If you’re already bored with your holiday gifts, hang tight: 2017 promises to be the year when some long-awaited technologies finally come into their own.

Cars, which can already talk to you, will soon start talking to each other. The technology is called vehicle-to-vehicle­ communication, or V2V, and cars equipped with it will tell each other where they are and what they’re doing.

Say you make a sharp left turn; every car in the vicinity equipped with V2V will instantly know it. A car sneaking past you on the left or tucked into a blind spot up ahead will show up as an alert on your vehicle’s warning system — on the dashboard display screen, for example.

V2V will be vital for the self-driving cars of the future, but it’s just as useful with humans at the wheel. In mid-December, the Department of Transportation announced a plan to make it mandatory on all new cars, perhaps by 2021, because the advance warnings could ­reduce accidents.

Mercedes-Benz has put the technology into its 2017 ­E-class cars, and Cadillac is doing the same with its 2017 CTS. Of course, both of these models suffer from the Ghostbusters problem — who they gonna call? Still, the industry must start somewhere, and when V2V reaches critical mass in a few years, expect to see aftermarket kits for upgrading older cars.

Then there’s speech recognition, specifically voice-controlled home assistants such as the Amazon Echo speaker with Alexa, which were huge sellers this holiday season. Now the tech industry’s biggest companies are scrambling to catch up with Amazon.com with their own versions of technology that lets you do hundreds of things with your voice: play your favorite music, book a flight, or send a text message to a friend

Samsung Corp. is prepping a home device for 2017 that will use Microsoft Corp.’s Cortana speech service. Alphabet Inc.’s Google Home device is ­already in stores. And while Apple Inc. hasn’t made it official, the company is believed to be working on a version that’s based on Siri technology from the iPhone.

So watch your words; soon everything in the house will be listening.

Also on deck for 2017 is another round of virtual reality products, which use 360-degree video to immerse you in a three-dimensional simulated world. The technology made major inroads in 2016, with the introduction of entry-level products such as Google Cardboard and Gear VR from Samsung, which use smartphone video to deliver a basic VR ­experience.

But products like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, with headsets tethered to personal computers or video game consoles, generate a richer, more immersive experience. What they didn’t generate were a whole lot of sales. High-end VR devices suffered from a scarcity of good games, and scary hardware prices — up to $2,000 for a headset and a high-end computer to run it.

But it gets better next year, with more games in the pipeline, including a VR edition of the popular action game “Fallout 4.’’ Hardware will be cheaper, as well. Microsoft has partnered with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and others to produce VR headsets costing around $300.

Microsoft and its partners say the new software and hardware will provide decent VR on a midrange home PC, though you’ll still need a high-end game machine for best results. Also coming up is a VR-compatible upgrade of Microsoft’s Xbox game console. Codenamed Scorpio, it’s due for release in time for next Christmas.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, the biggest gamble of the year happens in March of 2017, when Nintendo releases the Switch, its sequel to the Wii U game console.

The company badly needs a hit; the Wii U sold just 13 million units, compared to nearly 102 million of Nintendo’s original Wii console.

Some blamed the Wii U’s radical design features, but Nintendo is doubling down on radical. The Switch is a hybrid, a gaming tablet you can take anywhere, but with a docking station that lets you plug it into the living room TV. And according to Wired magazine, it may be able to run VR games.

If you’re tempted to cut out this column and save it for next year’s holiday shopping, resist the urge. There will be more good gear coming in the months ahead — sort of like Christmas all year.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeTechLab.