Eight things you need to know about the future of wearable tech

It’s all about wearables at the moment – talk to anyone in the know about the future of tech and they’re all like: “Wearable this, wearable that.”

It’s exciting, there has been some amazing developments in this technology over the last year, including smart contact lenses, and smart jewelry.

Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner, commented: "There are around a dozen crowd-funded projects competing right now in this area, with sensors built into jewelry for communication alerts and emergency alarms.

“Obtrusive wearables already already on the market, like smart glasses, are likely to develop new designs that disguise their technology components completely.”

Gartner have made some interesting predictions about the future of wearables, and the overall consumer technology market.

Eight need-to-know consumer tech predictions

1. 25 million HMDs (headmounted displays) to be sold by 2018

2. VR and AR will eventually be used regularly in a number of consumer and business scenarios

3. The sales of HMDs will boom when they are offered as fashionable, consumer level eyeglasses

4. Device adoption will also be driven by the introduction of higher quality and compelling virtual worlds and augmented real-world content

5. As popular as HMDs will eventually be, adoption rate will be nowhere near as fast when the smartphone was introduced

6. By 2017, 30 per cent of smart wearables will be completely unobtrusive to the eye

7. Fingerprint scanning will be the main biometric feature introduced by the majority of vendors, and feature in 40 per cent of smartphones by 2016

8. Facial, Iris, voice and palm vein biometrics will also emerge, but will remain niche products