The State of Virtual Reality

Virtual reality has been in the news for the past few years for its major advancements, but we aren't even on the brink yet. Google, Microsoft, HTC, Valve, Oculus, and more are all into the VR game. This amount of competition hasn't been as strong for any individual field in years.

Oculus made major headlines with the Oculus Rift, marketed as the first major VR headset for the masses. Facebook has since taken over Oculus, which caused quite a lot of backlash. While it still isn't completely ready for everyone to use, everyone is certainly impressed by it. Following suit comes everyone else. Google Glass was a big thing for about a year before it regressed back into the experimental labs of Google, but while it was popular everyone was imagining what could be possible with VR in the near future.

Microsoft's HoloLens made one of the coolest tech demos in history last year by providing a VR headset that merges VR and reality. This isn't simply viewing a fake world through a screen, this creates objects on top of the real world and allows you to interact with them. Imagine a fake Minecraft world on your coffee table. That's what HoloLens is aiming to do.

Google isn't done with VR simply because they're taking a break from Glass. This month they officially announced their virtual reality division, meaning they have a team of VR experts working on it all the time now. Google's Cardboard is probably one of the more interesting VR concepts. It isn't anything fancy, but that's the point. If you're looking for a good VR experience without shelling out hundreds of dollars, Cardboard has you covered. I got a free Google Cardboard simply by following Google's Twitter. You place your phone in the headset and install Cardboard-compatible apps. They aren't fancy, but they give you a feel for VR if you've never done it before. As my dad said, "I've never seen anything like this before. Wow."

HTC Vive is another attempt at VR, focusing on gaming. Vive allows you to walk around the room and explore your surroundings while warning you of any nearby obstacles. Vive partnered with Valve, a major game creator, in order to ensure their focus on gamers.

Lastly, there's the mysterious Magic Leap. Google invested just under a billion dollars in the startup last year, and since then there hasn't been much talk. The company is very secretive, not even releasing a look at their product. The most we have are renders of what the view behind it might look like, and one small tech demo.

With so much competition from various companies, from Facebook to HTC, VR is going to explode in the next decade. I can't even imagine all the things possible with it.

Facebook's Internet.org: Greed Masquerading as Charity

Internet.org is Facebook's effort to expand Internet access into less fortunate areas of the world in order to improve life there. Or at least, that's what they make it seem. Sure, it may do just that for the people there, but it is motivated by nothing but greed on Facebook's behalf. When Internet.org installs Internet access in these places, they offer a very stripped down version of the web. Not only does this version explicitly violate net neutrality, but it strongly benefits Facebook and makes them a monopoly in these areas.

Internet.org only allows for the use of pre-approved websites over its network, which includes, of course, Facebook. They say that this is a necessary measure in order to keep the bandwidth usage down and optimize sites for slower devices and networks. Really, this creates a walled system that discourages innovation and threatens the very freedoms that the Internet stands for.

"It is our belief that Facebook is improperly defining net neutrality in public statements and building a walled garden in which the world's poorest people will only be able to access a limited set of insecure websites and services," stated an open letter to Internet.org, signed by 67 Internet rights groups.

Internet.org also discourages the use of encryption and security of the websites that are allowed on its service. This puts the privacy of everyone who uses it at serious risk. Sure, I know what a lot of people are thinking. "Aren't these limited websites a lot better than no websites for the people who are receiving this service?" Yes, for the time being. If the Internet begins to expand in those regions, it is completely possible that this service could expand into a full-blown monopoly of the Internet in those regions. Facebook has, and will continue to have, complete say in what sites are allowed to be accessed by these people. If that isn't the largest violation of net neutrality you can think of, I don't know what is.

Sources: New York Times, BBC

Modern AI

AI isn't science fiction. You hear about the human-like programs that will overtake humanity, (which I talked about in my "Machine Labor, AI, and the Technological Singularity" post.) but what you don't hear about is how AI is hugely beneficial to humans. Incredibly useful and interesting advancements in the field of AI are made every day.

Google has made many advancements in AI possible, as well as made them available to the public. Google Photos uses neural networks to understand what is in an image and display relevant images, keywords, and allow for search of what's in the image. Google Photos lets you search for say, "dog", and it will understand which pictures have a dog in it. Everyone is familiar with Google Images, but it's currently vastly different than what Google is doing with AI. Google Images searches websites and file names for relevant images and displays them. That's why searching for one thing can sometimes lead to something completely different. Google's new neural network algorithm understands what is actually in the image. You can see a visual effect of this with Google's "DeepDream", which provides a sort of viewpoint of what their neural network sees. Any image can be put through it, you can see what the computer thinks is there.

SwiftKey has been my Android keyboard of choice since my first Android phone. In the past few months, SwiftKey has been working on a keyboard that bases predictions and corrections on a neural network AI. Presently, SwiftKey looks at your last few words typed and will suggest words that many people put after. SwiftKey's Neural Alpha examines actual word relations and understands the meaning of words. SwiftKey Neural clusters similar words and understands sentence structure. After using SwiftKey Neural Alpha for a few months, it's leagues ahead of any other keyboard prediction I've seen. The old model doesn't actually understand how humans speak, it simply suggests words that are frequently placed after the last few. In practice, this leads to suggestions that don't make sense. When SwiftKey's Neural network examines the whole sentence, it uses all of the words to predict an accurate continuation.

Go is an ancient Asian board game still extensively played in China and Japan. Google made history recently by creating an AI that beat the European Go champion five times out of five. This probably doesn't seem significant. We've had bots beat humans in chess, and lots of other games. Why is Go different? Well, Go is extremely complex with more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. Usually, a bot will scan the possible moves for the most advantageous position to best their opponent. This isn't possible with Go due to the sheer number of possible moves. When humans play Go, they rely strongly on instinct. In order for the AI to replicate this, Google had it study and understand games played by humans. Afterwards, the AI played against itself thousands of times in order to gain a deeper understanding. If an AI can master Go, a game once considered an art that must be mastered by any Chinese scholar, what can't it do? The progress of AI is expanding at an exponential rate. Whether this is scary or exciting depends on your opinion, but the fact is, AI is not only something done for purely research purposes, but also for practical use in every day life.

Sources: Nature, Wikipedia, SwiftKey

Apple Could Ditch the Headphone Jack in the iPhone 7

Why is Apple considering ditching the headphone jack on the next iPhone? Space. Apple is all about fitting the most stuff into the smallest amount of space. When you consider the amount of space inside an iPhone dedicated to the large headphone jack, it's actually quite a lot. Whether this space could be used to make the battery bigger or add more features, it doesn't really matter. If Apple goes through with this, I won't be surprised due to the decisions they made with the new Macbook. Most likely instead of a headphone jack, the next iPhone could just use the Thunderbolt connector. This isn't only bad for headphone manufacturers, it's even worse for the consumer. If you want to be able to use your old headphones, you'll have to buy an adapter. Headphone manufacturers will have to spend more money creating two different versions to fit iPhones, increasing the overall cost. Oh, and forget about charging your phone and listening to music at the same time without an adapter as well. I can't see this decision being good for Apple in any way, but I also think they can get away with it like they did with the adoption of the Thunderbolt port and the use of a single USB-C port on the Macbook. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see if they go through with it, and if they do, see what kind of backlash they receive.

Source: Forbes

Amazon's Gadget Business

Amazon has been making various gadgets for years now. Kindles being the most popular. When Amazon released the Kindle Fire, it was meant as not only an e-reader, but a cheaper competitor for the tablet market. Unfortunately, Amazon is viewing this business all wrong. Instead of capitalizing on the e-reader market they're trying to branch out into the tablet and smartphone industry. This is a bad move considering they can't compete.

Amazon's smart devices run Fire OS, a fork of AOSP or Android. Fire OS doesn't include the Google Play Store or any Google services at all. Amazon has completely taken their fork in a different direction away from Google. While this isn't terrible, it certainly means the devices will lose a lot of features that Google already has in place with Android.

Now it's time to talk about one of the biggest flops in tech history. The Amazon Fire Phone. When it was released, it could be considered a mid-range phone. What made it "special" was its 3D software which used sensors to make the interface appear 3D. It was pretty gimmicky and honestly, nobody wanted the feature. For a mid-range phone from a company new to the smartphone game, you would expect a cheaper price, right? Well, apparently Amazon overestimated itself. When the phone was released, it was for an off-contract price of $650 and an on-contract price of $199. That was as much as a new Samsung Galaxy or iPhone. Needless to say, nobody was getting this phone. Sales plummeted, resulting in an over $200 price drop for both models. Even still, Amazon practically had to give these things away with free Amazon Prime memberships included. Amazon finally ran out of stock in 2015 and it doesn't look like they plan to release another phone anytime soon.

Just because their phone strategy failed, doesn't mean Amazon's done. Amazon has been hard at work making worse versions of already existing products. Amazon Fire Stick, for example, is basically a copy of Google's Chromecast. Even better? Amazon banned the sale of Chromecasts on their website because it would be "confusing for customers" to have both products for sale. Amazon Echo is an ambitious product, for sure, but like the Fire Phone, I don't see any reason for anyone to get it. Echo is basically a large speaker with microphones in it, allowing you to ask it questions and it will respond. Sounds cool when you forget that almost all smartphones have this feature. Plus, for $179, I would expect something better.

All-in-all, Amazon needs to calm down about its gadget production and focus on its market and website. I realise that Amazon has to continue to evolve to make it, but the paths it's taking aren't going to get it anywhere.

The Importance and Proper Use of Material Design

Google introduced its design language, dubbed Material, in 2014 as a proposed solution to make its OS distinctive and replace the outdated Holo design language. The goal of Holo was to standardize the designs used across different versions of Android and make Android more uniform. Holo was a mostly dark look, with electric blue accents. While many loved Holo for what it was, it was definitely time Google stepped up its game in terms of design to keep up with Apple. In comes Material.

Material (left) vs Holo (right) settings apps

Material Design was code-named "Quantum Paper" by Google before it was announced, and this is a good description. It was announced at Google I/O 2014 along with Android L, later known as Android 5.0 Lollipop. Distinctive features of Material Design is a lighter interface with distinctive, vibrant colors and a huge focus on animations. Pre-Material, Android was pretty static in terms of animations. Sure, you had some simple ones across the operating system, but the ones that were there were pretty unimpressive. Material's major focus is providing context through animation, and adding depth to the interface. If you press a button, instead of a screen suddenly appearing, the screen should grow from the button. This provides an understanding of what event is triggering what, and frankly, an amazing example of great design. Depth is used by making subtle shadows underneath certain elements. This allows items to be on top of each other and still look great. FABs, or Floating Action Buttons, are another common theme among Material apps. They provide a place for the user to interact without requiring the developer to allocate space in an otherwise unneeded place in the app. The FAB gets out of the way when it isn't needed, and can display new options when tapped.

Good examples of Material Design are those that use the design language to create apps that follow the rules set across by Google, while also injecting a bit of originality and brand recognition. The best example of this I can think of is with the Tumblr app. It isn't a Google app, but it follows Material Design extremely well. It's not perfect, but it uses cards, distinctive animations, and depth to create an app that feels material, while also feeling like it's still Tumblr. Basically any app by Google has amazing Material Design as well.

A bad example of Material is Sleep as Android. It's a great app, don't get me wrong, but its adoption of material was half-assed, for lack of a better word. It doesn't do many of the things that Material apps should do. It feels like it's trying to give its users the impression of it being Material without putting in any of the work. It has a FAB, but its placement is off and tapping it is not animated. Actually, almost nothing in this app is animated better than the Holo days. The toggle switches aren't even animated! The UI is a weird combination of half-baked Material over a Holo base.

Material isn't just needed to make apps look better, it's needed to make Android look better. If apps do not follow this design language it fragments Android and makes it confusing to the user. Imagine if every app you open had a completely different layout and style. Different stylistic choices are great, but if you're making a modern Android app, please use Material in the way it's intended instead of half-assing it.