- We’re Already in the Future of Virtual Reality: When I go to Disney World I always go to the Carousel of Progress — Walt Disney’s tour of American ingenuity through the decades. It ends with a Future scene (produced in 1993) which involves virtual reality and speech recognition. If you take a look at the video, you’ll see that with virtual reality and an Amazon Echo, we’re just about to surpass it.
- Use Your Phone: I have an iPhone which hasn’t yet come up with it’s own VR accessories so I’ve been using a Mattel Viewmaster. If you’ve got a Samsung phone Samsung Gear is a lot better and if you have a Google Pixel, the Daydream headset looks pretty great. Either way, it’ll give you a pretty great way of seeing what all the fuss is about. These sites are especially useful:
- With.in has some great content including watching a taping of SNL, being a character in an animated short and flying in New York.
- The Google Cardboard site has a lot of good links and the cardboard app itself on the iphoneincludes a lot of great content as well.
- Demo an HTC Vive at the Microsoft Store: I’ve tried a few different VR systems but they didn’t put me much more in “The Matrix” than Google Cardboard. Then I tried the HTC Vive at the Microsoft Store. It’s really amazing. You can walk around in the environment and it totally feels like you’re there. Pretty mind blowing.
- Hear: — This is an awesome app that does Augmented Sound. It’s a truly incredible experience. Roman Mars highlighted the company’s first app, RJDJ, it in one of the first episodes of 99% Invisible. Listening to the world through Hear really changes your perception of the world. A door slamming or the pings on an ATM start to have a musical lyricality that you’d never heard before. It’s a really wonderful experience. I’ve never done mushrooms but all the review on their site say, “It’s like Mushrooms without the mushrooms.”
- Some final thoughts on VR:
- Citi has a really great overview on VR (~100 pages)
- One comment I heard recently was “VR is great because I can be fully in the moment — without any notifications from my phone.” I think this is a bit short sighted and see notifications coming to these platforms pretty soon. I think Dave Pell said it best that relying on technology to solve your technology problems is like using heroin to kick your methadone habit.
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