Future of diving?

[jasondrake]

Thought this might be interesting.
Where do you see recreational diving being in 10 years?

Will it be more or less popular? Will we all be rebreathing? Or in atmosphere suits? Or personal subs? Will helium have run out? Will we have new gases to breathe? What about decompression theory? Will we wear personal doppler units to measure actual bubble loading? What about underwater comms? Any ideas.........

[Gavin Yates]

<font color='#000F22'>arent people looking into using neon instead of helium?

10 yrs reckon 90% of tek diving on breathers.

[Finless]

Oxygum - that's where the future is. &nbsp;

Maybe heads up displays will be common.

[Mark Davies]

<font color='#000080'>Yes, interesting, this one.

There has clearly been a big expansion in diving over the last few years which I'd say can be put down to holiday divers. These days a summer diving holiday is much like a winter ski holiday has been for some time. Many people are only diving for two weeks each year, somewhere nice and warm. There's a knock-on effect of course for UK diving when people get so hooked they want to dive back home as well.

So I can see recreational diving going in two directions. I think there's going to be a whole host of holiday divers, all PADI trained who will take their annual plunge abroad.

I think UK diving is going to continue to become more technical. More mixed gasses, more wings and twinsets, more DIR. And why? People here will want to differentiate themselves from &quot;The Host&quot; by doing &quot;proper&quot; diving here in the UK. Without a twinset you'll look just like a dabbler. Look around - it's started already.

Technical advances? Depends on cost really. It's an expensive sport as it is. Will we have heads-up displays and underwater comms? Not unless it's affordable. But with the advances in battery technology from mobiles, who knows?

Will we all still be clinically certifiable? Absolutely!

[jasondrake]

I can see the development of 'idiot proof' rebreathers, probly scrs. Holiday diver picks up a sealed unit pre-prepared by dive school/resort with 32% nitrox or something and it needs no checking other than spg. Depth limits sounded by alarms and a duration timer alarm for the scrubber. After 2-5 dives you return it and pick up a fresh unit. Or maybe ccr electronics will get good enough that bailouts aren't necessary and user monitoring not needed? If they don't find a cheap helium source and prices get high enough will rebreathers be more financially viable for all deep diving?
Or will the fad pass for diving altogether? PADI figures show a big slow down and plateau in numbers in recent years - and surveys suggest that PADI's efforts to dispel the rufty-tufty danger image of diving have gone so far that most people don't consider it 'exciting' anymore. Will liability issues come to rule the sport making running dive boats/schools prohibiti vely expensive?

[CotoChris]

<font color='#0000FF'>Jason
I can't believe you placed this question, I was thinking of putting one along the similar lines - how will diving develop technically in the next few years.
I agree on what Mark Davies write. Something I find frustating for example is going to a dive center abroad and ending up doing simple 'safe' dives because of less experienced 'holiday' divers.There may be a greater seperation between 'holiday' divers and regular divers and the regular ones tend to move more DIR, tech, mixed gases etch. I see this happening to myself inadvertantly.

On the technical side I wonder if we will get
i) underwater GPS devices,?
ii) computer intergrated BCD's where it will control bouyancy and automatically raises you to the surface as the air runs low?
ii) More frequent use of underwater vehicles?
iv) Underwater gameboys during decompression?
v) Smaller regs still
vi) Thinner wet suits but more effcient at heat retention
vii) Weirder shaped fins

I'm sure there will be even more PADI courses!

[Mark Davies]

<font color='#000080'>The computer integrated BCD is an interesting idea. We already have the Mares hub with hydraulically controlled air feeds. It's not a big step to link that with a computer in the same manner as the air integrated computers that we have now. You could drop to your desired depth, press a button to fix it (a bit like cruise control on your car) with a range of variance either side and then the computer could automatically adjust your bouancy as you moved around. Tell it when you want to go up and it could use bouancy adjustment to automatically take you to the surface at exactly the right rate, safety and decompression stops built in. It would be like riding a lift!

[aclivity]

<font color='#810541'>a BCD with cruise control?  I want one!  If they could add some little propulsion devices (to stop me having to remember to fin) and an automatic pointer outer for interesting things underwater (configurable, obviously, to fish / large fish / huge fish / hammerhead levels), along with the suit heater and integrated 2000bar 3 litre cylinder, that'd be ideal.

Maybe the next big thing will be the microsoft dive computer?  They have invaded lots of other small computer markets (pocket PC, Tablet PC).

Disposable kit?  Stuff that you buy when you arrive at the diving destination of choice, then simply discard at the end of the holiday?

Wearable gills - extract the oxygen from the H20? Actually, waterworld was on the tv last night and I couldn't help but think the 'gills' that the Kevin Costner character was supposed to have developed looked a bit like, well, another type of human anatomy?

[Scuba1]

<font color='#000080'>All of you are probably right, to some extent. I hope however, that we shall continue to dive, in whatever fashion, simply because we love it. If one person branches out to tec diving, while another is satisfied with holiday diving, why not....I hope that in ten years I will still be in the water, still loving it...no matter what the market developments.

moray

[lizardfish]

<font color='#810541'>You can kiss goodbye to coral reef diving in about 50 years. Most of the coral will be dead by then.