In order to comply, more merchants will update their credit card terminals to accept these new cards. Those new terminals will likely also work with contactless payments like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. If that's the case, then ubiquitous support for contactless payments might be around the corner. At which point we'll ask: where do smart cards fit in?. Smart cards want to replace your wallet full of debit and credit cards with one dynamic smart card. Here's what you need to know. At least four startups are betting the world isn't ready for mobile payments.

Virtual-reality devices, like the Oculus headset, close us up into the a separate world, cutting off reality completely, Google's current version is Cardboard, a dirt-cheap take on VR that mounts your phone on your face with stiff brown paper, Then there's augmented reality, which overlays vinyl collection iphone case virtual things onto our vision, seeking to enhance the world around us rather than replace it, Google has already dabbled in AR, first with the Google Goggles apps, most famously with its wearable Google Glass , and most recently with its 3D depth-sensing Project Tango tablet..

Here's what could come next. Cardboard, Google's simple, nearly disposable and pretty brilliant virtual reality solution, is practically a novelty: a foldable cardboard set of stereoscopic goggles that you can put a phone into. It was handed out like a party favor at the end of last year's Google I/O developer conference keynote. It demonstrated how VR could be something cheap, ubiquitous, and ready to make right now, a counterpoint to more expensive, specialized gear from Oculus and other manufacturers.

This year, the quality of those affordable goggles, and of the apps, could ramp up: less hobby DIY, and more cheap, fun accessory, Mattel is making a Cardboard-compatible ViewMaster-branded toy that's coming out in the fall, Google could announce more types of cheap VR-goggle accessories, and also a more evolved collection of apps and experiences that Cardboard VR can engage in, Maybe Google will brand Cardboard into something more vinyl collection iphone case immediately recognizable, too: right now, many people I know outside of tech don't even know that Google Cardboard exists, or what it does..

Already, 360-degree panoramic videos -- both in 2D and 3D -- are one of the killer apps for VR devices that exist right now, but you need to have a spherical camera (a camera that shoots panoramic video), and an app to host those videos. Samsung launched Milk VR earlier this year, an app that shows a rotating mix of streaming videos on the Oculus-made Gear VR . Oculus' own 360 Video app does something similar. But YouTube could end up being the best place of all for future video content. YouTube could, and should, be a place where VR-ready videos are easy to upload, or even convert to be Google Cardboard-ready. It would make a lot of sense for Google to create and expand a Cardboard-ready area of YouTube.