Beyond showcasing my product (see more here), I was able to connect with so many other companies doing innovative things in a variety of spaces from AR to wearables to robotics. I am hoping that some of these companies will become collaborators or even partners in the future, but even just seeing what they had to offer was exciting.
My top 5 coolest things I saw
- Hypervsn – Hologram
- RoboSea’s Biki – Fish Drone
- Volocopter – Electric Holocopter
- Omron Automated Ping Pong Player
- Samsung VR – This was just too funny and ridiculously cool
Adam’s 2018 Top 10 Hot Predictions
- Chinese brands will become a name brand in the US for cars (specifically electric vehicles) and TVs (specifically OLED)
- Autonomous vehicles (cars and trucks) will not be mainstream in 2018, yet computer vision, AI, and sensors will make a statement in modern day cars. This technology will be used to help evaluate seniors for safe driving, avoid car accidents of sleepy drivers, and keep you driving at optimal speed for aerodynamics with traffic. Incremental change to the end goal of autonomous vehicles.
- VR will expand the horizons of training for education and sports and enable people, young and old, to go to places and experience worlds from their imaginations without actually being there
- AR will surpass VR in actual valuable applications. From applications in healthcare for surgery training to maintenance in fixing parts on an aircraft to construction in laying a floor plan out to build
- Everyone will have a personal blood pressure monitoring device, a heart rate monitoring, and blood glucose monitoring. This may take a few years to get to each person’s home, but it was clear that these devices are ready and able to make a change in empowering individuals to be in control of their health.
- LPWAN technology specifically LoRa will become a household name among makers, hardware entrepreneurs, and IoT enthusiasts as a plug and play network for rapid prototyping applications and a sustainable platform for development
- Diji is no longer the big name for drones. With over 100 other drone companies, niches will appear in utility drones, photo and video drones, sport drones, even underwater drones.
- Wireless power will show itself in useful big markets like electric vehicles. Wireless power will become the new wireless charging, but will take some time. This will become powerful for the IoT devices in the next 5-10 years where devices will just use electromagnetic resonance for power instead of wired or wireless.
- Robotics will become a reality. Not for anything useful like in movies, but in teaching children how to code. It will start there and get the new generations excited and open to robots, then move into other applications. Kids will learn to program robots to do certain things and learn the value of automation through block coding.
- Voice will be the new interface. I am not sure how this one will play out as I believe there are a lot of security and privacy concerns here, but do know voice-as-a-UI will be in the news this year often.