What were the hottest technological innovations in 2021? As it turns out, some of them will surprise you. Our list of technological advances we believe made a real difference in solving significant problems. How did we pick? We avoided the one-off tricks and instead looked for those breakthroughs that will truly change how we live and work.
Here are the highly effective and potentially revolutionary tech innovations launched this year.
Unhackable Internet
Scientists have gotten one step closer to a quantum internet by creating the world’s first multi-node quantum network; an internet will enable secure communication.
Scientists at the quantum research institute QuTech in the Netherlands built the first-ever multi-node quantum network, a system made up of three quantum nodes entangled by the laws of quantum mechanics that govern subatomic particles. It is the first time that more than two quantum bits, or qubits, that do the calculations in quantum computing have been linked together as nodes or network endpoints.
The nodes can store and process qubits and the researchers have provided a proof of concept that quantum networks are not only achievable but capable of being scaled-up in size eventually to provide a quantum Internet. Messages sent over this network can’t be hacked.
Researchers expect the quantum network to have immense potential in computing applications that can’t be performed by existing devices, such as faster computation and improved cryptography.
AR/VR Become A Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are getting advanced and innovative — there’s a sensory hijacking of our faculties to deepen the sense of immersion. And although VR makes gaming amazing, the effects of the transformation of this technology are far broader, touching on all aspects of our lives — planning roads and buildings, testing autonomous vehicles and education.
For example, Engage’s platform is used by Facebook, HTC, and the European Commission to enable remote learning during the pandemic. Nvidia’s Omniverse project helps create realistic virtual spaces for real-world purposes. The platform combines the real-time ray-tracing technology of the brand’s latest graphics processing units with an array of open-source tools for collaborating live in photorealistic 3-D worlds. Architects like Foster + Partners use the tech to visualise building details earlier in the design process. Even BMW Group is using Nvidia Omniverse to design a complete digital twin of an entire factory that can be used to simulate 31 factories, enabling the company to test more efficient assembly-line possibilities.
Hyper-Driving EVs
Electric vehicles (EVs) are expensive, and you can drive them only a few hundred miles before they need to recharge, which takes far longer than filling gas. All these drawbacks have to do with the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. QuantumScape made EVs far more palatable for the consumers by unveiling a lithium-metal battery — it could boost the range of an EV by 80 per cent and can be rapidly recharged.
Even Singapore-based SES launched a lithium-metal battery big enough to power a car — the battery cell has more than 100 amp hours, or units of charge. The average capacity of a lithium-ion battery cell in EVs today ranges from 50 to 120 amp hours.
Automakers, cell manufacturers and startups are spending huge amounts of money to pursue battery breakthroughs that could dramatically speed up EV adoption. The next challenge will be successfully commercialising these offerings.
Securing Real-Time Data Sharing
Designed to be a vendor-neutral way to share data with any cloud infrastructure or SaaS product, so long as enterprises have the appropriate connector, Databricks’ Delta Sharing is the industry’s first open protocol for secure data sharing.
With companies going multi-cloud and the rise of cloud data warehouses, there are big challenges in terms of data availability. Data engineers spend a lot of time just moving/copying the data to make it accessible, queryable in a cost-efficient and secure manner in different places. Delta Sharing aims to solve this by storing “once” and reading it anywhere.
The tool is designed to work with multiple cloud infrastructure and SaaS service, including the Big Three cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as data visualisation and management vendors like Qlik, Starburst, Collibra and Alation and data providers like Nasdaq, S&P and Foursquare.
The Eagle Has Landed
IBM launched its largest quantum processor to date Eagle, which has 127 qubits. The Eagle is the first quantum chip to pack in more than 100 qubits of processing power indicating that quantum computing is approaching maturity. This is a large enough cluster to perform calculations that cannot be made by traditional computers in a reasonable time frame.
What it means for technology leaders in industries such as pharma and financial services, is that it is time to get to grips with quantum computing.
The increased qubit count will allow users to explore problems at a new level of complexity when undertaking experiments and running applications, such as optimising machine learning or modelling new molecules and materials for use in areas spanning from the energy industry to the drug discovery process.
Eagle is the first IBM quantum processor whose scale makes it impossible for a classical computer to reliably simulate.
Hit Me With Renewable Heat
Heating and cooling generation account for nearly 40 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the energy used to produce them represents the second largest expense for businesses, after labour. Heavy industry and large companies both necessitate huge amounts of heat and cooling to maintain daily operations.
VirtuPVT, a British startup, developed technology that produces heat and power from combining solar photovoltaic and solar thermal sources. With its vacuum tube technology, VirtuPVT can deliver peak efficiency of 80 per cent, converting 20 per cent of the sun’s energy captured to electricity and 60 per cent to heat.
Big Data Privacy Got Cheaper
Computer scientists at Rice University discovered an inexpensive way for tech companies to implement a rigorous form of personal data privacy when using or sharing large databases for machine learning (ML).
There are many cases where ML could benefit society if data privacy could be ensured, but as of today, data privacy methods do not scale.
The scientists hope to change that with a new method. Using a technique called locality sensitive hashing, the scientists found they could create a small summary of an enormous database of sensitive records. Dubbed RACE, their method draws its name from these summaries, or “repeated array of count estimators” sketches.
The scientists said RACE sketches are both safe to make publicly available and useful for algorithms that use kernel sums, one of the basic building blocks of ML, and for ML programs that perform common tasks like classification, ranking and regression analysis. RACE could allow companies to both reap the benefits of large-scale, distributed ML and uphold a rigorous form of data privacy called differential privacy.
Ads-Free Search
Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former head of Google’s search and advertising products, has inverted Google’s business model from ads to subscriptions. When using Neeva, users won’t have to surrender their data, as they do for free search engines like Bing and Google. Launched in June, Neeva offers an ad-free and private search experience starting at $4.95 a month and offers apps for Android, iPhone and iPad, and extensions for browsers. As expected, since its launch, the search engine has garnered positive reviews. As Google comes under more scrutiny than ever before, search engine startups such as Neeva are carving out a space for a million people who care enough about the way search works and the way their data is collected and used.
Zip And Zoom
Get ready to see high-speed electric vehicles in racing. The S1-X is not your average electric scooter — it can go 100 kmph. The sleek new machine, designed to leave the clunky scooters around streets in the dust, is a race vehicle built by YCOM, a motorsport technology firm. The S1-X has inflatable tyres, a 1.5 kilowatt hour battery and a carbon fibre chassis. And, of course, a steady, noiseless ride.
At the Glasgow Climate Summit, Hitachi Astemo presented a new compact, lightweight in-wheel driving system for EVS. The system combines a motor, inverter and brake in one unit. The new in-wheel system is intended to make the motor lighter, as well as reduce energy loss by 30 per cent and increase the range on a single charge, compared to existing electric cars.
Change Of Power
Hydrogen has always been a possible replacement for fossil fuels — it burns cleanly and is a good way to store power from renewable sources. But most hydrogen up to now has been made from natural gas; the process is dirty and energy intensive.
Green hydrogen is different. It is produced through electrolysis, in which machines split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with no other by-products.
Siemens Gamesa’s Brande Hydrogen produced its first green hydrogen, enabling research into how to develop an island-mode capable system of offshore hydrogen production at turbine level. Siemens Gamesa is exploring whether integrating new battery technology as an upgrade to the co-located turbine and electrolyser can contribute to grid stability and help address issues around the variability of wind. The combination has the potential to expand the output of existing wind projects.
Batteries can store energy in a way that allows electrolysers to run for longer and produce more green hydrogen. If there is a grid connection, the batteries can distribute the renewable energy to the grid rather than the electrolyser when conditions allow, easing bottlenecks and providing flexibility. The battery, turbine and electrolyser setup has the potential to enable the production of industrial-scale volumes of green hydrogen in the near term.
Glasses Of The Future
We are slowly creeping up on replacing PCs, well at least laptops, with something wearable. Lenovo launched ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses, one of the most exciting tech innovations of 2021. The smart glasses are designed to improve remote collaboration — it allows one to hook into a smartphone or computer and expand the view into something that exceeds office monitor setup.
Instead of turning on a monitor, you may simply don a pair of Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses, and the high-definition displays built into the lenses (it uses Qualcomm’s XR-1 SmartViewer) will show as many as five different virtual desktops. It lets you multitask between spreadsheets or pages using a standard keyboard or trackpad, while listening to a podcast through the headset’s built-in speakers.
Real-Time Animation
Nvidia launched Audio2Face — an impressive looking auto rigging process – that runs within Nvidia’s open real-time simulation platform Omniverse. It has the ability to take an audio file, and apply surprisingly well matching animations to the included Digital Mark 3D character model. The chipmaker has implemented a deep neural network that matches the facial animations to the audio in real time.
Nvidia boasts that the tool will eventually work with all languages. It also supports import-export with Unreal’s Metahuman Creator tool for the creation of virtual beings.
The usefulness of software like Audio2Face to the metaverse is clear — Microsoft recently said that its Teams meetings software will soon incorporate digital avatars, which will be animated in real time according to users’ speech.
But real-time facial animation increasingly has applications from video game characters to virtual beings and the pipelines of traditionally animated shows. Lip synching is a time-consuming aspect of animation, and Nvidia is hoping that studios adopt it as a time-saving tool.
Flattening The Sphere
For centuries, mapmakers fretted over how to accurately display our planet on anything other than a globe. This year, a fundamental re-imagining of how maps can work has resulted in the most accurate flat map ever made, from a trio of map experts: J. Richard Gott, Robert Vanderbei, and David Goldberg.
Their new map is two-sided and round, like a vinyl LP, that shows both sides of the globe. It breaks away from the limits of two dimensions without losing any of the logistical convenience — storage and manufacture — of a flat map.
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