It’s a few weeks now into 2017 and the new years party seems a distant memory and its time to think what this year will bring for us tech geeks.
- Augmented reality – after the huge success of last years Pokemon Go game for smart phones which used the phone’s camera to overlay the Pokemon onto the player real surrounding so that Picacho may appear in your back yard or local high street. One downside of the game was that it did require quite a high performance phone to run the game which mean that some users with older phones weren’t able to take full advantage of the augmented reality and the game wouldn’t be fully playable. Because of the popularity of this game we can expect more augmented reality games to appear and as more people will have upgraded their phones since last year this means more people will be able to play them.
- Virtual reality – VR has been the next tech since the 90s but now the consumer tech is finally affordable with Oculus Rift, and PS4 VR as well and Vive from HTC all available. You can expect more games and content to appear in 2017 for these virtual reality platforms but its in other areas where VR will grow as well. We already have a few theme parks coupling virtual reality with roller coaster technology to give riders not just the total immersion visually but also the physical sensations to make you believe you are traveling through a prehistoric landscape or space battle. So expect more and more to follow suit.
- In car computing – whether it be more basic in car entertainment computers that allow you to sync your phones and tablet to play content and handle satellite navigation or more full automated in car computer systems in self driving cars we can expect a lot more computing power to be found in our cars in 2017 with the likes of Nvidia demonstrating there Xavier self-driving computer which can cope even when the white lines are missing from the road and BMW showing a modified 5 series which was a semi-autonomous that they said could go into production this year.
- Bots and AI – Computers are getting to be more intelligent and are starting to be able to take on tasks that only a few years ago could only be done reliably by humans. We have already seen how AI in super computers in can play Jeopardy and Go against top human opponents but it will be in more everyday tasks that they will be seen more in 2017 such as answering online customer service questions or even predicting potential medical problems by analysing patient records