Recently a new term—nearables—has been popping up all over the place. Nearables work based on the concept of proximity or nearness, allowing two communication media to talk to each other. Rajini Padmanaban looks at nearables and their challenges, uses, and potential success.

Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and UC Berkeley are developing a vision-correcting screen that automatically corrects for vision defects. The idea is that eventually you’ll be able to clip the display onto your phone, tablet, laptop, or GPS dashboard display in your car—no glasses required.

Applications often house messengers, editing software, or other social functions, putting a great deal of pressure on a single icon to do a handful of things. Instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, developers are now splitting up products and introducing standalone apps to the world.