A tech news site can never run out of content because there’s always news in technology. Things change so fast. Companies like Apple seem to always be releasing new products and the rate at which technology products become obsolete is astonishing. The pandemic might have slowed down technological progress but since vaccines became available, technology has been advancing at a much faster rate.
As usual, technology usually has many hot topics. However, there are those trends that stand out, mostly because of their significance as well as how much they’ll change our lives now as opposed to in the future.
Here are some of the tech trends that have stood out.
Synthetic Media
Computers have become quite advanced and can now generate media that is impossible to tell apart from traditional media. This is true across almost all forms of media, from text and audio to images and videos.
To begin with, thanks to generative adversarial networks, you can create the face of a person who does not exist. Such faces are indistinguishable from real ones.
Next, thanks to a technology called Deep Nostalgia, you can breathe life into your fake face. The face can be made to mimic the actions of an actor, resulting in realistic footage.
In addition, you can have a computer generate a script for you. There are AI models that have been trained on a portion of the internet, say 10%, which can tell convincing stories. Of course, they have to be provided with proper guidelines and currently operate on a Garbage-In-Garbage-Out protocol. However, they are becoming smarter.
And finally, you can have AI programs do voice-overs for you.
Synthetic media means that it will no longer be necessary to go to a studio to create content. All you’ll need is an internet-enabled device.
Trust Architecture
Cryptocurrency has blown up, and with it the blockchain. Every tech news site must have talked about the blockchain in one form or the other dozens of times this year.
Thanks to the increased importance of the internet in today’s world, cybercrime has become a real issue. Proponents of distributed ledgers say that they are the key to improved cyber security.
Blockchain technology has continued to be implemented not only in the financial sector but also in other industries such as art. Non-fungible tokens are being used to verify the ownership of digital art.
Trust architecture comes with numerous advantages, among them improved security and lower security costs.
Distributed Infrastructure
If you own a company and you haven’t migrated to the cloud, you are missing out on significant advantages, including enhanced scalability and reduced storage cost. The migration of companies to the cloud has really caught steam in the past few years.
However, we’ve already moved to the next stage: Edge computing. More and more processes that were previously hosted on the cloud are now being performed at the edge. The internet of things is coming to life, with all sorts of devices being connected. But rather than the devices sending requests to servers in the cloud, they are processing data right at the edge, which is faster and more secure.
Vehicle to Everything Communication
Vehicles are becoming increasingly semi-autonomous and fully self-driving vehicles are in advanced stages of testing. However, to get to a world of fully autonomous vehicles, we’ll need vehicles that can communicate with everything around them. This is already underway and is being referred to as v2x technology.
V2x technology will enable vehicles to communicate reliably to pedestrians, infrastructure such as smart intersections and traffic lights, other vehicles on the road, as well as servers in the cloud.
This will ultimately reduce accidents for example at blindspots and enable self-driving vehicles.
Volumetric Media
3D scanning is all the rage across multiple industries. 3D printing has also found revolutionary applications. There was a time, not so long ago, when you couldn’t make a 3D scan of your truck without visiting a 3D media company and parting with a lot of money.
Now, however, 3D scanners are not only portable and handheld but also affordable.
What is more, with the fast pace at which smartphone technology is growing, smartphones will soon be a common 3D media capture tool.
And to make sure that the revolution of volumetric media is truly underway is Facebook’s move to rebrand as Meta. Meta will be dedicated to the establishment of the metaverse, a universe in which reality and virtual reality will be merged. This will see a surge in the production and consumption of volumetric media.
Conclusion
Technology is changing at quite a fast pace. Things that previously only belonged in scientific movies, such as electric cars and 3D printing, are now real. It’s getting difficult to keep up with all the new technology but one thing’s for sure, we are in for a wild ride.