http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/technology/personaltech/standouts-in-tech-drones-virtual-reality-instant-translation-and-ai.html 2015-01-01 01:36:28 Standouts in Tech: Drones, Virtual Reality, Instant Translation and A.I. Farhad Manjoo picks four products from 2014 that are bringing the future closer. === LOTS of cool new technology products come out every year, but usually only a few stand out. These few, though, are often mind-bending — they alter your perspective of what’s possible in the future. There were four such technologies for me in 2014: DJI INSPIRE 1 Romeo Durscher, a drone pilot who works at DJI, let me take control of the Inspire 1 during a test flight over the San Francisco peninsula just before Thanksgiving. As he described all the serious uses for the bird — especially for photographers and videographers who’ve long yearned for a cheap alternative to helicopters for aerial imagery — I became hooked. It’s hard to think of a more visceral pleasure in tech than a machine that can dart across the sky at your will. Welcome to the terrifying thrill of the drone age. OCULUS RIFT’S CRESCENT BAY One huge problem in virtual reality is motion sickness. If your eyes see a picture that looks just slightly out of sync with your perception of motion, you’re going to feel a little queasy. In September, Oculus showed its latest prototype, Crescent Bay, that can track a user’s head in a complete 360-degree swivel, allowing for a sense of being immersed in a picture that observers called “ SKYPE But it goes deeper. In Skype Translator is the product of Microsoft’s deep investments in machine learning and natural-language processing. Because those processes only get better as more people use them, services like Skype Translator are bound to get much better. GOOGLE But if you’re a computer, translating such an image into words has long been out of reach. Until now. In November, Google The system uses a neural network, an artificial intelligence system that mimics the human brain, and which Google has used, in the past,