6 Upcoming Pieces Of Technology We Need To Be Talking About
1) Glasses free TV
Those crazy guys at UC Berkeley and MIT have come up with a TV, which uses an algorithm to decipher your glasses prescription and then alters the screen’s projection to mimic what your glasses would do to suit the user’s less than perfect eyesight. So no more fumbling in bed for your glasses or contacts to watch TV when you’re shirking your responsibilities! Now you just turn on your TV (preferably with your Harry Potter remote wand) and you’ll automatically be able to watch whatever you’re binging from Netflix this week with perfect clarity.
2) Texting Dog Collars
Everyone remember Dug from Pixar’s “Up?” Well apparently there’s a new dog collar coming out courtesy of PetPace that will monitor various aspects of your pet’s health and then text it to you. This tech will even go so far as to let you know if your animal is in pain and how many calories they have burned so you’ll know when they’re hungry. Now we just need to link this collar to our iPhones so Siri can speak to us directly from the perspective of our pets. This is happening. Soon our dogs and cats will be able to let us know their thoughts and feelings! I have a feeling some of us may just be getting “Squirrel!” texted to us throughout the day though.
3) 3D Holograms from Our Smartphones!
When I was growing up I watched Star Wars. A lot. And one thing that’s always stuck with me is the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” scene. And that little bit of future technology with the blue hologram just there for all to see in the middle of the room always fascinated me. How is that possible? Will we ever get this in my lifetime? The answers are – who cares! And Hells yeah we will! The future is closer than you think. Or a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is closer than you think. However you want to put it. It’s closer than you think! Soon we’ll all have way more distractions than before with 3D holograms floating above our phones and we’ll all be looking like this. I can’t even imagine what this will do for Snapchat’s stock prices.
4) The ZHEST
I have no idea how this isn’t all over the Internet! The Zero Emission Hyper Sonic Transport, or ZHEST, is freaking awesome! It’s essentially a plane like any modern day commercial airliner except is has rocket boosters too! Ok, I know this is still very far off (it won’t be fully functional until 2050) but that’s only 36 years away, there’s a very good chance I’ll still be alive to see this thing in something other than a concept video. The ZHEST has the potential to go up to Mach 4 (4 times the speed of sound) and can make the trip from London to New York in about an hour and a half, or London to Tokyo in less than three hours! Oh and in case you missed the Z and the E from ZHEST (they stand for zero emission), this thing is supposed to run on seaweed and only produce water vapor as a byproduct. Epic.
5) 500 Mile Range Electric Cars
Elon Musk is about the closest thing we have to a real life Tony Stark. This dude, who founded Tesla Motors, released all of their patents to help out competition and the advancement of electric vehicle technology. It’s true, modern electric cars have plenty of limitations – long charge times, no places to recharge, limited range, etc. But, we’re starting to see a real advancement in this field, like IBM’s proposed Battery 500 Project. And I for one couldn’t be more excited, especially with the Tesla 3 supposed to be incorporating this technology and for under $35,000. Maybe gasoline is finally going the way of the dinosaur (see what I did there?).
6) IBM’s TrueNorth
Well all that stuff I mentioned earlier is great but it won’t freaking matter anymore. This is it. This is the end. This is the end, my only friend. The End. What started with Watson is soon going to turn into SkyNet. Cognitive Systems are the future. If you don’t know what they are here’s IBM’s definition, “Cognitive computing systems learn and interact naturally with people to extend what either humans or machine could do on their own.” Wonderful. Enter TrueNorth, IBM’s new brain-like chip, which, “Comes packed with 4,096 processor cores, and it mimics one million human neurons and 256 million synapses, two of the fundamental biological building blocks that make up the human brain.” And according to Dharmendra Modha, who overseas the project, it’s “a new machine for a new era.” I remember something else called that. Think I’m looking too much into this? Well think again! TrueNorth was able to recognize things like people, cyclists, cars, buses, and trucks with about 80 percent accuracy. So now we got a super chip, which will eventually start to learn, and it can already identify us so it’ll know who to eliminate. It’s only a matter of time. 
