12 Futuristic Gifts for the Early Adopter

It’s a great time to buy a TV. Even 80-inch TVs with screen resolutions sharper than any content currently available are getting cheaper. This HDR-capable Sharp 8K set is only available in Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, but it’ll upscale 4K video to something that looks more like 8K—that’s 16 times the resolution of HD video. Seeing as a Sharp 8K TV cost $133,000 last year, the $7,000 to $15,000 tag on this set seems like a steal. Just fly your supersonic jet to a foreign land to pick it up.

After a long day of watching 8K TV and flying to a bodega in your drone, it’s time for a nice glass of Chardonnay. But you only want one glass, you’re droning to the Hamptons tomorrow for a week, and you don’t want to waste a nice bottle. The $1,500 Plum does all the opening, decanting, optimization, identification, and preservation for you. You insert a bottle, it scans the label, sets the ideal temperature, drills into the cork with its argon-emitting needle, and dispenses a measured pour when you raise a glass. The argon keeps your Pinot perfect for 90 days, and you can read about what you’re sipping on the web-connected touchscreen.

You can’t watch 32-megapixel moving pictures on your TV without treating your ears to the ultimate in surround sound. This $1,600 Yamaha soundbar handles both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X content—those object-oriented soundtracks in movie theaters that match up with action above, behind, and all around you. You don’t need to install speakers in the ceiling, either: The YSP-5600 fires a few channels upward, pinging audio off the ceiling and down into your ears. Just bring your own subwoofer, because this ‘bar doesn’t serve one.

That fancy soundbar is just going to wake the baby when you want a late-night jam session. For private aural bliss, cop these $55,000 Sennheiser cans. They’re way more than just a pair of electrostatic over-ears with impossibly thin slices of vaporized platinum vibrating perfect sound into your ears. Also included in the price is a V8 engine of tube amps, a control center encased in a slab of marble, and a motorized boot-up routine that gets all your senses ready to rock.

This list can’t be all moonshots and million-dollar playthings. Score one for practicality: If you’ve bought a MacBook recently, you might be struggling to adapt to a port-free future. This Satechi hub has several input/output options covered for the reasonable price of $45: Two full-size USB 3 ports, microSD and full SD slots, and a pass-through port for USB-C charging in a little slab that plugs into the side of your laptop. Don’t think of it as a dongle. Think of it as a bridge between the past and the future.

Real talk: Someone who can’t wait for 8K TV or supersonic private travel has no patience for shoe-tying. Or even manually tightening Velcro straps. The latest from Nike’s labs are these self-lacing shoes, but to get your feet in them, you’re going to need $720 and a trip to a Nike store in New York City. Motors in the soles loosen and tighten the laces once you press the integrated buttons, and the kicks juice up via magnetic induction points on their soles. A few hours of charging gets you two weeks of robo-lacing, accompanied by a light show.

One of the most beautiful phones ever built is a China-only release. The Philippe Starck-designed Mi MIX devotes nearly all of its front real estate to a 6.4-inch touchscreen, so this phone has no forehead: Its selfie camera has been relocated to the chin. Under the hood, there’s an up-to-date Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chip, an ample 4,400mAh battery, and up to 6 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. Surprisingly, it’s also really well-priced, with a $590 top configuration that costs less than most stateside flagships.

There are two flying contraptions on this list, but dude, where’s the car? It's not an oversight, we just suggest you print your own automobile with this gigantic $1.5-million 3D printer. The job should take less than a day: BAAM has already made replicas of a Shelby Cobra (12 hours), an Orion Spacecraft (two days), a dinette set (9 hours), and a kayak (3 hours) using carbon fiber and ABS plastic. The biggest version of the printer weighs 20 tons and is 12 yards long, and the DIY beast prints 80 pounds of material every hour.

Sure, your giftee may already have a VR headset (or five), but none of them are capable of replicating the $600 Fove headset’s marquee trick. Other headsets can track your head and body movements, but Fove knows where your eyes are looking. That means on-screen objects react to your gaze, coming into focus when you look at them and selecting menu items without having to operating anything by hand. The headset jacks right into your computer, and it works with existing SteamVR and Oculus games.

A positional-tracking VR headset is just a gateway drug. The ultimate accessory for an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive is this 360-degree treadmill-like rig, which lets you walk around virtual environs without knocking over your 8K TV or stepping on your $55,000 headphones. When it comes out early next year, it’ll run $500. But don’t forget the weird $60 bowling shoes, because they're essential for using the Omni. They have low-friction soles, which helps you virtual-walk inside the Omni's scooped-out bowl.