When AR takes over we will all rent virtual diamonds and have AI personal shoppers at home.

We live in a dematerialising world - all the objects that were once integral to our daily lives have been subsumed by computers and the internet, from our calendars to our books and all forms of communication. But that physical world, is not done disappearing, according to director of design at Singularity University Labs, Jody Medich. “All those things we thought essential materially, disappeared into the virtual environment,” she told the audience at WIRED Retail, at London’s British Museum. “They have all gone into the screen - but in the future, we are going to be looking through that screen.” Medich is talking about augmented reality, a technology that she says will be ubiquitous in five years time, whether through our phones, headsets like Microsoft Hololens, or AR contact lenses. Just to prove how commonplace we should expect the latter to be, all the big tech players from Apple to Sony have patents pending on the technology. “Sony says its version will record everything you see and play it back to you.” more