boiMAG.com "Tech Trends"

AI is the “brains” that will guide the autonomous cars, boats, and aircraft that are set to revolutionize travel and society over the coming decade. 2022 should be a year to remember when we look back in the future and contemplate with horror the fact that we thought it was normal that 1.3 million people died of traffic accidents every year, 90% of which were caused by human error!

As well as increasingly effective autonomous cars, Tesla says its cars will demonstrate full self-driving capability by 2022, although it’s unlikely they will be ready for general use. Its competitors include Waymo (created by Google), Apple, GM, and Ford, and any of them can be expected to announce major leaps forward in the next year. The year will hopefully also see the first autonomous ship crossing the Atlantic, as the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS), powered by IBM and designed in partnership with non-profit ProMare, will once again attempt the journey (having been forced to turn back during its initial attempt this year).

We know now that AI can be used to create art, music, poetry, plays, and even video games. In 2022, as new models such as GPT-4 and Google’s Brain redefine the boundaries of what’s possible, we can expect more elaborate and seemingly “natural” creative output from our increasingly imaginative and capable electronic friends. Rather than these creations generally being demonstrations or experiments to show off the potential of AI, as is the case now, in 2022, we will increasingly see them applied to routine creative tasks, such as writing headlines for articles and newsletters, designing logos and infographics. Creativity is often seen as a very human skill, and the fact we are now seeing these capabilities emerging in machines means “artificial” intelligence is undeniably coming closer in terms of scope and function to the somewhat nebulous concept we have of what constitutes “real” intelligence.

The topic of Robotics is not new and has been steadily growing in the manufacturing and healthcare industry ever since more intelligent automation took off many decades ago. A lot of the robotics systems seen today are mainly hard-to-program stationary robots like robotic arms for welding, etc. The trend now goes into making these easier to program with machine teaching and getting these stationary robots on the move, which we see more and more with autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Predictions say that by 2030, 75% of the robots shipped worldwide will be mobile (6 out of 8 million). The Reply Network is at the forefront of this trend, being part of a few selected companies in the Boston Dynamics Early Adopter Program for the SPOT robot dog, which has been applied to interesting challenges with our clients. We also announced our deeper partnership with Microsoft and the reference architecture for autonomous mobile robots.

IoT and Digital Twins have been an ongoing topic for the manufacturing sector but now they are also entering retail, utilities sector, automotive and many other industries and their consumers. The topic becomes even more interesting with the bigger picture of Smart Spaces which market research companies also feature for their trends to watch closely. Smart Spaces are physical or digital places and locations with interconnected sensors to give owners, occupants and managers better information and how the system is leveraged. Smart Cities is a flavor that is often discussed where whole cities become smarter and allow for more resource sensitive usage. Smart spaces offer a great way across industries whenever traffic, people, robots and other machines require analytics and efficient management. Smart Spaces also tie into the Real-World Metaverse technology allowing to add a smart, digital layer on top of the world.

Spatial Computing is a favorite topic of our R&I team and we have been creating content around it for quite some time and will continue the journey, as it is still very much an emerging technology that will change how we interact with computers and the world. Mainly driven by AI computer vision and advanced sensors.

Devices can sense the physical world and provide more precise context for Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR) scenarios. Valorem Reply is a long time Microsoft Mixed Reality partner, and our experienced team developed many innovative solutions gaining ROI for our clients.

In 2021 a 30-year-old terminology gained new traction and became top of mind for many business leaders: The Metaverse. We also looked at the whole topic from a 10000-foot view in our November 2021 article and also mentioned the potential benefits for professional users with the Enterprise Metaverse. There’s currently a lot of hype and potentially a bit too much hype in particular on the decentralization web3 aspect of the Metaverse with NFTs. Aside from this overhype, we believe there’s real potential in web3 and the Metaverse, that will enable new beneficial experiences not just for consumers but also for corporations with their own branded Corporate Metaverse spaces. Another interesting flavor is the Real-World Metaverse, the AR Cloud, essentially a Digital Twin of our world, a digital content layer that is persisted and mapped to real objects and locations in the physical world. Virtual content can be anchored in the realworld, shared cross-platform, between platforms and over time.

It’s just the beginning of the Metaverse with the puzzle pieces of AI, Spatial Computing and decentralized protocols like blockchain becoming mature enough. We are deeply committed to this and recently launched a Metaverse landing page as we expect to see more gain this year, just like Forrester and the rest of the world are expecting huge growth opportunities here.

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