When the end of the year comes around and us writers can’t come up with more things to say and want to take a break over the holidays, we do our “look ahead” article with the predictions for the coming year. Well, anyone in the industry who works with technology probably already knows what will be coming out in 2012. Technology innovations don’t happen overnight, and the new products that are slated to be shipped next year have already been conceived. Sigh.

But there is still room for wild predictions about digital out of home and customer engagement technology, we just need to push forward our time dials and look five years down the road instead of a few days. What will DOOH be like in 2016? Here are some predictions which might prove completely untrue, but in the world of the online written word, no one will ever come back to read this is 2016 to see if this writer was wrong or not. Please enjoy.

1. Augmented reality will be everything. Imagine that you are in a store and you see a product, instead of looking that product up on your Google search in your smartphone, you just point your camera at the product, on the screen information starts to pop up about what it does, customer ratings, ahem, prices at competitors stores, how long it lasts, how often people use it, basically, it tells you everything that years of data has been able to collect about a specific product. It might even be able to give you a recommendation of whether or not you should buy it depending on how you live your life.

2. Interactive projected keyboards will come standard on all mobile phones. A micro-projector will allow you to put your phone on a table, and have your keyboard visible on the surface of the table. A motion sensor will tell where you are moving your fingers and the virtual keyboard is born. Laptops, look out.

3. QR Codes will be the main joke at trade shows, “remember when marketers thought they were good ideas?”

4. Kiosk printers will be dying off. Sorry guys, but digital receipts, tickets, and statements are already becoming popular, it is only a matter of time before all documents go digital. Trees, you can thank us later.

5. NFC, as in Nantucket Fried Chicken, will be everywhere. Mobile payments will finally be commonplace in North America and the technology will be used to trigger mobile engagements. Near Field Communications will replace pretty much all of the other ways to interact with digital signs. The only problem is distance, but augmented reality will take care of that.

6. Facebook will be the largest country in the world. In five years they will have over 1.3 billion users, making it the largest social group in the world. Bosses will use it to screen new employees, all of them, so make sure that you have a good excuse about that picture of you with a beer bong (networking), passed out on the floor (saving money on hotel rooms on a business trip), and peeing into a fountain (it was a large ornate outdoor urinal, you know how the French are…).

One more thing for you as you head into your holidays from the very clever agency folks at draftfcb

See you in 2012!