The tech that will change how we connect in five years
AR and VR and smart homes, oh my!
Amelia Kinsinger
April 17, 2024
The ’90s aesthetic may be trending right now, but one thing that’s never coming back is dial-up internet. We’ve come a long way from the once seemingly ubiquitous devices that connected us at home: Remember getting kicked offline when a family member picked up the phone to make a call? And of course, how could you forget the nostalgia of the family-room desktop computer, the Palm Pilot, and the Wii Fit? Ah, simpler times.
With buzzwords like AI and VR dominating tech conversations in 2024, it can be hard to tell which innovations will actually stick.
Tech Brew spoke with a handful of experts about the devices and applications they think will change the way we live and work at home in the near future. From AI-powered smart homes to higher-quality wi-fi, here’s a look at what they said.
AR/VR
Whether it’s training for a job or navigating a physical therapy session, immersive technology isn’t only for playing that scary rock-climbing game on Oculus. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed-reality applications will increasingly bring virtual experiences to our homes aimed at helping us prepare for real life, according to Liz Hyman, president and CEO of the XR Association, an immersive-technology trade group.
The global market for XR technologies was worth $31 billion last year, and it’s expected to reach over $100 billion by 2026.
“I often talk about XR, or, you know, immersive technology, as not just gaming, but that it is really playing a bigger and bigger role when it comes to healthcare, and education, and manufacturing, all different types of enterprise and industrial applications,” she said.
If the XR Association itself is a barometer, the industry is steadily growing. The group surpassed 50 members last year and counts Meta and Google among its ranks. According to the group’s 2023 state of the industry report, the global market for XR technologies was worth $31 billion last year, and it’s expected to reach over $100 billion by 2026.
One area that’s seeing particular growth is connected healthcare, Hyman said, bringing “the doctor’s office into the person’s home,” with companies like Mynd Immersive offering new ways for homebound seniors and caregivers to connect. For example, doctors can guide patients through “stretches and calisthenics or physical therapy…and they can actually monitor the progress while wearing a headset,” according to Hyman.
Workforce training is also a big area of growth, Hyman said, with immersive programs from companies like Transfr and Flaim now available to help train workers, from dialysis technicians to firefighters, on common scenarios they’ll encounter.
“If I’m…training to become a nurse, I can go into a virtual training session, and it will help me understand and practice how to intubate a patient,” Hyman said, later adding “If you can do that in a virtual environment, that frees up people to be in different locations…and to pursue different career pathways that they might not otherwise.”
Hyman said that right now, some of these applications are only available in an enterprise setting—think a medical school classroom or corporate training center. But in the next few years, she said, they’ll be getting closer and closer to our living rooms.
Wi-Fi 7
Speaking of dial-up, there’s a lot to look forward to as home networks get faster, providing support for a plethora of bandwidth-intensive devices and applications. Next on the horizon is Wi-Fi 7, a new technology standard that aims to give consumer routers access to more optimal spectrum bands and generally speed up traffic flows.
“Wi-fi has become almost a lifeline…It’s like power or water,” Sandeep Harpalani, product management VP at Netgear, told us. “The first thing that people look at [when] they’re traveling somewhere is, ‘Do I have wi-fi? Do I have connectivity?’”
On the flip side, when a home network is down, “you might as well take a vacation, because there’s nothing much that you could do at that time,” he said.
"A lot of these applications now, suddenly, have access to...almost limitless space and limitless computing power," Harpalani said.
The good news is that Wi-Fi 7 unlocks a channel that will be used by newer phones, laptops, smart TVs, and other devices that are tuned to it. While Wi-Fi 6E first made the channel available, Wi-Fi 7 will be “a lot more efficient in terms of data transmission, a lot more bandwidth available,” he said.
Harpalani compared it to “having an eight-lane highway” available for home network traffic that would otherwise travel on well-worn roads already clogged with congestion. Hello, more stable Zoom calls.
“A lot of these applications now, suddenly, have access to…almost limitless space and limitless computing power,” Harpalani said. “And that would really drive the next set of applications that we’ve been talking about.”
Applications—you guessed it—like the AR and VR innovations we already discussed, as well as smart appliances and even some electric vehicles that require an internet connection to receive updates.
“Initially, you may not have a lot of devices that support Wi-Fi 7,” Harpalani said. But as consumers upgrade their wi-fi routers and wireless devices over the next few years, the “slow transition” will become a reality, he said.
IoT
As the devices in our homes are increasingly connected to us and each other, expect the Internet of Things universe to keep expanding while also getting easier to control, Google Global Product Marketing Manager Jessica Kim said.
Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Nest were the initial gateway to smart appliances that provided ease of use, but the industry is now moving toward an ecosystem of devices that users can set and forget, Kim said.
“The next iteration of what that magic moment of voice assistants is, is actually automation,” Kim said.
For example, with Google Nest’s Home and Away routines, users can program their universe of smart-home devices to automatically detect when no one is home, switching the thermostat to eco mode, turning all the lights off, and flipping on the security cameras.
Smart homes will also increasingly incorporate AI to help a home’s devices work together more seamlessly. Kim pointed to Google’s Help Me Script feature, which can take a basic concept—for example, putting a smart doorbell on Do Not Disturb mode during working hours—and spin up code using generative AI that will have the desired effect.
Kim highlighted the push to standardize smart-home devices through Matter, a technology standard that aims to make smart devices interoperable across manufacturers and platforms. Allowing devices to work together in a way that almost anticipates a user’s needs will ultimately deliver the next “magic” moment for smart-home users, according to Kim.
“The whole idea is that a smart home is greater than the sum of its parts,” she said.