VR Goggles: Most famous is Oculus Rift , but there are others in the wings. Facebook now owns Oculus. While we’ll see a lot more on VR goggles, I’d say they are still 3-5 years away from any mainstream markets. First market will be games. Followed by use in industrial training applications like engineering or engine repair. As for having a prominent place in WalMart? Maybe 2018.
Driverless Cars: We’re still many years away from any mass market. The HD maps required and the subsequent processing power in the cloud to make driverless cars work is a massive investment. Google and Nokia are making swift progress, but a number of countries still need to change legislation. For the next 5-10 years we’ll see a hybrid use, mostly in larger urban areas.
In-Car Tech: This is where things get a little more mass-market ready as Ford and Microsoft breached this sector a few years ago with Sync. But now Ford is going with Blackberry’s QNX. Apple has put out CarPlay. Now there’s Navdy, a portable HUD display you can plug-in and slap on your dashboard and feel all fighter-pilot cool…we may see a surge in speeding tickets. Look for competitor products to Navdy and similar add-ons. Forget the “quantified self” this is going to be about the “quantified car."
Home Automation: This is the real big growth area, but not massive growth. I expect CES in January will be all a gaggle about devices in the connected home. We’ve got Nest for home heating control, there is the Wink relay for controlling lights and other connected devices. Hey, with Croc-Pot you can already monitor your roast from work on your smartphone. This market has moved from visionaries into the very early adopter phase on Moore’s bell curve of adoption. We’ll see cool gadgets, bit home automation is still very much in geeksville territory.
3D Printing: still in the visionary stage, but growing. The Maker Movement gets all starry-eyed with dreams of making Star-Trek gear and we’ve seen some astounding uses in the medical world. Like printing a heart valve to save a little girls life; that is so cool right? But despite the pundits predicting mass unemployment in the manufacturing sector, the impact of 3D printing on the manufacturing sector is but a mere blip.
Smartphones: Well, sit down and just hold on to your chair! This sector is going to be, well, boring. We’ll see more screen resolution than your eye and brain can even bother with. Phones, processors and storage will improve along with energy storage. Aside from that…smartphones have hit a plateau
Tablets: These devices have ridden the bell curve very fast in lock-step with mobile phones. Don’t expect anything more astounding than the same feature creep of smartphones. Now what we’ll see in 2015 is greater adoption into workflow in the Enterprise and the money here is in apps and Enterprise functionality…what both IBM and Apple understand clearly in their partnership.
Drones: Some pundits want to put the stork out of work, but I doubt we’ll be ordering genetically altered, DNA sequenced babies from Amazon to be delivered by drone anytime soon. For 2015, drones will remain front-page as we continue to explore their fit in our society. There will be legal battles as they disrupt certain sectors and we’ll see some innovations. Christmas morning of 2014 however, will see massive suburban dogfights as they crowd the backyards and parents will be demanding airspace rights for their property.
Social Media: It just is and just will be. Usage will increasingly be mobile driven. Look for a lot more pictures, really cool filtering and editing apps for those images and Hyperlapse videos, but we’re now into the phase of debating larger social issues, so change in the social media space will be societal debates in the real-world.
Wearables: Apple’s Watch will slam the market and drive some sales…but one has to wonder how fast the novelty of watching our heartbeat in real-time will wear off. Wearables in the category of glasses with cameras and such will see usage in industrial settings and the workplace, but otherwise fall flat in the broader consumer market. Devices like Nike Fuel band or FitBit will hang around, but not be anything special.
So 2015 will be an interesting year in the technology world. Business and government will be facing the complex issues of dealing with integrating the physical and digital worlds. And perhaps that really is where things will be interesting in 2015, figuring out how this all fits together. Companies that figure out leveraging digital in 2015 stand to gain over their competition, but that is where the C-Suite needs some vision. As for anything “wow factor” in the consumer world? I doubt 2015 is the year for that.
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