Best tech innovations of 2017
Apple’s animated emojis are a breakthrough.
LOS ANGELES – When you can get a drone to respond to your commands by waving your hands, it’s hard to top that as one of the most fascinating tech innovations of the year.
You don’t have to know much about operating the DJI Spark Drone. Want to go up or to the side? Just move your hands near the drone. This is fun stuff that takes a lot of the learning curve out of flying a drone.
In a year in which Amazon’s voiceactivated Echo speaker was one of the best sellers and companies such as Amazon, Sonos and Google touted new voice-computing features, we saw the Spark as potentially opening the door to other gesture-controlled consumer devices. If we could wave commands for a drone, imagine putting those same sensors on TV sets, cellphones and video game consoles and all the different ways we’ll be able to communicate.
Flying cars get closer to reality
Speaking of flying, we don’t necessarily buy that Kitty Hawk Flyer is really going to launch anytime soon, but we love the concept: a flying boat-type vehicle from the co-founder of Google that can cruise over water. It looks like a giant drone, one in which the driver sits atop to navigate.
The company, backed by Larry Page, the CEO of Google-parent Alphabet, had originally said the unit would be available by the end of 2017. With just a few days left for the year, there is scant buying information available on the website, but the YouTube video that claims to show the flying vehicle in action is still generating lots of views, more than 3 million to date.
Kitty Hawk isn’t the only flying vehicle in the works. Both Toyota and Uber vowed to debut models in just three years. If that seems soon, remember that the Jetsons took place in 2062, so if the companies are a little late, they still have 40 years to catch up.
Self-driving cars take passengers
This year, automotive companies and technology start-ups turbocharged their self-driving car ambitions. But the biggest move by far came from Waymo, the renamed Google self-driving car outfit that in Phoenix launched the country’s first driverless car pick-up program. The twist: no humans in the front seat, eventually, to monitor.
It’s just the beginning. General Motors recently said it will introduce a ridesharing service with self-driving cars in 2019, two years earlier than rival Ford.
Microchips for humans
Love or hate the idea of a company implanting its employees, you’ve got to give it to the folks at Three Square Market for creating some buzz. It announced it planned to implant microchips in its employees in 2017. The idea is that employees could ditch company badges and just wave their chipped hands to enter the building and use their chips in similar ways to paying for stuff with our smartphones. The microchip was developed by a company in Sweden that hopes to spread more chips into all of us in 2018.
Amazon Key
Here’s something else we never saw before: giving a major tech company the actual keys to our homes. Amazon introduced the Key service to cut down on stolen packages.
You pay $250 (on sale now for $199) to Amazon to install a device that will let company reps drop packages inside the home.
The “Key” is a smart lock and companion security camera that gives access to the reps and watches over them when they enter the front door.
Animated emojis
We were in the camp that was underwhelmed by the iPhone X, Apple’s first redesigned iPhone since 2014’s iPhone 6. So it has a pretty screen, edge-to-edge display, no home button and facial recognition to unlock the phone. That’s cool, but the animated emojis, called Animojis, are the breakthrough.
Twelve animated characters, including a unicorn, fox and pig, can be used to create messages based on your voice and facial expressions (you laugh, the emoji laughs), only on the iPhone X.
Now that’s cool.