2013 was an interesting year in technology. It is becoming increasingly clear that smartphones and tablets have reached maturity, and that we shouldn't expect drastic new innovation on that front. Meanwhile, wearable computers continued to flounder, as no one seems really sure whether they really want a smart watch. There was some really exciting news, but it seemed like there weren’t that many truly breathtaking stories. Luckily, 2014 is poised to be a mammoth year for the tech community.

4. Google & Ray Kurzweil Begin to Create World Class AI

Driverless cars, augmented reality and with the recent acquisition of Boston Dynamics, world class robotics - in these areas and several others, Google is going outside the search business and into the making-science-fiction-a-reality business. While these projects are all huge, the most exciting Google moment of 2013 was when they hired legendary futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil to be Director of Engineering. Kurzweil is a renowned predictor of the future who brought the concept of the Singularity into the popular psyche.

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil’s first project will be to help create the ultimate digital personal assistant. Imagine having your own virtual secretary, one who could help organize your appointments and even carry out minor tasks for you. Yet it is quite obvious what Kurzweil’s long term goal will be — to create lifelike artificial intelligence capable of passing the Turing Test. Kurzweil has been a proponent of AI for years and even staked $20,000 of his own money on it happening by 2029. While I don’t expect massive breakthroughs in 2014, we should see a clearer picture of Google’s long term vision for AI, an event that’s important enough that I feel it warrants the #4 spot on this list.

3. The True Beginning of the Internet of Things

For years, the Internet of Things has just been another high tech buzzword thrown around by analysts, but not having much impact on the real world. However, a variety of factors are coming together to make 2014 the year that the Internet of Things begins to radically affect the way that we interact with the world.

For those not familiar, the IoT (Internet of Things) is the term given to the intelligent ecosystem that will arise once most everyday objects become digitally connected. Imagine a front door that unlocks as you approach it, a refrigerator that knows what food is in it or your alarm clock syncing to your coffee maker, making fresh brewed coffee as soon as you wake up every day. With the IoT, all of these things and many more are possible.

2014 will be a massive year for the IoT for a number of reasons. The first is the plummeting cost of sensors for devices. Moore’s law and the exponential gains in price-performance in sensors has finally reached the sweet spot where we will begin to see true consumer adoption. Compounding this will be the first wave of iBeacon enabled mobile apps. iBeacon is a new feature which Apple introduced in ios7 which allows an iPhone to be located to within a couple inches, simply by triangulating the phone between Bluetooth LE sensors. The combination of low cost sensors and Bluetooth LE will truly allow the IoT to take off in 2014.

2. Soylent Disrupts Traditional Food

Soylent CEO Rob Rhinehart found that working 12 hour days at a tech startup left him with little time or energy for cooking and grocery shopping. Instead, Rhinehart spent most of his days eating fast food and unhealthy takeout. Deciding there had to be a better solution, Rhinehart set out to reengineer the way we approach nutrition.

His solution was Soylent — a shake which contains all of the essential ingredients of a healthy diet. Rhinehart claims that Soylent will be able to offer all the nutritional benefit of a healthy diet, but without the grocery shopping and cooking — and it will only cost $5 per day (although currently the price is $9 per day). After an extremely successful crowdfunding campaign brought in $1.5 million in summer 2013, Rhinehart has been working hard for the consumer launch, which is expected in late January.

Soylent has proven to be quite controversial with some people saying that it “is everything that’s wrong with the tech industry, in one neat example. Dehumanization, ahistoricism, authoritarianism” (twitter user @umairh). Others simply claim that it isn’t that original, after all, meal replacement shakes have existed for years. However, Soylent represents a much more concerted effort to recreate a total nutritional product than current market offerings. And there are many exciting possibilities besides bachelor chow for time-strapped techies — Soylent could prove to be a game changer in the developing world as well.

The Oculus Rift Brings the Dream of Virtual Reality to Life

If you are reading this article, you have been dreaming for years about lifelike virtual reality. Being able to step inside a virtual world, one which is realistic enough to fool our senses into seeming real, has been a dream of many people for years. Yet after the repeated VR flops in the early 90s, it seemed as if lifelike & responsive VR was never going to happen. Now realistic VR seems all but inevitable, brought back from the dead by 20 year old tech prodigy Palmer Lucky. Lucky spent years collecting and tinkering with VR headsets, before creating his own. Lucky chose to fund his VR headset, the Oculus Rift, on Kickstarter. With the endorsement of industry legend John Carmack, the project quickly went viral, eventually getting 10x the amount of funding that was initially sought.

A man wearing the Oculus Rift

The Rift promises to bring true, immersive virtual reality to the market. Reports from people who have tried the developer kit state that trying the Rift is unlike anything that they have ever experienced before. Putting the Rift on and stepping into the game feels like a true VR experience — one tester said that he looked down over a ledge in a Rift simulation, and instantly jumped back in real life! His mind was telling him that he was in actual danger of falling down a virtual cliff.

In the 1.5 years since the Kickstarter, Oculus has secured nearly $100 million in VC funding and his put together a team of some of the top talent in the industry. They are working to make the ultimate VR headset, one with minimal latency and a sufficiently high resolution — the two biggest problems with VR in the past. They have made impressive progress thus far. It is highly likely that the consumer version, expected to launch in late 2014, will provide the richest, most immersive virtual reality experience in history.

Virtual Reality will do more than make video games more immersive. The potential impact, from education to business, are astounding. Imagine an architect being able to virtually design, then tour a new building. Or a class of students experiences the Ancient Olympics in breathtakingly realistic virtual reality. Virtual reality will change how we learn, do business and socialize. It will allow us to visit places we otherwise could not have (seriously — watch that video).

There have many notable years which were turning points for the tech community. 1993 with the introduction of the Mosaic Web browser. 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. It is very possible that the launch of the Oculus Rift in 2014 will be remembered as the start of the virtual reality era.