2021: tech innovation boom!

VR offers a way of transporting patients from one reality to another, allowing them to take time out from a threatening situation. In time, it can help patients develop new habits for problem resolution, by creating simulations of difficult situations.

The technology will be even more beneficial to mental health with the emergence of fully haptic VR. This technology will do more than fool our senses of sight, sound and touch - as VR does today. It will also emulate taste and smell, creating vast new possibilities for emulating reality in treatment situations.

Green Hydrogen

The development of green hydrogen will be a major area of innovation and investment in 2021 and beyond. Already, it attracts 14 per cent more investment globally, each year.

Green hydrogen technology uses electricity produced by renewable energy to extract hydrogen from water molecules and use it as fuel. It will be very helpful in cleaning up industrial processes that are difficult to de-carbonise. These represent fifteen per cent of the economy and include such sectors as long-haul trucking, aviation and heavy industry.

Saudi Arabia is building a futuristic city called Neom in the desert by the Red Sea. The goal is to power the city entirely using green hydrogen. Meanwhile, Germany is investing more in green hydrogen than any other emerging fuel-source.

Holograms

Until recently most people thought holograms were pure sci-fi, but even wifi was sci-fi not that long ago.

For the better part of a decade, holograms have been used in concerts featuring artists alive and dead.

The Coachella music festival 2012 featured a "live appearance" by Tupac Shakur, a rap singer who was murdered in 1996. He performed one song together with his (still living) friend Snoop Dogg, in a hologram created from the ground up by a movie CGI company. The cost? Something in the vicinity of $400,000.

Since then, other artists have been "resurrected" using holographic projection. They include Michael Jackson, Roy Orbison, Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline.

In 2018 Orbison's hologram was backed by a live orchestra on a national US tour, performing sixteen hit songs in each venue. Promoters love this kind of thing. It's so much cheaper to move a hologram around on tour than a real artist.