For those of you who have yet to try the Daydream, its mostly a really nice Cardboard with a higher spec phone for better rendering and head-tracking.  (I talk about this in my previous post)  But what is really different, and IMOP better, is the controller. Its not the design of the controller is all that great, its the fact that its there! Having this sense of presence both from the haptics of my hand as well as my head movement greatly improves immersion and enjoyment.  The presence of a controller my not seem like a big deal, but it is.

What is really great about the Google Daydream is the commitment of a controller.  When you buy a headset, it comes with one.  Thus app devs can always rely on the fact a controller will be there. This certainty is what we are missing today.  And Samsung and other other headset makers can take cue and make it a requirement for their systems as well.  Unfortunately, as I understand it the Daydream controller will NOT work on other systems, but look for others to fill this market.

Also coming is the mobile stand-alone headset.  I do not expect to see anything beyond POC at CES2017, but I fully expect that towards the end of 2017, we should see a few come out.  These devices will have controllers as well, allowing devs to leverage previous work on the Daydream and GearVR systems into the new stand alone systems.

Also watch for 6DOF controllers as well..  This will be a bit harder to crack.  

When I first tried the Daydream I had the same response most people had.  It was small, attractive and felt great. I really like the tactile feel of it, better then the hard plastic GearVR.  My only complaint was the field of view.  However, now that I have spent a good deal of time in it, my opinion has changed somewhat. When I first tried it the strap was VERY tight, however, that kept light bleed to a min and I never really felt the weight.  However, the next time I tried it, the tight strap started to really bother me, so I loosed it. That made it far more comfortable, but then light bleed was pretty substantial.  The fit also felt a little less complete and instead felt a bit top-heavy.  Once you get into the task you are doing, a game for example, the light bleed ‘sometimes’ goes away.  What I mean here is when I’m deep into doing something in the game, I do not noticed, but at transition or other points in the game where I’m not deeply focused, the light bleed comes back to my attention. Same with the fit.  When I’m in the middle of something, I do not notice, but at transition, I cannot help but feel like the headset it resting on my forehead and not comfortably across the face.

Now to the phone.  The head tracking at the beginning feels just as good as the gear. I have to really pay attention to notice any lag. However, for whatever reason, the phone heats up very quickly. The hotter the phone gets, the slower the system becomes.  Then you can feel the head tracking slow down just a bit.  Enough that if you are standing, you can start to get motion sick.

Now here is where the Daydream is great, and its nothing to do with the headset or the phone. It’s the hand controller.  The hand controller is a simple 3DOF motion tracked device but what this does is greatly enhance immersion because you can ‘see’ you hand movements in the environment and allow you to interact with object more naturally.  So far I have not seen an amazing implementation, but give it time.  This simple controller works very well, yes it drifts but centering is not a big deal.  I really wish the GearVR came with one. I fully expect someone at sometime is going to write a driver to allow the Daydream controller to work on the GearVR if Samsung or Oculus does not make one themselves. As simple as this is, the knowledge that ALL Daydream devices will have this controller gives developers confidence to design their apps with this support.

An issue with Daydream, which I also have with the Gear is drift.  As the phone heats up it tends to drift, typically to the left.  Seems like this is just a limitation of the internal compass for now.  I’m sure they will fix it in the future.

So my final assessment:  I would buy the Daydream for a casual user, but stick with the GearVR for anyone else. A key point however is that the daydream does not need to compete with the GearVR, its needs to be a friendly, accessible device that anyone can use.  And for Google, this seem like exactly the market they are after, so despite my complaints, I think Google nailed this one spot on.

Image from http://inhabitat.com/

Now there are exceptions to this of course, but when I tell people that in five years they will no longer need a new car, I get a look like I’m nuts.  But once I explain that you are getting a new(ish) car and its a ‘need’ not want, then they are a little less skeptical.  However, once I give the full explanation, as I’m about to here, gentle readers, you will agree with me and start telling your friends the same thing just to get that ‘your crazy’ look from them.

First, the caveats.  There are people who buy vehicles for work or hobby.  Truck, Van, taxicab or RV for example.  Then there are those that WANT to buy a new car because its a part of their identity, or love high performance, or have that classic that they love to drive.  Then there are those who live near the edge or off the grid with poor or dirt roads.

OK, now that we have the exceptions out of the way, lets talk about your typical citizen living in a urban environment. In five years, that will be the last time you need to buy a new or newish car. How does that figure?  3 things are going to start happening in 5 years and be complete in 15.

In 5 years we will have our first autonomous vehicles on the road. FULLY autonomous meaning we have the legal issues sorted out that these little Google panda cars driving around my neighborhood will no longer need a driver.  This will be huge. The idea that I can use my phone to have a car pick me up and take me where I need to go will be just as convenient as taking my own car. To make this work, there needs to be a lot of these little buggers running around such that I can have a car at my door in 3 min or less.  Assuming Uber has not been sued out of existence, they will be first in line to try and make that happen.  Watch for them to partner with google and some car maker.

In 5 years the price of these little bugs will be 1/10 the cost of a normal car.  They will be fully electric with no frills.  There will be competitors (Apple, Tesla and later other car makers) that will focus on higher end self driving cars, but those will be seen more as luxury than a necessity. The simple ‘autono-cabs’ will be simple, and thus inexpensive such that there will be many of them. So many that in 15 years many of the next generation will question why they need to ever buy a car or even get a drivers license. (By the way, when that happens we will need a new form of ID.)

Parking space, who needs a parking space?  If you live in San Francisco you know parking is a pain. Worse when you are coming home tired and the last thing you want to is run circles around the blocks trying to find a place to park.  That goes away.  Worried about finding parking when you go somewhere?  Don’t worry about it anymore.  The autono-cab will pick you up at your door and drop you off at your location. Suddenly, parking anywhere will be easier and cheaper because of the reduction of demand.  Going to the game? Or big event?  Not only will you not worry about parking, there will be special lanes for electric autono-cabs so you will get there faster then driving?  Why will this happen?  People who run events and the cities authorities where the event takes place does not want traffic anymore then you do.  They want people in and out quickly, without accidents and drunk drivers making a mess of things.  Win.

Range?  Got that covered. I looked into buying a leaf and decided not to.  If I wanted to take a day trip from mountain view to say Napa, or halfmoon bay, or Oakland (hey its kick’en over there) or even SF I could not be sure I would get back unless I was positive I could find a charging station and have the car there long enough to get a charge.  Our little cabs?  Well, being smaller, lighter and battery tech about to double the range of current car battery packs, we only need to go one way.  Odds are these little guys will have a 60-75 mile range, more then enough for a one way trip anywhere in the bay area.

Now, back to the 5 years thing.  So its 2015 (at least at the time of this writing). I just bought a 2013 PIP Prius although once the new Tesla comes out I will sell the Prius and get that.  But lets say I keep it for 5 years and buy a 2018 Tesla. (I almost never buy new). That takes us to 2020.  Many people believe, as I do, that we should start seeing autonomous cars on the road in 2020. I live in Mountain View, which is not ‘Big city’ but dense enough that the first wave of autonomous cars will reach me.  Odds are, like bike sharing, there will be a monthly or yearly fee you can pay for near unlimited rides.  So that means my Tesla stays in the garage unless I need to go somewhere outside of my local area or I want to go for a fun drive. So now that 2018 is taking on less miles and holding onto more value.  So instead of getting a new car in 2025 I can wait until 2030 or longer depending on how often I drive it.

So now we are at 2025. Battery tech will have doubled again (conservatively) making autono-cabs to more specialized public cars cheaper to make.  The autono-cab is mostly a giant tablet now with multiple screens.  Averts help reduce the costs even more. Choice increases as well as we see Apple cars, luxury Lexus and turbo Tesla’s available via an app. My 2018 Tesla is sitting in the garage most of the time and my wife got a new’ish’ car in 2015, so we have two cars that we really do not drive.  It does not make any sense to have 2 cars now, so we will sell one of them.  Now we just need to stretch the remaining car to 2030, which will be easy because again, we do not drive it much.

From www.fastcodesign.com

By 2030 the autonomous car is ubiquitous. There will still be manual cars out there but even they will have ‘safety’ overrides. The number of car accidents plummets, car insurance goes up for some, and no longer exists for others. There are gas stations, but they are also charging station for the autono-cabs.  Owning a car repair shops goes they way of the local newspaper. Traffic actually goes down instead of up even as population increases. There are more people on the road, but traffic is more efficient, almost no accidents to cause backups, no rubber necking and very few breakdowns since the cars know when they need attention and can drive themselves for service. Places like LA see a marked reduction in pollution.  And one of the biggest win IMHO, drop in drunk driving. Buying a car in 2030 does not make much sense.

Now there will be losers in this grand future I’m painting.  Vehicle drivers; cab, truck, bus will be losing their jobs. Mechanics, we will not need as many.  Oil?  Do not need as much of that either. Car insurance, car dealerships, towing services; not a growth industry.  Municipalities will need new revenue (most likely they will tax the cabs per mile). Traffic tickets?  Kiss those dollars goodbye. Toll takers?  That is already disappearing.

So lets recap.  I said that in 5 years, that will be the last time you ‘need’ to buy a new car.  Math review time!  Buy car latest in 2020.  Good for 5+ years.  We should see the first deployments of self driving public cars in 2020.  By 2022, they should cover most urban and sub-urban areas. Since you are driving your car less, you can hang on to it for another 8 years easy which brings us to 2030.  Not so crazy sounding anymore right?  1) So start telling your friends.  2) Make money bets before you explain.  3) Profit!

P.S.  I started telling people this back in May, and started writing this post in June.  So no, I’m not following the crowd, just talking WAY to long to write my posts now-a-days.

Last year we heard that Apple was moving away from its licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance and building its own team to create a neural-net deep learning system as used by Google and Microsoft.  To date I have not heard any big announcement on how far they have progressed, but they may want to push down on the gas if they do not want to see users leaving Siri and moving to Cortana. Although Siri was a great feature when it was first released, the addition of voice actuated watches, TV, cares and more IoT voice enabled objects coming on the scene, intelligent voice assistant technology supported across multiple devices will become highly desired to expected functionality in the near future.  And right now Siri is not meeting the new coming standard, but they may not be too worried.   Mature Google Voice has been on iOS for more than a year and I have not heard anyone who had dropped Siri for Now, not because Siri is better, but because they are used to it and its a default voice system. However, given a significantly better system, that could change.

Image from http://inhabitat.com/

Ok, so this article on driver-less cabs just popped up saying NY’s Mayor de Blasio just signed with Google to have them put out a fleet of 5000 driver-less cars in Brooklyn and Queens.  They will be called Zippie.  Nice.  And that is not all; order now and get an ATM machine, vending machine spitting out mouthwash to condoms and btw the condoms will be a bit hit because I can see a trend starting on having sex in driverless cars, but that is another post.  They are even going to serve hot pizza!  What about the mess?  A 12 horse power vacuum will take care of that.  A vacumm?  How is that going to clean smeared pizza?

Does this all sound too good to be true by next year?  Yea it does.  Ok, so first off, even Google admits the driver-less car is not ready for sever weather like heavy rains, snow storms and icy roads.  This is NY we are talking about kiddies, if you ever been there in Feb.  Ug.  And serve food?  Its going to be a mess, and I’m sure some jackass will make it a worse mess.  What about legal issues?  Nothing talked about that in the post I read.

So here is what I think.. I think they are going to start putting in the ground work and doing limited tests in 2016.  Sure, you may be able to grab one of these Zippie’s next year, but I have a feeling there will be no food and running during limited times of the year ( good weather only) and limited routes.

Now you may be saying, “why such a downer man”. Actually, I’m pretty excited and looking forward to seeing even a few cabs running in limited conditions in 2016.  I want MORE cities to get in on this. Google will run the program so no one owns it. That is sooner then I would have expected from a legal perspective.  I think its great and cant wait for it.  However, lets not get crazy…. Hot Pizza?  Lets hold off on that for a bit ok?

BTW, Cabbie backlash in 3… 2… 1…

First, the watch is beautiful.  This was fully expected from Apple and they did not disappoint.  But its not stunning.  Its not gorgeous. The Moto360, although weak from almost all other measures, is stunning. The Samsung Gear S is beautiful and ground breaking with a curved screen, but held back by a horrible band.  This is Apple’s first version, so I would not be surprised to see it get thinner and thinner as time goes on.  I do not love this watch, but give Apple a few more versions and they will have something that matches the rhetoric I heard at the presentation.

The UI is fantastic, again what we expect from Apple and they delivered. There is much the other watch makers can learn from Apple and I fully expect much of what we saw to show up in Samsung and Google’s efforts.  Watch for a spin dial selector to show up on other watches in 9 to 12 months.  Same with payment options.

Of course the watch is locked to Apple just like Google’s is locked to Android and some of the Samsung devices are locked to Tizen, Samsung’s new OS.  Almost all my iPhone friends who did not get Pebbles have been waiting for Apple, and I have yet to hear any one of my friends who are Android users say they are willing to leave Android for Apple for this watch.

As a Pebble user and Android user, I paid great attention to the Apple announcement and as a past iOS user, I have no problem switching back if I thought the watch was going to give me something that I cannot get from Google or Android.  However after doing more reading on it and carefully considering where Apple is and how long would it take for Google or Samsung to catch up, it is just not there yet.  Its close, VERY close, but not quite there yet.  It needs to be thinner.  I need to know I can go 2+ days on a charge.  I need to know the watch SDK will allow innovative apps to be developed for the Apple watch.

One of the most important things for me is battery life and appearance.  Despite being the first watch on the scene, I still reach for my Pebble before I reach for my LG.  I do this because the watch is small and looks good. No its not stunning in ANY respect, but it looks like it fits on my wrist, not bulky.  I like that I can go almost a week on 1 charge.  I like that does exactly what I want my watch to do.  Let me know when I need to get my phone out of my pocket or ignore it.  The Pebble does this.  I do like the voice support on the LG, the one thing on the Pebble I miss.  I also like the Google cards, but I can get this on the Pebble as well in a limited manner.  I know Apple copied that with Apple glance, but this is new for Apple where Google has been refining cards for a number of years.

So what is my conclusion?  I’m not ready to pay the money it will take to move back to Apple and the cost of the watch.  However, the Apple watch is clearly the current measure of what a smart watch can be.  But just like all the others… its not quite there yet.  No one is quite there yet.  So I continue to wait and watch.  Whomever can create a watch that is beautiful, well designed UI and a 3 day battery like, will win me over.  Google, Apple, Samsung, it does not matter to me.  Basically all the phones are so similar enough that I am more the willing to switch.  However, for now, I’m staying with Android.

The Moto 360 is unique in that is a fully qualified smart watch, running Google wear, but its smaller, round and very attractive.  A friend of mine whom I’m working with developing a news reader for the Google wear watches never liked the LG I got and I agreed that it looked bulky and unattractive.  However, once she started using a smart watch, she came to realize what a number of us early Pebble adopters have known for awhile, a smart watch is not just an extension of your smart phone, but a means of reducing the number of interaction on the phone.  Then she decided she wanted to 360.  Didn’t get it.

I touched on this briefly when I first got the Pebble; now that its more mature, and I moved to Android, I found the promise of reduced time on the smart phone has increased. I am very happy with the Pebble both because of its functionality and nice appearance.  Something I have yet to see in another smart watch save the 360.

And it seems I’m not the only one who things form does not follow function when its comes to wearables.  Like anything else we wear, appearance and comfort DO matter.  The selling out of the Moto 360 has proven that.  I expect Samsung to follow up with a slimmer more mature design in 6 months.

From Sammobile.com

Last week at Google I/O, they sprang a cardboard phone holder that basically turn your smartphone into a VR HMD display device.  Its extremely  cleaver, and was quite the hit.  So much so, there is a strong demand for these guys even a week later.  Now we are hearing rumors that a plastic version of this is coming out called the Samsung Gear VR.  I’m not sure how true this is, but it would not be all that hard to make something like the Google Cardboard HMD in plastic and then make a few improvememts.  Might even work better since it would be lighter and made to better tolerances.  However, part of the rumor is that it will be more then just a phone housing as with the cardboard version.  According to Sammobile.com this thing will come with extra feature like:

On the right side of the Gear VR, there is a see-through button, which uses the smartphone’s rear-facing camera sensor to supply the user with a video feed of the real outside world – this way the user won’t need to remove and wear the headset again and again, which will make the overall experience of wearing the headset easier than alternatives from Oculus or Sony. There is also a touchpad located directly under the see-through button, which will allow users to navigate through the user interface on the Galaxy smartphone.

I wrote before how disappointed I was when the Galaxy Gear first come out, trying to put too into the device and then pricing it too high. Not to mention locking it to their own devices.  I also discussed how I was looking forward to the Google watch for the same reason, spoiler alert, I’m going to try to get on this week and hack on it.  So I do not have my hopes up that the VR Gear will be something I want to buy.  In fact, I would not be surprised to see it locked to the Galaxy line with a special driver that is matched to the optics making it unless with any other phone.

But what I DO expect, is someone out there is going to design a simple plastic version and sell it for $15 or even better,  a 3D printer version that can be put together with 3 or 4 parts.  I will be all over that.

Well seems the pendulum has swung back to the VR/AR hotness again.  Beginning with the kickstarter project, Oculus, later purchased by Facebook (still not sure why), then a number of copy cat VR headsets, Motorcycle helmets with HUD displays (my favorite) and now Google has a VR dev platform with aforementioned sweet ass cardboard VR glasses mounts. So what is different this time?

Plenty.  When I was first playing in the VR/AR world, we had AOL dial up, Pentium I PC’s running windows 95 or 98.  Limited content and Headsets that cost in the thousands.  The most common way to experience a 3D world was through games or VRML.  Now a high-speed internet connection is pretty common.  Most desktop computers have more then enough power to display a reasonably detailed 3D world out of the box, and high power graphic cards are almost a 1/10th of the price from the 90’s. There is more content out there and its more connected.  Google 3D maps just itself has more 3D content then anyone would have time to completely consume. And of course, 3D games are constantly pushing the limits of an immersive environment with 60fps soon to become the new high standard for realistic gaming.

Finally, we have a plethora of new display devices.  Not just cheaper and better HMD’s for full immersive VR, but mobile phones, google glass (kinda) that provide AR (Augmented Reality) experiences, and yes, or new friend the Google Cardboard 3D viewer.  That does not mean suddenly everything is going to be VR/AR, we already learned that lesson, but as wearables become more common, I think we will see a smart phone that can fit into a simple glasses container that gives us pretty good VR/AR.  That is saying something. So with so many people who can now experience a VR/AR environment at little to no extra cost, what kind of apps will take advantage of this opportunity and bust out?

Well, lets find out.  Coming soon is a VR hackathon where like minded people can explore that question. Of course games will always be at the forefront, but what else? Perhaps someone can come up with a cool little app that runs on the cardboard headset google made.  And Perhaps someone will model this head mount in 3D and print a whole bunch of them.  Perhaps someone will grab a Leap motion detected, Like I did in a hackathon awhile back and allow a full VR experience with complex navigation.

Who knows, but what I do know is we have the confluence of check hardware, cheap/free software and wide pipes.  Its time to see what VR/AR can really do.