As a mobile and web development agency, we are always on the look out for the latest and greatest innovations and ideas in tech and Mobile World Congress, held in the beautiful city of Barcelona, was the perfect place to find them!
We headed out to MWC 2018 last week and while the expensive stands, iPhone X knockoffs, shiny Samsung flagships and the push for 5G were interesting, here are some of the technologies and ideas that really caught our attention…
Virtual Reality is Viable
VR has been around for a few years now, but until recently any implementations of it have needed a significant investment in hardware and software to get a good experience. HTC’s Vive VR headset is an affordable way to experience VR. Their cooperative modes allow multiple users to connect and interact in the same world – which is really impressive. It is however a shame you had to look like a bit of a fool hiding behind virtual walls and shooting virtual zombies while crowds watched and filmed you…
Facial Recognition Knows When You Are Happy
We saw a number of companies offering powerful facial recognition solutions that can run off streamed video standard CCTV hardware. The accuracy of the recognition and the additional measures and categorisation such as gender and mood were surprisingly accurate – especially when reading the emotions of Scottish developers being sold to!
IoT Platforms are Gaining Traction
IoT was a big theme again this year with yet more creative solutions for home appliances. We even saw smart mirrors that tell you about your day while you are brushing your teeth! What really caught our eye though were the emerging IoT cloud platforms that allow your applications to much more readily connect to devices and sensors. We are really excited about this space.
Smart Cars are Really Exciting…
…but we aren’t really seeing them in the main stream yet. Other than some high end models, car manufacturers don’t seem to be rolling out all of the cool features that we saw at MWC this year. 5G is going to make a big change once it goes live though – with more throughput available, smart cars will be able to provide an effective way of utilising sensors and gathering data in smart cities.
Autonomous cars were on show at MWC too this year but we don’t think the technology is quite ready yet – it turns out BMW’s self-driving i3 can’t operate in the rain!
Plenty of Innovation to Go Around
We went along to the “4 Years From Now” hall this year and were impressed by the range of start-ups and innovative ideas that our industry is coming up with. It’s a great time to be in tech and we were inspired by the drive and passion of other small companies.
