Tech is changing rapidly as the future becomes the now. While our current reality is made up of touch screen phones and 3D TV’s, back in the 90’s when the Internet was only emerging and a cell phone was considered a privileged luxury, these concepts seemed a distant future. Today SheBytes brings you some of the most awaited and overly ambitious concepts we can’t wait to see live.
The current smartphone market resembles a battlefield between iPhone and Android devices, which according to “Inman News” make up nearly 75% of the market. RIM’s Blackberry is currently working hard to regain its market stability after 4.5 percentage decline to 17.2%. In order to regain its consumer base RIM is desperately trying to keep up with current market trends, therefore a lot of resources are being spent on coming up with concepts that could turn around the current situation. The “Empathy” smartphone concept is something we would love to see hit the shelves in the near future. Empathy is a concept that was put together by “Art Center College of Design” and it features a freshly revised look for upcoming Blackberry handsets.
Potentially this type of handset would be able to read users emotions, and map out their emotional states in a colored ring social map. It would basically enable you to go through your phonebook and see which friend is worth calling , and which is better to hold out on depending on their emotional state. While current Blackbery devices are traditionally known to have smooth, rounded edge design, this concept is given an edge with more angular design. The handsed would also feature a large touchscreen interface that would turn transparent in stand by mode. At the moment unfortunately “Empathy” is just a concept, however the technologies it feature are currently being developed and will find its way into our daily lives in the near future. However, the way things are currently looking for RIM, its in their best interest to speed up the process to be able to overtake the current smartphone race.
Oasis Intelligent Kitchen Concept
Our current lifestyle is filled with a range of gadgets to make our life’s everyday tasks more efficient, from smartphone’s that include hundreds of different features, to our dog’s feeding bowl that has an inbuilt feeding timer. The Oasis intelligent kitchen is a concept designed by Yifei Li, that wants our favorite part of the house to make the food preparation and consumption processes an even more pleasurable experience. With features ranging from a sink self-cleaning system to an integrated water tank, Oasis kitchen concept is designed in a way to make your home a lot more environmentally friendly and to have food preparation time decreased to a minimum. The concept also features a vegetable cultivation area, where one could grow their own groceries and fresh herbs. Other features include hidden storage units, hidden stove, wine freezer, recycling system and a rotating stove surface.
While some of these features are already offered by hi-end kitchen manufacturers, within the next generation this is potentially how an average kitchen could look.
With female consumers growing more and more technologically aware each day, its a natural process for tech designers to start basing their design around female tastes and preferences. Currently smartphones are becoming thinner, lighter and more flexible. This kind of evolution makes it more likely for a cellphone to begin replacing fashion accessories and jewelery. Philips’ latest concept, designed by Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata, branded “Fluid” is a smartphone that could be worn as a bracelet. Featuring an OLED touchscreen flexible display, it could be wrapped around ones wrist when in stand by mode, for comfortable mobility. That kind of technology could expand into a variety of gadgets that could multi-function as fashion items setting trends of their own. Who knows, maybe years ahead we could begin to see catwalk collaborations between tech companies and hi-end designers.
Mac Funamizu a “Reddot design award” winner, came up with a design concept of how internet search could look in the near future. With Google integrating features like image search and voice search into our daily “Googling” activities, this concept doesn’t seem to be too far fetched. With the tablet PC market being as competitive as ever with everyone racing to secure its own share of the market, technology is moving toward transparent tablet displays. Such mobile device would include features like touch screen, scanner, WIFI, camera, and all our favorite Google products (Google Maps, Google Search, Google Earth, etc.). You would be able to point your device at any object of your choice, for example a building as seen in the image, and you you would instantly see image search results come up with any relevant information.
This could be expanded into integration of your address book, calendars, navigation system and many other features. Potentially this could be a tool used for scanning documents, highlighting and saving information. With the tablet market growing and search engines replacing dictionaries and phone directories, this type of gadget could be as irreplaceable as a cellphone.
This is a concept that combines both current and future technologies in one. While DVD’s seem to be being replaced by memory space in the Cloud, some of us still prefer keeping a physical collection of our favorite Blu Rays and DVD’s in an almost old-fashioned manner. This concept features a built in DVD player and full-color flexible display. This technology (e-paper), is currently being developed by Mag-Ink in Israel. When in stand-by mode, it could be folded into a classic CD shape. E-paper is already looking to be the future of magazines, newspapers, menu’s and many more, this is an example of how this technology could be integrated.
While some of you might ask, what could be the use of such a player since current tablets can provide a similar experience, some still speculate that a 1080p Blu Ray still provides a higher quality picture then our favorite iTunes HD downloads. To most of us however it will remain purely a question of taste.
With the current IT market being at its most competitive point yet, everyone is in the race to come up with the next big thing. With distance between idea (concept) and its manifestation into a product, decreasing each day, we could potentially see all these concept make their way into retail, or our credit card statements in the very near future.
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