Friday, January 12, 2018

2018 SPECIAL ....New year, new gear: Technologies that will catch your fancy

New year, new gear: Technologies that will catch your fancy

From hanging out in VR to stepping into smart cities and getting a clerk bot to assist at work, it is going to be an interesting year in tech

Drone with artificial intelligence
AI flying machines are creating a buzz — Intel has teamed up with Ferrari for AI drones to analyse races and conservation group Air Shepherd’s AI drone system detects humans and animals through infrared thermal imaging at night to fight against poachers. Like the ORCA drone, AI flying machines are poised to understand and execute your voice commands.

Take VR into the mainstream
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a virtual reality headset (VR) called ‘Oculus Go’. In a bid to expand its grasp in the world of VR, the social media giant’s first standalone product lets you watch movies or concerts, play games, and lets you hang out with your friends in virtual reality. As standalone virtual reality headset tends to turn affordable and portable, VR is poised to go mainstream this year.

Smart gadget for home
The craze for smart home gadgets is only going to surge in our connected homes. The numerous smart devices will be replaced by multi-function devices like the Toshiba Symbio Smart Home Solution. It is a wireless security camera, smart speaker, voice control with Amazon Alexa, an intercom, smart sound detector and an expandable smart home hub — all in a single device. One can use the Symbio as a smart home hub by controlling all of the devices from a single app.

Green and smart cities
Architects and governments around the world are taking interest in building smart cities with zero carbon footprint. The world will see more concepts like Liuzhou Forest City in China, Europa City in France, not to mention the USMexico border wall prototypes. These cities will have connected technologies that will influence urban environments — from crowd-sourced figures about parking availability, to street lamps that can detect the depth of snow on roads, energy selfsufficiency, emphasis on public transport and more.

Smart jewellery
Moving on from smart jewellery like Ringly Aries, Michael Kors Access Thompson, Motiv and Oura smart rings that track your vitals and activities, the new ones are going to help us carry around less stuff by replacing cash, payment cards, loyalty cards, passes, ID, tickets and keys. We are also going to put our personal security into the hands of smart rings like Nimb.

Bots for productivity
Artificial intelligence plays a key role when it comes to turning machines capable of working alongside humans. Remember Billy Bot — the AI-driven clerk chatbot that assists humans in administrative processes within legal practices? Built by a UK-based advocacy and mediation service provider, the bot can check barrister availability, conflict check, create the case and acknowledge the booking to the client by email

rajarshi.b@timesgroup.com

ET12JAN18

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