What Will Christmas Look Like in the Future?

Santa Drone

Goodbye Santa, hello drone! Forget the big fella, soon drones will be coming down your chimney to deliver presents! The last stage of a delivery journey, where a package is delivered to the consumer, is currently very expensive and inefficient. Using drones could save businesses and consumers lots of money, and would significantly reduce the time it takes to receive your perfect presents. Sophisticated chimney-esque ​“drone shoots” could also grant access to the specified address, delivering packages directly to the safety of your home. No more queuing up at the depot when you’ve missed the postman!

Virtual Black Friday

Dragging yourself around the cramped and stuffy shops amongst the ardent Christmas bargain hunters may soon be a thing of the past. Virtual reality shopping will bring you all the clothes and gadgets you could ever wish for, live in the comfort of your own home. Pop the headset on to be guided around the products by a virtual shop assistant — who knows more about your tastes than you do. Pick the perfect lighting level and layout of the store for ultimate comfort, and even invite friends to the same virtual store to get their opinions. If you like the sound of it, make sure to attend The Big Bang Fair at the NEC next March, where you’ll be able to try the concept out for yourself!

Perfect Christmas Trees

Real Christmas trees are great – you get to pick them, they look unique and they bring that lovely Christmassy pine smell to the home. But isn’t it annoying when the pines start to fall off! Well, with advances in the Internet of Things, that can already switch kettles on and off, and remotely adjust heating, we could harness this technology to keep our Christmas trees looking perfect all winter long. Using an app we could control when the tree is watered, and make sure the air around the tree remains at optimum temperature, to prevent annoying pine needles falling off and getting everywhere. Any excuse to not pick up the vacuum cleaner over Christmas!

Programmable Christmas Decorations

Advances in OLED technology mean that lighting can soon be flexible, bendable, and transparent, whilst also being low cost and lightweight. OLEDs also allow for large area illumination, which can be customisable by shape, size, design and colour. With all these incredible features, it may be possible that our windows of the future could be entirely covered in OLEDs. Come Christmas time, this means that the OLED windows could be easily programmed to light up in all sorts of colours and patterns, with no need to untangle the lights and brave the winter weather! 

By using OLEDs alongside induction technology, which allows power to be transferred wirelessly, baubles on the Christmas tree could soon be programmable too! Perhaps in the future we’ll say goodbye to those arguments on ​“What colour theme should the tree be this year?” as we’ll be able to change the colour and design of the decorations every day!

Augmented Reality Family

In recent years, video chatting platforms have allowed us to stay close to our nearest and dearest, even if they’re on the other side of the world. Soon this could be taken to the next level, with augmented reality capabilities that could bring family members live to your living room. Pop on some AR glasses, and loved ones from all corners of the globe could appear around you as if they were really with you. The family can finally be together on Christmas Day, and, even better, if that one relation starts really getting on your nerves, you could even hide them from your view without them knowing!!

These ideas may seem futuristic, but thanks to the breadth of innovation happening here at CPI, we are actually only a few steps away from some of these Christmas technologies becoming a tangible reality. To find out how CPI is shaping our future world, make sure to keep up-to-date with the latest developments or follow us on Twitter.