VR and wearable tech

So 2015's gonna be a big year for virtual reality, augmented reality and wearable tech :) This is the first time in a very long time that I've had such a strong feeling that "the future is now".

A colleague of mine uses the Oculus Rift in her research and hooked me on VR, but, being a cheapskate, I've opted to wait and scratch the itch with Google Cardboard and it's been fun as hell.

To be sure, Cardboard is a toy for people who like to tinker and enjoy the frustration associated with things being just a little borked. But it's also a good way to get an idea of what's just around the corner.

There are relatively few good apps for Cardboard atm (my two favourite examples are an augmented reality demo called CMOAR AR RPG and a silly game called Lamper) but, with a little work, you can hook it up to a PC and try out some more-or-less vr-ready games. My PC's gfx-card is old and my phone is a little wonky, but it works and would likely work far better with better hardware.

Wrt content, naturally the most well-developed content for Cardboard is porn, but there's a growing library of SFW 180-360-degree videos to try out as well. I use VR Player for the most part to stream movies from my NAS, but, for a slightly cooler experience, you can check out Go Show, an app that places you in a giant empty movie theatre where you can change the screen-size, your seat and the lighting.

The single most frustrating limitation atm is the fact that you have to remove the phone over and over again to switch apps, change settings, get new content etc. I've found very few apps that can be controlled almost entirely without touching the phone. Some of them rely on looking at buttons for a couple of seconds while a small circle or bar fills up, while others use the clever little magnet-switch included in the original cardboard. I've yet to find a truly satisfying VR app launcher for example. Voice commands are a bit hit-and-miss atm, but I expect they'll get better.

Other problems include latency, judder, image quality, comfort and performance. I've found latency and judder to be tolerable but noticeable enough that you really get an appreciation for how well the Rift does its thing. Image-quality's good, but would be better with a better display (I'm using a Nexus 5, which has a great display for normal use but shows off the screen-door-effect nicely when magnified). More importantly, the lenses I have in my set are not great. They scratch extremely easily, get dirty, are a little bit too small and not quite the right shape. Slightly larger and better-quality asymmetric biconvex lenses would probably be better, and I'm looking to mod my set (an advantage of cardboard is that it's fairly easy to modify :o). Finally, it would be good to be able to accommodate different interpupillary distances (which some kits allow for). Comfort is naturally an issue, esp. for fat-headed four-eyed people such as myself, but it's something that can be addressed fairly easily. Even unmodified, a regular cardboard kit with headstraps is pretty comfortable. As for performance, I've mostly had problems streaming extremely large files over wifi. Streaming from the PC over USB has had better results, but it's still clear that my gfx card needs to be upgraded.

The consumer edition of Oculus Rift will hopefully be released later this year, and it looks like it'll be a huge improvement on the 2nd developer kit wrt quality, performance, comfort and usability. I'm not very fond of buying tech new and at full price, but I think the ginger and I will have a hard time restraining ourselves. However, I'm almost more excited about the Avegant Glyph, a portable media device that's a little less immersive but promises to be way more comfortable and cool, using a technology that uses millions of tiny mirrors to project images right onto the retina.

CES 2015 seems to have had a lot of VR stuff, but some of the coolest things there seem to have been in the realm of wearable tech. I feel kinda meh about all these fitness trackers and related gadgets that try to "quantify" our lives, but I'm very keen on stuff like the Cicret and the WattUp wireless long-range charger/router. I have no idea what else is in store, but for once it seems like we might get useful and awesome products in addition to all the gimmicks :o well, one can hope.

Forget Wearable Tech. People Really Want Better Batteries.

The International Consumer Electronics Show has wrapped up its showcase of the latest in high-tech, from wearables to curved-screen phones to extremely high-definition 4K televisions.

But according to a survey from the magazine Fortune, many Americans have a simpler wish: better batteries.

According to Fortune's survey of more than 1,000 adults, conducted in collaboration with Survey Monkey, "only 2 percent said they were extremely or very likely to buy Internet-connected glasses, such as Google Glass, in 2015."

And 4K television didn't do much better. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they had never heard of it.

Meanwhile, consumers indicated that the new smartphone feature they were most excited about — picked by 33 percent of respondents — was "improved battery life."
Alan S. Murray, editor of Fortune, says he was struck by the survey results while walking around the halls of CES.

"You have to realize, this is like 2 1/2 million square feet of display space with all these drones flying around and these mammoth curved televisions with 4k ultra-high definition," Murray tells NPR's Arun Rath.

Even in this high-tech wonderland, he says, there were "an awful lot of people running around trying to find power strips so they could plug in their smartphones that had run out of battery juice."

Despite consumer interest, Murray says, there wasn't a great deal of buzz about batteries at CES. But, he says, many in the tech industry are awaiting a breakthrough in battery technology.

"This is a problem waiting to be solved," Murray says. "And I didn't get any sense in my three days at the Consumer Electronics Show that the solution is about to happen."
As for the lack of interest in wearables, and a lack of knowledge about 4K television, Murray says tech companies are hoping that Steve Jobs was right when he famously told BusinessWeek in 1998 that "people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

The question facing companies, Murray says, is, "Can they create the demand by introducing something that sounds so exciting and compelling that you feel like, even though you didn't previously want one, now you do?"

Sometimes those companies fail.

"A few years back, the big thing at the CES show was 3D television," Murray says, "and everybody thought, 'This is going to be the next big thing,' and they were pushing them out like mad at Best Buy and all the consumer electronic shows."

But, as it turned out, 3D TV was a big flop. "People don't want to sit in their living room and wear silly-looking glasses while they're watching TV," Murray says.

Whatever device tech companies come up with next, Murray says the lesson from Fortune's survey is clear: "It better have a good battery in it!"

Better batteries no. 1 on Minx's wish-list so that he can have more wearable goodness :o

i'm not holding my breath for the batteries. I don't know of any possible tech down the road thats going to give us any more than a tiny bump in storage. What we need are better ways to trap and use the energy we generate. Better capturing of natural motion or something like the wireless signals we're putting out anyway. I think the limit right now is 15 feet for wireless charging via a special wifi router?

Wireless charging over long distances? Pipedream.

There was this scam on Kickstarter, for example, detailing how they would create a key finder with a low-power Bluetooth adapter. The proposed design was physically impossible due to various reasons - antenna size way to small, wifi routers don't use the max power rating continuously, wifi signals are pulsed and so on and so forth.

If that was actually worthwhile, we'd have done it a long time ago. And natural motion? Yeah, we already have that. It's used to power wrist watches (and that's about the maximum of power you can get).

lower energy requirements and the WattUp charging router

next step is to implant a power socket into people

... oooor just carry an extra battery to charge your things with

This will revolutionise porn:

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-hands-on/

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...-virtual-real/

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...ns-first-look/

http://theworldforgotten.com/showthread.php?t=4433

Will it use microwaves like WiFi and cell phones? Virtual cancer too?