First up is Google Glass. While Glass is not commercially available yet it has been available to a few lucky thousand people who were invited and then paid a small fee of $1500 to have the privilege of getting the explorer edition of glass and basically being beta testers. For those of you do not know Google Glass is a wearable hands free smart phone, that you use your voice to control mainly and you wear like a pair of glasses. If you want to find out more about Google Glass and how it works I suggest you visit the wikipedia page for Glass here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
I think that Glass deserves a place of my top 5 because it is completely revolutionising the industry. Wearable technology really hit the scene in 2013 and is becoming more and more relevant with many big name companies making smart watches such as Samsung and Sony but Google has taken it one step further with Glass, as they like to do, and they have effectively made a computer that you wear as glasses. I hope that this will encourage development from other companies to try and compete with Google Glass and come up with other interesting pieces of wearable technology. Unfortunately there has been some controversy surrounding Google Glass because of the way that you could take photos and videos of people without them releasing. Google have tried to sort this out by releasing some information to the public which tells you how to be able recognise when people are recording or taking a photo. Google Glass is going to be commercially available at some point in 2014, there has been no official release date as far as I am aware. 
What many of us dreamed about as kids is finally coming to reality for us now with the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head mounted display. It allows people to play games with the head mounted display on, allowing for a true surround gaming experience. Although at the moment there is not a huge amount of games available for it due to games having to be specifically designed to work with it, more and more are becoming available as Oculus is creating a software development kit to help developers integrate their games with the Oculus Rift. While the Oculus Rift alone is very exciting I think add-ons to it such as the Virtuix Omni are more exciting. The Virtuix Omni is an omnidirectional treadmill and it works as a game controller with the Oculus Rift. This basically means that when you walk on the Omni then your character in game will walk, and when you run your character will run. I personally think that this is a great idea as it allows gamers to finally get some exercise while playing games. If you could get other add-ons such as guns, this would make games such as Call of Duty so much more exciting in my opinion and it would really enhance the game play experience. For reasons such as the Virtuix Omni is why I have included the Oculus Rift in my top five pieces of technology in 2013, because they are so innovative in the field of gaming and I feel that there has not really been enough innovation in this field for a long time,
Next up on my list is the Pebble Smart Watch. For me, this was the Smart Watch that really kicked it all off for smart watches. It was crowd-funded and is still the most highly crowd-funded project. The Pebble Smart Watch allows you to view text messages, e-mails, see who is calling you, and many other things on Android and iOS devices. There are also many different apps for the Pebble which allow you do more things on it such as music control and things do with fitness. This was the first smart watch that I heard about and so for me it was the one that has revolutionised the wearable technology market, along with Glass, and I think that this is where smartphones are heading, more wearable technology. The reason that it is my list not only because it was the first smart watch that sort of went viral, but because I think that it is still the best smart watch out there.
The penultimate item on my list is Nvidia's G-Sync. For those of you who are not PC enthusiasts you will probably not have heard of this and for those of you who are, you will probably have had the debate at some point between AMD's Mantle and Nvidia's G-sync. I personally think that G-sync is more important and with the first monitor being released with G-Sync now and AMD failing to deliver the first edition of Mantle in Battlefield 4 before there dead line of the end of 2013, I cannot include Mantle anyway. For those of you who do not know G-Sync is a small module that is attached to the back of monitors that helps with issue like screen tearing and skipping issues. From what I understand there was already V-Sync which helped with this issue but it also created a another issue which was input lag but because of the way G-Sync has been made, there is no input lag. Now I think that this is more important than Mantle because it affects every game were as Mantle will affect games where the game developers have bothered to add the Mantle API into the game and we have no evidence to tell us what kind of performance increases we are going to get from it; on the other hand G-Sync does not require developer support and although only a small amount of people have seen it so far, unfortunately I have not, the people who have seen it say that it makes it large difference. The downside is that you will have to buy a monitor that has the G-Sync built in which will be quite expensive. There is much debate over which will be more important and I will leave it to you to research and develop your own opinion on the matter but I think that G-Sync is one of the best pieces of technology that we have seen in 2013.
My last one is another Nvidia product, and no I am not an Nvidia fan boy, and that is the Shield. The Nvidia Shield is a portable gaming device that runs Android and so allows you to play all of your favourite Android games with a controller, but this is not the best thing about Shield. The highlight of Shield for me is being able to stream PC games to your Shield, as long as you have GTX 650 or higher. This works by using Shield as a portable controller and display for a game played on the desktop and some more complicated things that I will not bother explaining. It uses WiFi to stream the game form your PC to your device and because of this you would have thought that there would be quite a bit of input lag, however there is not. Since it has come out the Shield has received numerous updates with the best one, in my opinion, being the ability to stream games from your PC to your TV at 1080p, but you will not be able to do that wirelessly, you will need to get an Ethernet cable to go through the Shields micro-usb. This is the reason that I think it deserves a space on my list. It is revolutionising mobile gaming by being a great device if you are out on the go and want to game but then it is gives you a great experience at home playing on PC games on your TV using the device.Well there you have it, my top five devices that have come out of 2013. You may not agree with all of them and if you do not comment below or tweet at me and tell me why not at:
https://twitter.com/TechRandN
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