Gaming will be one of the first mainstream use cases, in my opinion. You may ask, what is the advantage of games on the blockchain? I will refer you here to a great post from the Decentraland blog, explaining what blockchain games are, and how they differ from traditional games. For the more technical folks, see also this post about NFTs (or non-fungible tokens). My favorite so far is 0xuniverse, if you feel like exploring the universe and prepare for interstellar battleships.
Virtual Reality is an interesting segment to cross over the blockchain. As all the applications being built on the new DLT technologies are accelerating the digital everything (particularly economy of everything these days), it only makes sense that the virtual reality will become more important and even necessary to give the “physical aspect” of all this, read more along the lines of “digital physical aspect”, a reflection of physical representations as we know them, in a virtual reality.
For example, a collection of digital art could be exposed in a gallery in which you could walk by, in a virtual reality.
Decentraland, is, in fact, building a virtual world called “Atlas”, open source built on Ethereum. “ Users can create, experience, and monetize their content and applications”. This is exciting because this is a pure combination of DLTs and VR, in other words, infrastructure/economy and visualization.
Communication between connected things (IOT applied concepts). Here I describe how in the future, cars could “cross-communicate” on the road.
Media art is another segment seeking to find a perfect fit in the emerging crypto market. Evidently, the storage of unique records is a perfect use case of the blockchain capabilities. Therefore many efforts have been ongoing there in the last couple of years, and you probably heard of Factom, Swarm, Sia, IPFS (though the scope of this one is much wider), and other similar infrastructures. What we are seeing more, however, is the emergence of specialized storage applications. For example, Codexprotocol specializes in the registry of unique and auctionable items, art being a big part of it. Needless to say, their protocol includes all the functionalities necessary to perform auctions on the blockchain. A Codex record is an item identity. Mine.art, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on registering art items, through authenticity and certificates ownerships protocols, in order to bring together galleries, artists, art lovers, and collectors. This one did not launch yet and deserves its own article, so I will save the big piece for later.
Voice assistance in a secure and trustless environment started as well. Join me on Snips and develop voice apps for SnipsAIR, the first ever decentralized, open-source voice assistant with privacy built in.
Mapping and geospatial data: see FOAM, an “open protocol for decentralized, geospatial data markets. The protocol is designed to empower users to build a consensus-driven map of the world that can be trusted for every application”. Therefore there will be an on-going work for registering useful POIs, potentially building the future of quality mapping and geospatial data.
Browsing the internet, via Brave.com. If you have not heard of it by now, this should be on the top of your list. Improvements keep being released at a fast pace, and the user base is growing exponentially. A new competitor surely arrived, presenting clear advantages thanks to the blockchain tech and its surrounded concept of financial and digital freedom.
Ref: https://medium.com/@MickaelSalabi/crypto-rev-series-q318-more-applications-d1765cde1d30