11 Virtual Reality Shopping will be more common in the future

A major retailer opened a virtual store in one of Korea’s railway stations which allows you to order by taking pictures of the barcodes and your purchases will be delivered home.

The retailer, Homeplus, installed six screen doors with life-size pictures of shelves filled with items you’d buy from a supermarket. Below the each item is the relevant barcode which can be scanned and sent via the app. You could place the order at the station when you go to work and the items will be delivered to your home at night.(source)

12 Self-Driven Cars

By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 10 million self-driving cars bringing down the number of deaths by 2,500 between the years 2014 and 2030.

Many car manufacturers have already started or are going to start adding some level of self-driving features to the cars they are manufacturing. There are also many tech companies that are looking to develop their own technologies for self-driving cars, like Google, which has recently announced a driverless prototype car. There are both completely autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle types, and the fully-autonomous ones are set to debut by the year 2019.(source)

13 Domed cities

Currently Dubai is building a 4.3 mile pedestrian mall, called “Mall of the World”, covered with retractable dome that helps control the climate inside and provide air conditioning.

The project covers an ambitious 48 million square feet pedestrian mall under an air conditioned dome. The attraction will include a 3 million square feet wellness center, a cultural celebration district, serviced apartments and hospitality sections that have as many as 20,000 hotel rooms. It is set to be the world’s largest mall with an indoor theme park.(1, 2)

And we can expect more of such projects in a near future.

14 “Artificial Leaves” that convert CO₂ and sunlight into fuel

Scientists have developed new solar cells that can convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and convert it into fuel using sunlight.

Though there have been many successful attempts at converting carbon dioxide into something useful, this is the first time a viable method has been developed. Unlike other techniques that require precious metals like silver, this method uses tungsten based material that is 20 times cheaper and works 1,000 times faster. These solar cells can use the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce synthetic gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide, which can be directly burned or converted to hydrocarbon fuels. (source)

15 Plasma force field that can protect vehicles from accident and blast impacts

Boeing has patented a method to create a plasma field by rapidly heating up air to absorb shockwaves.

The force field could be generated by firing converging lasers or microwave beams. The created plasma is the air heated to a higher temperature than the surrounding air with different density and composition. Boeing believes that it would be able to reflect, divert or absorb the energy that a blast would generate protecting whatever is on the inside of the field. If the technology is realized, it could be a revolutionary development in military.(source)