2013 Predictions That Never Happened, and awesome gadgets that did!

It seems that we wait every year for the flying car to finally make it onto our driveway, while we might have a little wait for that awesome new form of transport to catch on, there have been some other predictions for 2013 that seem even more hilarious, in hindsight.

A year back LaMont “Monte” Hamilton – an ordained minister made some predictions on About.com for 2013, and he didn’t do so well.

Monte predicted that 2013 would see Immigration Reform, Telepathic Communications, and Peace in the MIddle East! Sorry Monte, I’d love to tell you to stick with your day job, but apparently this is your day job – so maybe find another one.

President Obama promised that 2013 would bring the end to all our healthcare worries with the Affordable Care Act: You Decide!

What we can learn is that if the people running Hi Tech companies would be running the world, we would have made some real progress on all those issues that matter, but instead we’ve been blessed with a flurry of cool and useful inventions that just seem to be getting better all the time.

Gigaom.com predicted that we’d start paying for our shopping with our iPhones in 2013, and that hasn’t really caught on yet. But, we have to give them some credit, they guessed that we would see, Dick Tracy style, smart watches,and the Samsung Galaxy Gear proves them right. They also guessed that Apple would have to divide their iPhone line up, which they did with the iPhone 5S and 5c.

2013 – Year of the SciFi Specs

The geeks at Google have done some really cool stuff, but if we’re talking SciFi, it has to go to Google Glass, which looks straight out of a Science Fiction movie. Google Glass, if you didn’t know, are worn like a pair of glasses, they have a small screen suspended an inch away, and slightly up from, your right eye, a camera, a microphone and a bone induction speaker. It’s handsfree Google, basically, allowing you to see your messages, search the web, communicate and capture new memories without reaching for your phone, ever.

OrCam an Israeli company created an amazing gadget that is a bit like Google Glass, but just way more useful! The OrCam attaches to the arm of a pair of glasses and also has a camera and some nifty speaker system, but it’s for partially sighted people. The OrCam can read newspaper articles, bus numbers and even recognize your friends, proving to be a massive savior for people with vision problems, and at $2,500 it’s a steal. Wouldn’t you pay $2,500 for the function of your eyes?

And for the completely Blind, well they’ve also been taken care of with the incredible ARGUS 2, which is another piece of wearable tech, these are just like a pair of glasses that are connected through a computer to an implant in the blind person’s Retina. Right now the ARGUS 2 is only able to send back simple images, but they’re very hopeful that this incredible invention will end up bringing a valuable visual experience to the blind. Star Trek here we come.

So 2013 was definitely the year for wearable tech, mostly on the head, but also on the wrist. What are your predictions for 2014? Just flying cars?