The digital space is always shifting, expanding, creating room for more. Our newsfeeds are inundated daily with fresh influxes of ICT-related information, and every week brings new advances in tech, big and small. With the constant buzz around innovation, we’re not always sure what’s really disrupting the industry, and what’s just fluff.
Here are five ways the digital world will change your life this year.
1 Virtual Reality (VR) is for everyday life
While the concept of VR has been around since the ‘70s, the technology never seemed to catch up, and there was no way to distribute the service to the public, who generally couldn’t afford the gadgetry required. Until now… Smartphones have changed everything. With HD cameras, GPS and screen rotation functionality, as well as enhanced processing power, the Smartphone is fully capable of running VR software. This not only makes for a seamless VR experience, but also makes it accessible to anyone with a mobile smart device.
This year, HTC, Sony and the Facebook-owned Oculus will each release their own VR headsets. As a fully immersive experience, VR will change the way we work, learn and entertain ourselves. At home, we’ll be able to play exhilarating online games, as well as learn practical skills in real time instead of in theory – great for kids learning sports. Training simulators will not only be reserved for astronauts and pilots, but firefighters, engineers, doctors and disaster relief professionals will be able to practice dealing with occupational curve balls too.
2 Sharing economies are all the rage
Uber. Airbnb. Gumtree. Just some of the household names you’ve come to know. What you may not know, is that these innovative brands are part of what has now been dubbed the “sharing economy”, and it’s seriously trending. It’s all about access, really. Most people can’t afford to stay in hotels, buy high-end sports equipment or hire a full time employee at their start-up. This is what makes sharing communities so powerful – people can trade goods for goods, or get the experience, knowledge or help that they need at a fraction of what it would usually cost using traditional service providers.
Companies like Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Uber allow regular people to turn their assets (such as apartments and cars) and skills into a means of earning a passive income. It’s genius, and a mega disruptor for conventional business; companies will be competing with consumers who rent their goods out for a small fee, a bottle of wine or even a basket of home-grown vegetables. Who can compete with that?
3 User Experience (UX) science will drive design
It’s not news that the marketing landscape has changed drastically over the last decade. Digital communities have influenced the way we buy, sell and strategise, and the consumer is now informing the business, not the other way around. While some companies were slow to realise this shift, for brands that are at the forefront of their fields, consumer behaviour intelligence now drives all their business – from product concept and design, to marketing execution and delivery.
UX is a vital element of product design – it is how the user feels when they interact with a digital product. Think of it as a product’s first impression on the user. There is a lot of competition out there; if a website or app is unattractive or difficult to use in any way,
users will spend their clicks somewhere else. Our new reality is that consumer attention is a commodity, which means that intelligent UX design is no longer an option – it’s a top priority.
4 Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make our lives better
Despite films that put the fear of machines into us (think Terminator, I Robot, The Matrix), the field of robotics and AI has never been as prolific as it is now. Last year the industry saw huge leaps in robotic capability. International competitions, like Amazon’s Picking Challenge, the DARPA Robotics Challenge and the RoboCup pushed innovators to their creative limits, and we saw robots that can pack shelves, operate in disaster situations and perform as proxy surgeons in remote locations.
While there are still many milestones to reach in the field, experimentation and field testing are gaining ground and developers are using glitches to learn and make adjustments. Despite the setbacks that Google faced with the testing of its self-driving cars, it’s only a matter of time before the kinks are ironed out and they move on to the next “impossible”.
5 Cyber crime is a major threat to all
Imagine a child playing innocently with an electronic toy. She is chatting to the toy happily, when the toy starts to talk back – and not in a polite way. Entirely possible, as hackers proved when they breached digital toymaker VTech’s network last November, exposing the account information of 6.4 million children around the world. Hacking is riper than ever before and last year saw some really big attacks (remember the ‘Ashley Madison’ hack?). What these breaches have taught us is that we need to tighten up security in an innovative way.
So what kinds of criminal ingenuity do we have to look forward to? “Headless” worms or viruses that will target “headless” devices, such as Smartwatches, Smartphones and medical hardware. “Ghostware” designed to breach, steal and vanish before the break is discovered. Cloud jailbreaks will become more frequent as more users migrate to virtual storage. So we’d suggest you start working on those passwords…
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