Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking &amp; unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every Consumer product. All over the place, and some of them maybe invisible.<p>2) Custom silicon. Open source tools &amp; decentralization of fab tech (by countries not wanting to be subject to international trade problems... as well as Moore’s Law slowing) are gonna make this like making a PCB.<p>3) Electric airplanes. With wings. “Drones” as VTVL electric helicopters have been big for a decade, but there are physical limitations to that approach. if you want to see the future, look at drone delivery in Rwanda by Zipline. But also, I think we’ll see passenger electric flight start small and from underserved regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency) but much more granular and without massive infrastructure.<p>4) Small tunnels by The Boring Company and probably competitor companies with similar ideas. When you can build tunnels for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an urban surface lane, then why NOT put it underground? And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Gets lot of hate from the Twitter Urbanist crowd, but what TBC has done for tunneling cost (on the order of $10 million per mile) is insanely important for how we think about infrastructure in the US.<p>5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight.<p>6) Geoengineering. I’m not happy about it, but it’s insanely cheap so... it’ll probably happen.