Many of the same “trends” appear again and again because, to put it simply, technology takes a long time to mature before most of us actually want to buy it. That applies this year as well. Some trends for 2022 that tech companies are pushing are things you will have heard of before, reports Denver Post.
Some of the techs that will invade our lives
1. Welcome to the metaverse.
“We’re in a world where people several times per day send out an image reflecting themselves,” said Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written extensively about the metaverse. “The next phase takes that visual representation and dimensionalized it. You go into an environment and express yourself through an avatar.”
For one, the technology got better. Last year, Facebook announced that it had renamed itself Meta after shipping 10 million units of its virtual-reality headset, the Quest 2, which was a milestone.
For another, many of us were willing to splurge on our digital selves. Hordes of investors bought NFT which are one-of-a-kind digital objects purchased with cryptocurrency. Eminem and other celebrities even invested in virtual yachts for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The metaverse could still turn out to be a fad, depending on what products emerge and who buys them. Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for the consulting firm Creative Strategies, said she worried that it could become a reflection of the privileged few who can afford to treat their digital selves.
2. The smart home.
Yet the smart home, for the most part, has remained chaotic. Many smart home products didn’t work well with other technology. Some door locks, for example, worked only with Apple phones and not Androids; some thermostats were controlled by talking to Google Assistant and not to Siri.
The lack of compatibility has created long-term issues. An Apple-compatible lock isn’t useful for the family member or future tenant who prefers Android. It would also be more convenient one day if our home devices could actually talk to each other, like a washing machine telling a dryer that a large load was ready to be dried.
This year, the tech industry’s biggest rivals — Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon — are playing nice to make the smart home more practical. They plan to release and update home technology to work with Matter, a new standard that enables smart home devices to talk to each other, regardless of the virtual assistant or phone brand. More than 100 smart home products are expected to adhere to the standard.
This means that later this year, when you shop for a product like an automated door lock, look for a label indicating that the device is compatible with Matter. Then, in the future, your smart alarm clock may be able to tell your smart lights to turn on when you wake up.
3. Connected health.
Fitness gadgets like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, which help us track our movements and heart rate, keep getting more popular. So tech companies are experimenting this year with smaller wearable devices that gather more intimate data about our health.
Oura, a health tech company, recently introduced a new model of its Oura Ring, which is embedded with sensors that track metrics including body temperature to accurately predict menstruation cycles. This week at CES, a tech trade show in Las Vegas, Movano, another health tech startup, unveiled a similar ring that stitches together data about your heart rate, temperature and other measures to inform a wearer about potential chronic illnesses.
Medical experts have long warned about the potential consequences of health tech. Without proper context, the data could potentially be used to misdiagnose illnesses and turn people into hypochondriacs. But if the widely sold-out COVID rapid test kits are any measure, more of us appear ready to be proactive in monitoring our health.
4. Electric cars.
Last year, President Joe Biden announced an ambitious goal: Half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be electric rather than gas-powered by 2030.
In response, major automakers are hyping their electric cars, including at CES this week. On Tuesday, Ford announced plans to increase production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Later this week, General Motors plans to unveil a battery-powered version of its Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Other carmakers, like Mercedes-Benz, have shared plans for electric cars to be released in coming years.
While there’s lots of marketing hype around electric cars, those of us looking for battery-powered vehicles this year will probably still gravitate toward Tesla, Milanesi said. That’s because we have yet to see widespread deployment of solar power and charging stations for electric cars, especially in more rural areas. Tesla has a head start because it has been rolling out charging stations for years, she said.
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Source: Denver Post
