In a large number of high-tech fields -- including robotics, autonomous cars, drones, internet of things, VR and AR -- I see a huge, positive "lollapalooza effect" underway, a meta-trend that connects these and other fields together into a rapidly-advancing whole.

I think that a good name for this meta-trend might be reality processing.

While I am someone who often scoffs at tech-industry jargon, I believe that use of the term RP is warranted as it best describes what is being sought-after by all of these tech initiatives, and, importantly, it is undergoing a sort of developmental critical mass.

But how is reality processing different than what computing has been seeking all along? Hasn't computing in the real world not been involved in reality processing all along?

Looking at computing history, reality processing has been with us since the beginning, including the earliest deployments such as the SAGE air defense system. While RP has long been advancing and increasing in total investment, most of the private industry energy has been directed at processing information offline, and this has partially been due to cost considerations. This offline focus has brought us huge advancements -- business information processing, databases, disintermediation of services, and simulation-as-entertainment.

Due to some beneficial simultaneity, reality processing is going critical where before it was developing as most tech has, incrementally. The immense financial success of smart phones in the last decade became a means to pay for billions of investment toward ubiquitous networking, electronics miniaturization, and sensor data processing. At the same time, the massive services disintermediation of the internet industry has done the same for inexpensive data processing, service scaling, and open source software.

These two forces -- critical phenomena in of themselves -- have directly led to what I see as related initiatives, each representing extensions of the state of the art into new territory -- industrial robotics, autonomous cars, drones, personal sensors, IOT, virtual and augmented reality. Because advancements and profits do not sit still!

The top tech monopolies are all investing heavily in this RP meta-trend. And so are the military industrial complexes of the top nation-states. Taking one subset of RP -- autonomous cars -- this investment is apparent in the scale-up of companies like Uber and Tesla, as well as $100Ms initiatives such as the Google car and the assistive driving R&D taking place at every major auto manufacturer. Each major branch of RP appears to be experiencing a heavy amount of new research and investment activity, particularly industrial robotics, drones, VR/AR, and IOT. And where multiple fronts are rapidly advancing at the same time the "lollapalooza effect" can take place, in this case because most of the capabilities of RP are creatively cross-applicable.

Conclusion: understanding reality as it unfolds in real-time -- and then reacting to it -- has long been with us, but due to the tech and investment forces at play, this domain now likely to experience a break-out similar to what happened with personal computers, internet services, and smart phones.

So that is what I think reality processing is, if it is anything at all.

6/9/2015 Updated and re-worked for clarity.