You wanna know what I think is gonna be the next big kickoff industry thing that nobody saw coming but changes the world anyway in ways that nobody expected? Hyperspectral imaging. So instead of just having 3 channels of light information like our puny human eyes are evolved for (Red, Blue, Green) or (Hue, Saturation, Value) or ( ratios of red versus green, blue versus yellow, and black versus white), they’ll be hundreds if not thousands of channels. Ideally , you’d have a smooth image across a huge chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just the visible stuff. So you could see exactly what specific wavelengths are being reflected,absorbed,etc. What’s so cool about this? You figure out what something is made of just by seeing its absorbtion spectrum. You can look at foodstuffs and figure out if there’s defects and other qualities just by looking at a hyperspectral image of it. Hyperspectral imaging of aerial photographs can let you tell exactly what species tree cover is made up, what kind of soil it is, what kind of minerals are in the ground, etc. You can take a hyperspectral image of that gross little mole thing that just popped up on your shoulder a few months ago, and see if its just an innocent mole or malignant cancer. if a bunch of the hurdles constraining the technology today (high cost, difficulty making a lens that can form image across large bands of light, large file size, difficulty with photosensors and being able to capture an image across tons of spectra in a brief enough moment it doesn’t blur) are leapt over, and it becomes something you can buy in a gadget for a couple hundred bucks, I very strongly feel there will be thousands of practical uses for it we can’t even imagine right now.