Virtual Reality and the Chase

2016 has been the year of virtual reality, and as the holiday season approaches and we begin to look back and reflect on the year, it's a good time to evaluate the promise of VR and whether we've anywhere near approached it.

The year saw the release of three major headsets in the VR market: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the brand new PlayStation VR.

While the first two are headsets specifically made for beefy, gamer-ready desktop PCs, the PlayStation VR is a headset made exclusively to connect to Sony's PlayStation 4. This means it specifically is skewed towards gamers and games, and less towards the social experiments, video watching experiences and early access playgrounds of the more expensive headsets.

This is a double-edged sword, as while games are great, focusing towards them exclusively keeps you limited in scope. Every game developer seems to be making a VR demo for the PS VR, but not too many are actually making full game experiences. Many people seem excited to play a Final Fantasy XV demo on the PlayStation, but how many are going to play a brand new, original title made for such a headset?

While the PS VR specializes, the Rift and the Vive are, even months after their release, blank slates. Tiltbrush VR allows creative and non-creative users alike to paint the skies around them with color and grace. Rec Room allows VR owners to come together and play games in a social environment like darts and ping pong. Adrift is a beautiful, incredible space adventure about the fearfulness of actually floating along in zero gravity amidst a station that is collapsing quickly.

At the end of the day, all these headsets are chasing something. They're looking for new kinds of experiences that people haven't had yet, that will make people crave more. The sort of blockbuster hit like Super Mario Bros. or Microsoft Word that opens eyes to the prospect of the platform and creates a need that sells more headsets and inspires more of those same experiences.

Whether this will happen remains to be seen. But in the meantime, the chase is fun to follow.

The Microsoft Surface Studio

At the October 26th Surface event, Microsoft announced quite a few new products and accessories from their first-party line of elite computing devices. While Microsoft has always been in the software market with Windows, it wasn't until the past few years that they've become a behemoth in the hardware market as well.

One of the biggest announcements at this particular press conference, though, was the Microsoft Surface Studio PC, an all-in-one computer, the first one ever released by the company.

The Surface Studio / Courtesy of Microsoft

The heart of the Surface Studio is a vision: get a beautiful, colorful 28" display in front of you and make the rest of it as minimal as possible. Two simple metal spokes that allow you to pivot the screen at any angle and a stylus pen to draw on it like a canvas. A wireless keyboard and mouse with the same color scheme as the computer itself. A powerful computer that you won't want to walk away from.

The Surface Studio is yet another example of the flexibility of the PC market. A machine made for creative professionals, it really shows you the extreme ideal of what a computer could be for an architect or an artist.

Microsoft is showing up to do what Apple won't. The most beautiful screen on the market. A gigantic touchscreen with a bundled pen. A device to compete with an illustrator's Wacom Cintiq in the exact same price range. In terms of progress, I'd say Microsoft is showing quite a bit of competence.