By akademiotoelektronik, 26/04/2022

These projects of the tech giants will revolutionize our leisure

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Umbrellas will refresh the air… and the drinks

Carlo Ratti may well run a lab at the very serious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), but this Italian urban planner has something of a modern Sunflower professor. Our man has just designed a most astonishing object: a giant parasol that unfolds like an origami, 3 meters in diameter, and covered with solar panels. Thanks to these photovoltaic plates, the shelter, developed with a large Italian ice cream maker, can not only charge a mobile phone, but also refresh the surrounding air and cool the drinks stored in an integrated mini-fridge. "The hardest part was finding a simple and elegant way to open the parasol," said a spokesperson. Only a dozen prototypes exist today, installed in the park of a Milanese library for the summer.

We will kitesurf pulled by drones

The rowing or pommel horse events will get a bit old... In 2023, Philippe Blanchard, former director of the International Olympic Committee, hopes to organize his first Futurous Games, a kind of tech Olympics. The list of official disciplines is still being finalized, but we could see kitesurfing competitions with drones, dance in weightlessness, pentathlon with exoprostheses… Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are in the running to host the event, ready to align a hundred million euros budget.

Virtual reality headsets will become glasses...

At Facebook, 10,000 employees work on virtual reality issues. And the first results are there. Last year, the group launched Oculus Quest 2, a lightweight immersion helmet (503 grams) at an affordable price (349 euros), which would have already made 5 million followers. Fitted on the nose, it is bearable for several hours and allows you to explore a video game or attend a concert. Not bad, but all the tech giants know it well: if they want to make everyday objects out of their gadgets, they have to make them even more comfortable to use. Associated with Ray-Ban, the firm of Mark Zuckerberg, as well as HTC, is therefore working on more practical virtual reality glasses…

According to recently filed patents, other players such as Samsung and Mojo Vision are betting squarely on contact lenses with a camera and screen... "We will have to succeed in convincing customers that a miniaturized battery in contact with the cornea does not cause biological problem", notes Nicolas Ribeyre, responsible for monitoring the Laval Virtual show. Not won.

The streaming giants will adapt to our moods

Today, Deezer, Spotify and other platforms recommend songs based on your previous listening. In a few years, they will be able to adapt to your emotions. Your connected watch will give them a heart rate or body temperature, and your smartphone's microphone will be used to detect in real time the slightest hint of joy or stress in your voice. All these data, crossed, will then allow an artificial intelligence system to propose the air adapted to the situation. “To offer such a level of personalization, you have to have cut millions of pieces of music into segments categorized according to their tempo, their orchestration, their “percussiveness”…”, explains Nathalie Birocheau, CEO of Ircam Amplify, who is developing a description tool automatic songs.

Disney parks will welcome all kinds of humanoids

The patents filed by Disney leave little room for doubt: humanoids will invade the aisles of amusement parks. The entertainment giant imagines all kinds of amazing robots. Some will take on the appearance of a cuddly mascot, with flexible materials and rounded corners so as not to hurt children. Others will play acrobats, able to fly over passers-by and string together spectacular pirouettes. Many, finally, will probably take care of welcoming and orienting the visitor: for a better interaction, they will blink their eyelids, cast glances at the approach of a tourist and manage to change the intensity or the direction of their gaze.

We won't waste any more time at the airport

At the CNRS, around thirty research teams are working on the subject: terahertz, waves that are still little exploited but promising. In telecoms, they will make it possible to transfer more data, faster: Samsung is already testing this frequency band to considerably increase the speed of its 6G technology. At the airport, they will save us a lot of time at the security gate. Thanks to their extremely through and precise radiation, these terahertzes will scan individuals such as suitcases faster and further. “Forget the excavations and the business to take out of the bag!, smiles Eric Freyz, director of research at the Laboratory waves and matter of Aquitaine. You will only have to spend a handful of seconds in front of cameras. Only downside, for now, this technology remains expensive and requires bulky devices.

The rides will reach 250 kilometers per hour

Thrill-seekers will be served. In Saudi Arabia, the giant Six Flags Qiddiya amusement park, under construction, should welcome in a few years the fastest roller coasters in the world: on a course of 4 kilometers, the train will peak at 250 kilometers per hour . A record that we owe to Intamin, a builder of rides unknown to the general public, but already at the origin of a host of howling machines in Europe and North America. For even more adrenaline, its R&D teams are working on water jet propulsion mechanisms for wagons or ultra-powerful electromagnet systems. "We can also imagine new materials to lighten the safety equipment, dream of a thorough individualization of the attractions...", outlines Branko Mamula, commercial of the company. Chills guaranteed.

Smartphones will spawn holograms

It's hard to imagine, but within a few years, with a simple phone call, you will be able to bring up the life-size hologram of your interlocutor. Thanks to a suitable glove, you will even have the feeling of touching it. Such a magic trick requires the compression of a large number of pixels and a great computing power, but, from MIT to the Microsoft research center, battalions of engineers toil to make this technology more accessible. A sign that things are progressing, and quickly, the start-up Leia Inc., a Californian nugget co-founded by French people, is going to launch a holographic tablet at just $1,000. The screen will allow you to watch movies or video games in three-dimensional content without having to wear glasses.

We will be able to dialogue with the whole world

This will make holidays abroad easier. In Mountain View, Google teams are developing a simultaneous translation system that will perfectly imitate our voice, our speech rate, or even our intonations. A real challenge. "Emotions and hesitations are not all expressed in the same way in different cultures," recalls François Yvon, CNRS researcher in the Spoken Language Processing group. In the meantime, without being as sophisticated, a host of solutions have recently been released on the market. Like the convincing Waverly Labs headsets: connected to your smartphone, they translate the words of your interlocutor live... With a slight lag and a synthetic voice, of course.

We will stay in luxury hotels in orbit

Let's be clear, the Earth-Moon summer crossover is not for tomorrow. But space tourism is no longer a pipe dream. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, offers a little tour in space with his brother, Elon Musk expects a first tourist mission by 2022, Virgin Galactic would have registered 650 candidates ready to pay 250,000 euros for a round trip in his shuttle... Result? Smart guys are already thinking about related businesses.

Japanese architects are working on a space airport, a French entrepreneur, Nicolas Gaume, wants to create a training center – for 30,000 dollars, volunteers will experience virtual reality travel simulations and parabolic flights to test weightlessness –, and NASA veterans are refining a prototype of luxury “hotel modules” to be implanted in orbit. "There will no longer be an international space station, but dozens," said François Chopard, head of the Starburst Accelerator incubator. Some could be dedicated to tourism, others to the production or storage of data. In the meantime, the Hérault company Zephalto soon intends to propel passengers in a stratospheric balloon at an altitude of 25 kilometers: more than 200 candidates have already pre-registered despite the minimum price of 100,000 euros. Test flights are underway.

The spectator will become the hero of the films

Tired of being disappointed with the end of a film? At the head of CtrlMovie, director Tobias Weber wants to allow spectators to decide, from their sofa or their cinema seat, the course of the story they are watching. The operation takes only a few seconds, via a smartphone app, and the majority of votes win. "For a one and a half hour film, we must have at least four hours of content to be able to feed the various possible plots", explains the artist.

Competing studios have already offered experiments and he himself has a work to his credit. But this is only the beginning: six feature films are in the works, including adventure films for Disney and Paramount. Another revolution should transform our movie sessions: the spread of deepfakes. Ultra-realistic, these images produced using artificial intelligence could bring deceased stars back to life on screen or substitute the face of the spectator for that of the main actor. It has never been so easy to play the heroes.