好英语网欢迎来到元宇宙：2022年四大技术趋势
Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in consumer technology to guide you through what you might expect to buy — and what will most likely be a fad.
每年，我都会预测消费技术的新变化，以引导你了解你可能期望购买的产品——以及最有可能引领风潮的产品。
Many of the same “trends” appear again and again because, to put it simply, technology takes a long time to mature before most of us actually want to buy it. That applies this year as well. Some trends for 2022 that tech companies are pushing are things you have heard of before.
许多相同的“趋势”一次又一次出现，简单来说，这是因为技术需要很长时间才能成熟，之后我们大多数人才会真正想要购买。今年也是如此。科技公司正在推动的2022年的一些趋势可能你已经听说过了。
A chief example is virtual reality, the technology that involves wearing goofy-looking headgear and swinging around controllers to play 3-D games. That is expected to be front and center again this year, remarketed by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other techies as “the metaverse.”
最主要的例子是虚拟现实，需要戴上傻乎乎的头具，挥舞控制器玩3D游戏。预计今年它将再次成为焦点，被Facebook创始人马克·扎克伯格和其他技术人物重新营销为“元宇宙”。
Another buzzy category will be the so-called smart home, the technology to control home appliances by shouting voice commands at a speaker or tapping a button on a smartphone. The truth is, the tech industry has tried to push this kind of technology into our homes for more than a decade. This year, these products may finally begin to feel practical to own.
另一个热门类别将是所谓的智能家居，通过对一个音箱喊出语音命令或点击智能手机上的按钮来控制家用电器。实际上，科技行业十多年来一直试图将这种技术推广到我们家中。今年，这些产品终于开始让人觉得具有实用性而值得拥有。
Another recurring technology on this list is digital health gear that tracks our fitness and helps us diagnose possible ailments. And automakers, which have long talked about electric cars, are beginning to accelerate their plans to meet a nationwide goal to phase out production of gas-powered cars by 2030.
此列表中另一个经常出现的技术是数字健康穿戴设备，它可以跟踪我们的健康状况并帮助我们诊断可能的疾病。长期以来一直在谈论电动汽车的汽车制造商开始加快他们的计划，以实现到2030年逐步停止生产汽油动力汽车的全国性目标。
Here are four tech trends that will invade our lives this year.
以下是今年将侵入我们生活的四种技术趋势。
1. Welcome to the metaverse.
1. 欢迎来到元宇宙
For more than a decade, technologists have dreamed of an era when our virtual lives play as important a role as our physical realities. In theory, we would spend lots of time interacting with our friends and colleagues in virtual space, and as a result we would spend money there, too, on outfits and objects for our digital avatars.
十多年来，技术人员一直梦想着在这个时代中，虚拟生活对我们就像物理现实一样重要。理论上，我们会花很多时间在虚拟空间中与朋友和同事互动，因此我们也会在那里花钱为我们的数字形象购买服装和物品。
“We’re in a world where people several times per day send out an image reflecting themselves,” said Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written extensively about the metaverse. “The next phase takes that visual representation and dimensionalizes it. You go into an environment and express yourself through an avatar.”
“人们每天多次发送体现自己的图像，这就是我们所处的世界，”风险投资家马修·鲍尔说，他写了大量关于元宇宙的文章。“下一阶段将继续采用视觉表现并更加具体化。你进入一个环境，通过数字形象来表达你自己。”
That sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. But throughout Year 2 of the pandemic, a critical mass of factors came together to make the metaverse more realistic, Mr. Ball said.
这听起来像是科幻电影里的东西。但是，鲍尔说，在大流行第二年这整整一年里，大量关键因素汇集在一起，使虚拟世界更加逼真。
For one, the technology got better. Last year, Facebook announced that it had renamed itself Meta after shipping 10 million units of its virtual-reality headset, the Quest 2, which was a milestone.
一方面，技术变得更好。去年，Facebook宣布在交付了1000万台虚拟现实头戴设备Quest2后更名为Meta，这是一个里程碑。
For another, many of us were willing to splurge on our digital selves. Hordes of investors bought NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which are one-of-a-kind digital objects purchased with cryptocurrency. Eminem and other investors invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to join a virtual yacht club.
另一方面，我们中的许多人都愿意为我们的数字自我挥霍金钱。成群的投资者购买了NFT——非同质化代币——这是用加密货币购买的独特的数字物品。Eminem和其他投资者投入了数十万美元加入了一个虚拟游艇俱乐部。
There’s more to come this year. Apple plans to unveil its version of a virtual reality headset, which will look like a pair of ski goggles and, for computing power, rely on a separate computing device that is worn elsewhere on the body. Apple declined to comment.
今年有更多期待。苹果计划推出自己的虚拟现实头戴设备，它看起来像一副滑雪护目镜，并且为了达到一定的计算能力，它需要在身体其他部位佩戴单独的计算设备。苹果拒绝置评。
Google has also developed virtual reality products for years, and Microsoft has offered a virtual reality headset for businesses and government agencies.
谷歌多年来也开发了虚拟现实产品，微软为企业和政府机构提供了虚拟现实头戴设备。
The metaverse could still turn out to be a fad, depending on what products emerge and who buys them. Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for the consulting firm Creative Strategies, said she worried that it could become a reflection of the privileged few who can afford to treat their digital selves.
元宇宙仍然可能昙花一现，这取决于出现什么样的产品和购买者。咨询公司Creative Strategies的消费技术分析师卡罗琳娜·米拉内西表示，她担心这可能会反映出有能力给数字自我花钱的少数阶层的特权。
“The boating market is dominated by white upper-class middle-aged men,” she said. “Will we just transfer all of that into the metaverse?”
“游艇市场的主要客户是白人上层中年男性，”她说。“我们会不会只是把他们转移到了元宇宙？”
2. The smart home.
2. 智能家居
Over the last few years, smart home products like internet-connected thermostats, door locks and robotic vacuum cleaners made major progress. The devices became affordable and worked reliably with digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
在过去的几年里，联网恒温器、门锁和机器人吸尘器等智能家居产品取得了重大进展。这些设备的价格变得负担得起，并且可以与亚马逊的Alexa、谷歌助手和苹果的Siri等数字助理一起稳定地工作。
Yet the smart home, for the most part, has remained chaotic. Many smart home products didn’t work well with other technology. Some door locks, for example, worked only with Apple phones and not Androids; some thermostats were controlled by talking to Google Assistant and not to Siri.
然而，在很大程度上，智能家居仍然混乱不堪。许多智能家居产品不能很好地与其他技术配合使用。例如，一些门锁只适用于苹果手机而不适用于安卓手机；一些恒温器要通过谷歌助手控制，而不能通过Siri。
The lack of compatibility has created long-term issues. An Apple-compatible lock isn’t useful for the family member or future tenant who prefers Android. It would also be more convenient one day if our home devices could actually talk to one another, like a washing machine telling a dryer that a large load was ready to be dried.
缺乏兼容性造成了长线问题。适用于苹果手机的门锁对喜欢安卓的家庭成员或未来租户来说没什么用。另外，如果我们的家用设备真的可以相互沟通，那将来会更方便，就像洗衣机告诉烘干机，一批衣服已经准备好要烘干了。
This year, the tech industry’s biggest rivals — Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon — are playing nice to make the smart home more practical. They plan to release and update home technology to work with Matter, a new standard that enables smart home devices to talk to one another regardless of the virtual assistant or phone brand. More than 100 smart home products are expected to adhere to the standard.
今年，科技行业最大的竞争对手——苹果、三星、谷歌和亚马逊——正在友好地配合让智能家居变得更加实用。他们计划发布和更新家庭技术以适应Matter，这是一项新标准，使智能家居设备能够相互沟通，而不管使用哪种虚拟助手或手机品牌。预计将有100多种智能家居产品遵循该标准。
“We’re all speaking a common language built on already proven technologies,” said Samantha Osborne, a vice president of marketing for SmartThings, the home automation company owned by Samsung.
三星旗下的家庭自动化公司SmartThings的营销副总裁萨曼莎·奥斯本说：“我们都在说同一种基于已验证的技术的语言。”
This means that later this year, when you shop for a product like an automated door lock, look for a label indicating that the device is compatible with Matter. Then, in the future, your smart alarm clock may be able to tell your smart lights to turn on when you wake up.
这意味着今年晚些时候，当你购买自动门锁等产品时，请寻找表明该设备与Matter兼容的标签。这样的话，在未来，你的智能闹钟或许可以在你醒来时让你的智能照明开灯。
3. Connected health.
3. 健康互联
Fitness gadgets like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, which help us track our movements and heart rate, keep getting more popular. So tech companies are experimenting this year with smaller wearable devices that gather more intimate data about our health.
可以帮助我们追踪运动和心率的Apple Watch和Fitbit等健身设备越来越受欢迎。因此，今年科技公司正在尝试使用更小的可穿戴设备来收集更多关于我们健康的私密数据。
Oura, a health tech company, recently introduced a new model of its Oura Ring, which is embedded with sensors that track metrics including body temperature to accurately predict menstruation cycles. This week at CES, a tech trade show in Las Vegas, Movano, another health tech start-up, unveiled a similar ring that stitches together data about your heart rate, temperature and other measures to inform a wearer about potential chronic illnesses.
健康科技公司Oura最近推出了其Oura Ring的新模型，该模型嵌入了传感器，可以跟踪包括体温在内的指标，以准确预测月经周期。本周在拉斯维加斯举行的科技贸易展CES上，另一家健康科技初创公司Movano推出了一款类似的戒指，该戒指将心率、体温和其他测量数据联系在一起，以告知佩戴者潜在的慢性疾病。
Medical experts have long warned about the potential consequences of health tech. Without proper context, the data could potentially be used to misdiagnose illnesses and turn people into hypochondriacs. But if the widely sold-out Covid rapid test kits are any measure, more of us appear ready to be proactive in monitoring our health.
长期以来，医学专家一直警告健康技术的潜在后果。如果没有适当的背景信息，这些数据可能会导致误诊并将人们变成疑病症患者。但是，如果广泛售罄的新冠快速检测试剂盒能够说明什么的话，我们中的更多人似乎已经准备好主动监测我们的健康状况。
4. Electric cars.
4. 电动汽车
Last year, President Biden announced an ambitious goal: Half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be electric rather than gas-powered by 2030.
去年，拜登总统宣布了一个雄心勃勃的目标：到2030年，美国销售的所有汽车的一半将是电动而不是汽油动力。
In response, major automakers are hyping their electric cars, including at CES this week. On Tuesday, Ford Motor announced plans to increase production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Later this week, General Motors plans to unveil a battery-powered version of its Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Other carmakers, like Mercedes-Benz, have shared plans for electric cars to be released in coming years.
作为回应，主要汽车制造商正在大肆宣传他们的电动汽车，包括在本周的CES上。周二，福特汽车宣布计划增加其F-150 Lightning电动皮卡车的产量。本周晚些时候，通用汽车计划推出其雪佛兰索罗德皮卡车的电动版本。其他汽车制造商，如梅赛德斯-奔驰，已经分享了未来几年推出电动汽车的计划。
While there’s lots of marketing hype around electric cars, those of us looking for battery-powered vehicles this year will probably still gravitate toward Tesla, Ms. Milanesi said. That’s because we have yet to see widespread deployment of solar power and charging stations for electric cars, especially in more rural areas. Tesla has a head start because it has been rolling out charging stations for years, she said.
米拉内西说，虽然围绕电动汽车有很多营销炒作，但我们这些想在今年买电动汽车的人可能仍会倾向于特斯拉。这是因为我们还没有看到太阳能和电动汽车充电站的广泛部署，尤其是在有欠发达的地区。她说，特斯拉之所以领先，是因为它多年来一直在铺设充电站。
“There’s so much from an infrastructure perspective that needs to happen,” she said. “So it’s a lot of talk, but I don’t know how much of a reality.”
“从基础设施的角度来看，还需要做很多工作，”她说。“所以有很多关于它们的讨论，但我不知道有多少会成为现实。”