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.

How VoIP Closed the Gap of Personal Communication

When it comes to historical significance, most would contend that the peak of communications technology was the telegraph or the telephone. The telegraph was the very first machine that allowed us to think of information as instantly transferable. It no longer had to be tucked away elegantly in a parcel, strapped to the back of a horse. We could transform a thought into just a few fragments of energy and transfer it along phone lines.

While these paradigm shifts were of great importance, another huge shift happened over the past decade or so that it seems a lot of us didn't even notice. This is the rise of Voice over IP communication or VoIP. Ever heard of Skype? Then you know what I'm talking about.

Skype, and many of the identical services like it, provide a way to easily connect with and actually see the person you're talking to. Like the video phones in The Jetsons, they give you a window into the facial expressions and room of the other person, creating a face-to-face conversation over long distances. While conversations over just voice are fine and dandy and were clearly very important on a technological level, Skype allows for a recreation of local, immediate conversation. It's much more intimate.

This opens up a lot of possibilities! Long distance relationships are infinitely easier, whether you're a couple hours away or an entire hemisphere. Doing interviews with someone becomes easier as you can see their hand gestures as they explain an important concept or their facial expressions as they attempt to inflect a certain tone. Parents with newborn children can call up the grandparents, creating those early, important visual interactions with family members despite them being on the other side of the nation. So many social possibilities are entertained just by this simple technological shift.

These are the little things we so often forget about when we keep our heads strapped forward, always looking to the newest thing. Parts of our social lives have changed dramatically due to technology, but we barely give thought to it because it seems like such a natural change. Video calls fit so naturally into so many of our lives, we don't really have to stress the innovation. I think that's a mistake! It's just another example of progress as our world continues to turn.