Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016 Welcome to the future! The skies are full of flying cars, the waters are full of personal submarines and our digital wallets are full of 57 varieties of mutually incompatible blockchain-based monetary currency. Food is consumed in the form of nutrition pills. The outdoor temperature is determined by Weather Control in Berlin. …
The difference this time round is that many people will have a device at home capable of supporting VR. (PC, PS4), or via the cheaper options, such as Google Cardboard and rivals, that use an existing smart phone.
Previous attempts at VR were too costly, only available in locations like arcades, tech shows etc. and of poor quality.
I'm not saying this will be the year of VR, but I think this will be the year for early adopters, and as the market grows, which I'm certain it will, more VR developers will jump on board with more interesting applications.
By 2017, economies of scale will mean the 2nd generation VR devices will be cheaper and more capable, and so will more from early adoption, to more mainstream.
3D was a gimmick, VR is actually immersive, when done right.
But there's still the matter of Simulation Sickness, and that's not going to go away for the same reason seasickness won't go away: because it's biologically-triggered. The very thing that we want to see in VR is the same thing that makes us sick: part and parcel, and the closer to realistic we get, the worse the problem will become.
Yeah getting 4G at home and work is awesome. But id like to see it work inbetween.
I cant take advantage at work...the boss is a dick...and I cant make use at home...my little lad likes to hide my phone.
So really only the commute is where it makes sense...where currently just getting phone signal is unlikely.
"Yeah getting 4G at home and work is awesome. But id like to see it work inbetween."
I have it kind of easy in that respect as I work from home part of the time and my commute never takes more than 10 mins even when I don't.
I do spend a lot of my time in the woods and wilds (I teach outdoor living skills) and there is often no signal at all.
I disagree about the central heating IoT - the ability to turn it on if you're going to be home early or stop it turning on if you are going to be late is something that is practical and a money saver. And easler to program than the boxes fitted to most boilers*
* That's reminded me, the next time I'm having a beer with my landlord I'm going to ask if we can go halves in fitting one.
Agreed, i probably don't go straight home from work about the third of the time on an unpredictable basis, so being able to stop the house from pointlessly heating itself up until I'm actually going to be there is saving me a nice chunk of my gas bill. It may even pay for itself in the first year of use.
Same for me. Unpredictable finish times.
Some (all?) of the IoT type heating systems, can be tied to one or more mobile devices (as well as local movement detection etc).
If no one is near, or currently approaching home, heating stays off. If it detects you heading towards home, it works out your ETA, and from past data, knows how long it takes to get the house up to temp, and so switches the heating on at the optimal point.
Likewise, if you leave the house and forget to turn the heating off, it can do it for you.
I kind of like that, the system would likely pay for itself within a year or two with the fuel savings.
So if I spend the money to properly insulate my home, have radiator stats in all rooms and a new boiler, and then figure out how to sensibly set up a timer to accommodate my random-ish schedule I can leave it running all day with negligible increased costs. Or, I could buy a smart thermostat and have decreased running cost. Hmmm, it's hard to know what to go for...
If no one is near, or currently approaching home, heating stays off. If it detects you heading towards home, it works out your ETA, and from past data, knows how long it takes to get the house up to temp, and so switches the heating on at the optimal point.
Likewise, if you leave the house and forget to turn the heating off, it can do it for you.
Which means you have a phone that runs an app that blabs your location.
I don't have one of those; both the first, and ipso facto, the second condition are not fulfilled. It can send an SMS, and a RasPi will then determine if it needs to act on it (no-one at home, house at $low_temp) or not, by signalling the thermostat to select a higher, preset temperature.
If your product ticks one of those boxes then expect sales to go exponential.
So for VR i think part of the answer is interactive porn, where no longer are you at the mercy of whoever is holding the camera, as you can pan around the scene and focus on the angles that get you hotter and botherederer. That and finally removing your troops out of the firing line by letting them kick ass from a comfortable AC barracks.
Lets hope these two "advances" don't get confusingly intertwined in some nightmare snuff scene where Mr Garrison gets his wish to fuck 'em all to death.
Then again, watching daesh going out in a spectacular bang would be compulsive viewing.
Then again, watching daesh going out in a spectacular bang would be compulsive viewing.
You can find hilarious videos shot by spotters, choppers or whatever on the Interwebs today, actually. Still in 2D though.
OTOH, I am still looking for the camera view of the AC-130 that repeatedly bombed an MSF hospital for funs and giggles. Some atrocities are not released early.
I love his writing. But if we let him get away with the 4G gag he's just going to get lazy. Which wouldn't do at all. BTW I get mine from Tesco at no greater charge than my old 3G and it's brilliant,
OTOH I must admit, while my Tesco (O2) 4G usually works well for me, if I go a mile or two south of home there are places where I might as well try two cans and a length of string - forget 3G even. So Dabbsy's basic point is valid. Before they f**k about with 5G maybe they should be able to get a signal that covers all of North London.
I got a free upgrade to 4G on 3 network and at home in the evening I've seen 40mbit speeds up and down - amazing speed!
2 miles away in one of the financial districts I struggle to get 1mbit and in the new office location I don't even get a signal at all, so it's pretty pointless most of the time.
You put 100,000 people/phones in a 2km square area and it just doesn't have the throughput it needs on the backend, doesn't matter if it's 3G, 4G or 5G, the higher number just makes you more annoyed it's not working as marketed. Holiday day trips to lightly populated Med' islands show how decent even 3G is when it's not over subscribed.
Oh and on the IoT... I love the quote I read on t'internet - "my boiler won't turn off because it can't see the internet". I would laugh hard at that except the landlord controls the heating for the flats from his phone....
I live on one of the 'lightly populated' Med' islands and I can tell you when there are thousands of you taking and sending selfies of yourselves vomiting outside a club at 4am in the morning, my 3G is crap.
When hoardes of journos get told by their editors each year to make predictions for the coming year, that very act seems to guarantee that the predictions will never happen.
Holiday day trips to lightly populated Med' islands show how decent even 3G is when it's not over subscribed.
Might be great on the beach but step off the beaten track (i.e. onto the track that just locals use) and you'll be back down to Edge or they'll claim to give you 3G but they only have the bandwidth for GPRS. There's money in them roaming fees.
During the late 80s/early 90s there was a big push for "home automation". I was on a serious committee which met once a month to eat expensive lunches and think serious thoughts about protocols and interference and whether the signalling could be delivered over the mains without causing the lights on the house next door to turn on and off. It was good fun while it lasted, and then it sank without trace.
However,something has happened in 25 years that is different. The banks have run out of other ways of stealing our money and have been trying to pump air into tech bubbles. Peak Apple seems to have happened, Peak Twitter has happened. There has to be something new that Wall Street can lever to get the mugs to part with money. Therefore the IoT may be the next tech bubble. Remember, it is not about delivering products that people want; it is about paying yourself an enormous salary to persuade mugs to part with money, followed by presenting them with the 4.7pt "Value of investments may go down as well as up".
Unless tulips get very, very exciting again or new spices are discovered in the South Seas, I wouldn't put it past IoT to be the Next Big Thing.
I think a lot of the predictions about IoT rest upon how we define IoT.
Christmas Day I was at a friend's house preparing to enjoy the festive dinner when I realised I had forgotten to program my DVR for later that day. That's a Virgin Media TiVo with a network connection so I whipped out my mobile and programmed it up via that.
Was that IoT or something else?
Would it have suddenly become IoT if I had turned my heating up or down instead? Turned lights on or off, or had remotely unlocked the front door and disabled the burglar alarm because a friend had arrived there and wanted to drop a present off, had used the door camera to check they hadn't brought some pals round to ransack the house?
IoT: When it survives a cost-benefit analysis, we may reconsider. Wait. We can simplify that to a mere benefit analysis.
5G: That's exactly what I was wondering. So do we really have 4G now? Really?? It's like IPv6. It's been out for a while. A really long time. We are still waiting.
VR: I keep hearing that pr0n will make this a big business. You can hide whatever you were looking at by pressing alt-tab. Not so easy to conceal your dark helmet.
IT jobs sexy: I don't know of many jobs that are sexy. It's easy to be fooled by the "sexiness" of the end result of something (check out TV dramas on lawyers or physicians), not realizing that there is a lot of effort and a fair share of tedious work to do in order to get there. This applies to any serious job. So if your job is sexy, it must be a very easy one.
Is this a UK only thing?
And what's the big need for a 5G/4G phone anyway?
I've got 4G, but only use it on a USB dongle when customer guest WiFi is too onerous to register/connect to.
The phone is still only a 3G phone and works fine everywhere. Even for streaming radio in the car.
The field may never be considered sexy or hot but please don't extend it to the people who are in it.
Sorry to disappoint, but 3 of my female colleagues are among the hottest women I've ever met. Smart, successful, great to work with and easy on the eye. And before you ask: too late they're all happily married and no, I will not tell you where I work.
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