2024-02-14 07:30:43
In a constantly evolving technological world, not all innovations always deliver on their promises. Despite enormous financial resources and phenomenal buzz in 2022 and 2023, certain projects or solutions still do not materialize.
The 2024 edition of CES recently closed its doors. Like every year, this show presents major trends in increasingly varied fields. But as in other sectors of activity, many projects or technological advances are delayed, or even put in the bottom of a drawer. This article takes stock of innovations that created a buzz at the end of 2022 or in 2023 and, ultimately, were not as revolutionary as announced.
Autonomous vehicles
This is one of the most publicized advances in recent years. However, despite promises of safer roads and increased efficiency, reality has not lived up to expectations. Technical limitations, regulatory challenges and public skepticism have hampered progress.
Equipped with different sensors to detect their environment and integrating artificial intelligence, these vehicles have made the headlines following various accidents.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) has long been considered the future of entertainment and industry. In 2022 and 2023, several companies had promised revolutionary immersive experiences. However, the high cost of VR equipment, limited content availability, and discomfort caused by prolonged use have hampered their widespread adoption.
As a result, VR remained a niche market and failed to penetrate the mainstream as expected. In 2023, the VR headset market will decline by 12% worldwide. This could be due to a lack of general public interest in VR. However, this failure must be put into perspective, because VR continues to progress in industry (to train employees) and health.
Already used by doctors to help them train and simulate operations, virtual reality is on the verge of becoming an essential tool in patient care: management of stress or phobias, etc.
The metaverses
The metaverse hasn’t really kept all of its promises. Despite the colossal investments of several giants, digital worlds accessible through augmented or virtual reality have not yet broken through. For example, Meta’s Horizon Worlds did not reach the 500,000 users expected by the end of 2022. Presented in 2021, the application only has around 280,000. Available only on VR Quest devices, this application should be accessible on smartphones.
These examples highlight the difficulties faced by innovators in bringing their ideas to life. Despite the hype and initial promises, these high-tech innovations have often failed to live up to their potential. However, it is important to remember that innovation is an ongoing process and that failures often pave the way for future breakthroughs.
Some have deployed enormous resources to finally throw in the towel. THE Windows Phone managed to “survive” for a few years before being taken off the market in 2017. While the Windows mobile platform remains a good idea and some aspects of Lumia worked well, the company failed to attract users iOS and Android.
It’s always easy to list projects that didn’t really come to fruition or were too ahead of their time. Nobody believed it. On June 29, 2007, Apple released the first iPhone on the American market. We know the rest…
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