Facebook and Google Give Us a Glimpse Into the “Future” of Virtual Reality

Innovate LINK

After much speculation as to what their Virtual Reality plans would be, Facebook finally announced what most assumed would be the answer: Facebook Spaces. The basic idea is that you recreate yourself as a cartoon and then connect with people in VR to interact, share VR experiences, and take VR selfies of, well, your cartoon you. Spaces seems to only work with Occulus Rift + Touch, and there is even a kind of cool but creepy VR camera you can look forward to bringing your messy bedroom or kitchen table into VR. Wonder how long until we see this camera on tele-presence robots? Or floating in the air training Jedis how to fight with light… or not. On the other side of the VR world is the release of Tabel by Google, an immersive VR movie. It sounds cool, but since it is only for Cardboard right now, I only get errors on my iPhone. Will VR make movies immersive? Hard to say. I could see people really wanting to watch something like Star Wars in VR, but it would be expensive to make a movie like that immersive while also basically keeping the focus on main narrative. Maybe it will lead to a different types of less linear movies like Tabel? Who knows. Maybe people won’t really care that much for it. But both projects reveal a future vision of VR that takes some part of everyday life (movies, video chats, event planning, etc) and makes them more immersive, 3-dimensional, and realistic. Well, depending on your feelings about cartoons without legs.

E-Tattoos Point to Another New Future of Computing

Innovate LINK

Predicting the future is tricky business, but it is always interesting to see the ideas various people have. When looking at the “next thing” after smartphones, various predictions range from computers injected into our brains to flexible paper-thin devices. The one idea that seems to be the closest to practical application is the E-Tattoo. As you can see by the video, there are working models (unlike the computer in sheet of paper idea), and many people tend to be okay with the tattoo part (unlike inject-able computers – yikes!). Of course, currently there is nothing that is that spectacular about what these do, but the future could be different according to Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University: “You’ll have these digital tattoo parlours which you can go to in 2050 and 5 minutes later you can walk out with the iPhone 22 on your forearm.” Well, let’s just hope that the iPhone 22 won’t just rub off in a few days, because I am pretty sure they will be just as expensive in 2050 as they are today.