of these devices are not
and will not be certified medical devices due to the huge barriers another
question is how will healthcare professionals use the data, if at all?
3)
Electric Vehicles
Helped
along slightly by the VW scandal and government incentives electric car sales
have been on the up year after year. Tesla has shown that good electric cars
are possible and they can replace your Diesel or Petrol motor. The new car
line-up for 2016 is looking good and with the huge number of new and exciting
full electric and hybrid cars being released it starts to look extremely
impressive.
Tesla is set to get some big competition
though as the very mysterious new company, Faraday Future, is set to announce full details of
their autonomous electric car at CES in January. Faraday Future is just a
couple of years old and has been very secretive about what its doing. Despite
this they've attracted top
management and engineers from Tesla, BMWi and a whole host of
other manufacturers.
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