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many developers are concerned about the dangers (physical, mental, or cultural) of asking their audiences to strap on a vision-obscuring headset for hours at a time. 

Long-time game designer and current Google game design chief Noah Falstein's personal favorite is "transmogrified reality" --  an approach to game design that relies on new 3D-sensing phones and tablets, combined with inexpensive head mounts, to seamlessly integrate the virtual with the real.

The term “enhancing underwear” might summon images of go-go-gadget pants that help you run faster and jump higher, but it actually refers to a new breed of briefs that promise you a bigger bulge. Push-up bras and “butt-lifters” have long been a staple of women’s lingerie aisles, but genital scaffolding has now spread to menswear. Featured in the V&A exhibition, the “Wonderjock” is the work of Australian company AussieBum and aims to do for men’s bits what the Wonderbra did for women’s busts – hoisting them up and thrusting them out.

US army researchers have developed smart underwear, with sensors secreted inside elastic waistbands that track heart rate, body temperature and perspiration, and beam the stats back to a central monitor. This “wear-and-forget” sensory system is also designed for stressful training situations, identifying which soldiers remain more balanced, so they can be picked for the harder missions.

Underwear is already a common place for smuggling drugs of the illegal variety, but a recent pharmaceutical innovation could soon make putting pills in your pants a legitimate activity. Swiss textile giant Schoeller has developed a fabric that administers drugs to the surface of your skin over time, and thinks the best place to put it is in your undies – as those are the garments you’re least likely to forget to put on.

The latest new concept design is called Skreemr, which -- if developed -- supposedly would carry 75 passengers from London to New York in 30 minutes

unlike rockets, scramjet engines would burn oxygen from the atmosphere instead of having to carry heavy tanks full of oxygen

A hybrid rocket and jet engine is being developed by Reaction Engines with joint funding by the UK and BAE Systems, which could one day lead to a new supersonic airliner

body of the concept car is designed to maximize aerodynamic efficiency and is constructed primarily out of recycled materials

BMW has also eliminated to wood and leather from the its interiors to promote sustainable manufacturing.

The BMW design study also incorporates full autonomous and manual driving modes, called "Ease" and "Boost" modes.

collaboration of architecture and design firms consisting of MKThink, Concordia, and DSK are creating what the developers call "a full service community, where the school district and city work cooperatively to improve access to learning and opportunities to all members of the community through a highly coordinated City/School partnership.”

The local community contributed heavily to the school design. "I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and there’s never been a project that I’m aware of that has required and gone through such an open and transparent communication process with the community,"

The design team drew inspiration for its "school as the center of community" project from the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ)

From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.

The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better

The popularity of wearable health trackers, such as Fitbit, Jawbone UP, and Nike FuelBand, have created a problem

Hardly anyone has developed algorithms that derive actionable insights from the data that your body generates, and the dashboards are separate

Samsung is not planning to release a wearable health monitor to consumers, but expects other developers to build on the reference design shown today.

Waverly Labs says they will soon release the Pilot, a pair of in-ear translators designed to let people who speak different languages understand each other in real-time

The technology makes use of an embedded app that does the translating, which is delivered to the earpiece that is shared by two people. The Pilot is also supposed to come with an additional earpiece for wireless streaming music and an app that allows people toggles between languages.

The company intends to develop support for European and Germanic languages first, but the Slavic Semitic, Hindi, and East Asian languages are not too far behind.

whole countries such as Mauritius and Tuvalu will need to evacuate due to rising sea levels. But while coastlines in much of the world may suffer, climate change will be a positive development in some areas. Specifically, Canada; northern Europe; Russia; Alaska; Patagonia, Argentina; and southern Africa may all experience real estate booms.

Continuing with the New York example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently proposed a $20 billion climate change plan for the city.

The plan is designed to mitigate damage from another Sandy-sized storm and would drastically change everyday life for New Yorkers, with sharply increased taxes and large construction projects in most seaside neighborhoods.

"Since about 1955 ... children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children's activities,"

It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults.

Gray sees the loss of play time as a double whammy: we have not only taken away the joys of free play, we have replaced them with emotionally stressful activities. "[A]s a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, setting almost designed to produce anxiety and depression."

making robots look like humans or cute animals, we may develop emotional affinity toward the machines

. This could help promote trust with users—but perhaps also overtrust?

Robots are tools, but they are tools that sometimes hold meaning for people that interact with them, or through them, as when robots are teleoperated at a distance

that allows people to play games with each other in real time using their hands, even if they aren't in the same room.

and down to simulate completely different worlds — outer space, under water and so on."