Tag Archives: Google

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

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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.

How Will Learners Create Their Own Content in Virtual Reality

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When talking to educators about Virtual Reality, the big question I always run into is “how can my learners create their own content?” This is a good question. If we don’t get our learners into the creation process, we are really just creating fancy textbooks and lectures, or slightly more immersive movie experiences. Interesting but passive in the end. There are some ways to use newer high-end phones to record 3-D panoramic images with apps like Panorama 360 or InstaVR. But these aren’t moving, and you need some serious sound equipment to re-create immersive sounds. Projects like Jump from Google are looking at how to work on these issues. But even then you are looking at recording the world around you, bringing in limitations. How does one create content for games, fiction scenarios, historical re-creations, etc? It seems that Google is also looking into this with the Daydream platform (see also the video above). Still very rudimentary, but a good start. Someday we can hope that building VR will become as easy as placing a box of crayons and paper in front of learners and letting them create whatever comes to mind.

Artificial Intelligence Meets Instant Messaging in Google Allo

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXEkoXgb4bI

One thing you have to give Google – they are always willing to try new things. Of course, I can’t remember what the last new Google “thing” was that I read a few months ago, so that could be good or bad. But today Google announced Google Allo, a new messaging app. Its basically another version of testing or iMessage or (insert an messaging predecessor here). So nothing to get excited about there. However, they are combining it with a new Google Assistant to add some artificial intelligence to the mix. Basically, you don’t have to leave the app to look up directions (or whatever the task may be) – you can tell the AI to look it up and it will display in the app. It will also give you some suggested responses based on the messages you get. Basically it lets the AI do the Googling for you (the video above covers the more cutesy aspects, but the linked article includes more interesting ideas and details on things like Incognito mode). Interesting ideas, but do I have to get all my friends on Allo to use it? That seems to be the downfall of so many new Google ideas. Its hard to get people in new apps that don’t go viral like Pokemon Go.

Is the Future of Mobile Devices Modular?

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I remember hearing about Google’s Project Ara to create modular smartphones a few years ago. It seemed like a far-fetched idea back then, but now it seems that these will be a reality next year. What are modular cellphone? Basically a swiss army knife phone, where you can switch out different sections (modules) with new parts. Instead of trying to cram more tools into one phone, the idea would be that you could swap out tools when you need them. This would be things like better camera lenses, better microphones, better speakers, various scientific/measuring tools, physical parts, drone parts, etc. – anything that would take up a lot of room in a single phone. I am always knocking my phone case off, so I hope they have a good system for keeping the parts in place. And to store them when not in use. Seems like it could get bulky. And they never seem to show the screen side for some reason. But there are some interesting possibilities here, and a bonus that it looks more like a real phone than the proto type from years ago did.

Google Takes Virtual Reality in an Interesting Direction

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While focused in some meetings yesterday, I got a Slack message from our ex. director George Siemens asking what I knew about Google Daydream. I got online and saw various news sources exploding with references to Daydream. It’s an interesting approach to VR – Daydream is more about making sure hardware (especially phones) and software are ready for Virtual Reality. Or maybe think of it as a VR ecosystem with Google as the center of many devices. Sounds familiar, or course. Connecting to Google could mean interesting things for tools like Google Maps, Google Earth, and YouTube. This article looks at the general idea, as well as how YouTube already has a VR mode that other apps could copy. I think the basic idea is that you start experiencing your phone as VR (hopefully not while walking). The cool thing is that Google can sometimes do cool things and this has promise, but then again Google has a bad track record of letting things die… and the fact that they are everywhere is creepy at times (what will Daydream mean for data, privacy, etc).

Google Spaces Gives You, Well… A Bunch of Stuff

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Not sure whether to report this as innovation or just something you will probably hear about. Google announced today a new service for mobile devices called “Spaces”, a mobile app that “lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic.” It comes with Google Search, YouTube, and Chrome built in, so the claim is that it will simplify group sharing. Not sure that was a problem many had complained about, but I could be wrong. Also sounds like a simplified GoogleWave, or maybe an improved Google Plus, or a less synchronous version of Hangouts, or…? Not sure how Spaces will simplify – seems like it will just create more options. As with most things Google tried, it will not be an issue of whether it works or not as much as how many people you know that use it. GoogleWave had some great features, but failed because it was hard to get an invite to join, and when you did, people barely used it. Social anything online needs people there – old school bulletin boards are still very effective where people use them on a consistent basis.

Google AJAX Search API

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I’m not totally sure what to make of this one, but it sounds interesting. It seems that Google has created a search function that allows you to insert a Google search area into your site in a custom way. One of the most practical seems to be that it would allow you to use Google to search your site.

One of the really intriguing ones is the blog comments search API. You can add a small Google search area next to a blog comment area, and then the results can be added to the end of the comment as “clippings.” Sounds like a great idea for educational purposes. I would like to see something like that for discussion posts, too. That way, you can quickly find results to back up your posts in an academic settings.

I haven’t fully dug into these ideas yet, but they sound interesting.

YackPack: Will Voice-Based E-mail Catch On?

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We’ve all ran into the same big problem with e-mail: it’s so hard to read a person’s mood in the message. Are they angry, happy, bored? Many an enemy has been made in the world over the mis-typed or ill conceived response. Even a smiley really doesn’t help that much – mainly because so many people misuse them. “Your such an idiot :)” – so obviously a joke… right? Phones usually always beat e-mails in the accurate communication department. So, can you combine voice with e-mail to overcome these problems?

Some companies can have made attempts at this. Google Talk introduced a Voice Message system for email that I’ve touched on before. YackPack is a website that seems to move the concept of email totally into the voice realm. Basically, with YackPack, you record messages to leave for people that are also on YackPack. They can then open the message, listen to it, and respond to it.

Sounds like a fun tool, but will it catch on? We tried it at my office, and it died out pretty quick after the cool factor died down – like, after one day of use. Other tools, like Google Talk and Skype, still find usage in my everyday work flow. But YackPack didn’t quite catch on. I still think it is a step in the right direction.

The biggest problem for us was that YackPack has a funky interface that is unusual to learn. It’s not hard, it just is so different from how e-mail is set-up. I think they could greatly improve “the Yack” if they just made the message retrieval and response system function and interface like e-mail currently does, rather than create an entirely new system. It takes a good chunk of time to learn the voice recording side of it as it is – so leave something in there that is familiar at least.

I’ve also seen tools that create online voice-based discussion boards. I’ve discussed this concept on Moodle discussion boards in the past. Martin Dougiamas, the creator of Moodle, had a great point. If all of your discussion is in a voice recording, you can’t quote someone and respond to that particular chunk. You also can’t search through the voice messages to even find a specific quote. You have to listen to the whole thing all over again. It’s just a much slower, time consuming way of doing asynchronous discussion.

I think another good reason that text-based e-mail and discussion will continue to dominate voice-based alternatives is the silence factor. You can type e-mail without having to close the office door for privacy. That can’t happen with YackPack.

Google Talk is probably more of the step in the right direction – messages recorded and sent to an email address still show up as an e-mail, but you can play the voice recording straight from the e-mail (built-in player is included, if the recipient has Gmail). It would be nice for them to give the options of then responding to the message in voice or text, but for now the only option is text. Also the built-in player in Gmail is Flash-based, so it should be easy to send that player to non-Gmail addresses, too – but so far you can’t.

The possibilities are there, and the ideas are in motion… so it will be interesting to see how these pan out.

Google World

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Yep. Google will own you someday. You will just be a piece of data in their Big Brother global database of human DNA database or whatever. But until then, I sure am enjoying everything that they have to offer.

Of course, there is Gmail, one of the coolest email functions in the world. In addition to the massive amount of storage space (you never really delete e-mail, just search through it to fins old stuff with a search program that works great), you also get threaded conversations. Replies are stored in link of messages that lets you quickly read through the history of the conversation. Except for those people that constantly like to rename every reply they give. There is also a chat function that lets you chat with another Gmail user that is signed in. It even tells you when the other person is typing a response to you. Spooky, but it still rocks.

And I’m not even going to go into how cool Google docs is (online Word doc and spreadsheet creator that you can work on projects collaboratively with people around the world). That just speaks for itself.

Oh, yeah…. this blog is created on Blogger, which is Google. Blatant plug there….

I have been loving on Google Talk and Personalized homepage recently. Google now owns my life. Hope they don’t turn to the dark side soon….

Google Talk is kind of like a lite version of Skype. You can call other Google Talk users online for free. You can also send files to people using Google Talk. And there is a nice mail notice that pops up on the screen when you get a new e-mail. But the really cool function of Google talk is the Voicemail function. You can leave a voice mail on someone else’s email. If the person uses Gmail, they get a nice play button that plays in in their inbox. Other email accounts have to download the mp3 and play it in something else. It’s just a great tool for sending messages that might be misunderstood in text only.

Personalized homepage just flat out rocks. You can create a home page with customized content and tabs. Anywhere in the world you sign in, it shows you what you add there. But it’s the content that makes it rock. The picture above is a capture of my first “tab.” You can create as many tabs as you want, each with custom content. Here’s what I have on my first tab:

  • Google Calendar, which shows me all of my upcoming events.
  • Gmail monitor – shows my inbox
  • Current weather for my town
  • A to-do list
  • Quick search Ebay and Wikipedia
  • Notepad – take notes on what I need to.

The next two tabs are my news tabs – one for general news (world, weird, CNN, aintitcool.com, Star Wars and Sci-fi), and one for Educational Technology news. The fourth tab is the cool tab – my fun stuff:

  • MySpace profile alerts – see if I have new comments, messages, etc
  • NASA’s picture of the day
  • Links to favorite comics – Dilbert, Zits, and Calvin & Hobbs
  • New Urban Legends 🙂
  • Google maps quick search
  • Pac-man!

You can literally choose from hundreds of applications to add to your page. Don’t you wish you had Gmail now? Everything comes with your free Gmail account.