Abstract
This talk, as usual, has the purpose to focus on the main, most recent RPCs achievements and to extrapolate to new fields where they could be competitively applied. This approach suggests now the following considerations. The timing performance will be crucial for detectors at future accelerators. The idea of a 4D tracking combining space and time is a suggestive perspective of application for RPCs. Recent results indicate that another important field of application can be calorimetry at high time resolution. RPCs have already shown their potential in cosmic ray physics with ground based detectors. This potential has to be reinvested and further developed in new experiments. A last consideration is that RPC themselves can be a powerful instrument to investigate electrical phenomena in gaseous media.