Connected Development

Start a conversation about Artificial Intelligence and you evoke Hollywood’s vision of the future, full of killer robots, time-travelling cyborgs and sentient machines. That’s a fun, if apocalyptic, view but we’re closer than you think. To the AI, not end of days.

Thanks to our increasingly rapid efforts to connect the world around us, your car will soon drive you to work whilst teaching you Swahili, ordering milk and cheese for your fridge, reminding your significant other you’ll be home late because you’re having an affair with a robot shop assistant, taking a DNA sample from the steering wheel and poking you in the buttocks during your virtual porn session.

CES is once again revealing a selection of crazy devices many of us will never need but the message is the same – they should all talk to each other.

The machines don’t get to hog all the conversation as we’re already used to talking to the digital partners in our lives: Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, our cars. The idea works in a home or personal space where we’re all comfortable with a bit of digital banter, but it comes unstuck when we’re expected to talk to our devices in a social situation, wandering down the street, on a train, in the supermarket. This interactive tourette's didn’t help Google with its Glassholes image and I’m not sure this will change with Glass 2.0. It’s all still a bit weird – and noisy if we’re all doing it at the same time.

Speaking of cars (or to them) the tech and automotive worlds really have collided at CES this year. The convergence has been happening over the last decade but there’s never been as much infrastructure in place to genuinely make one relevant to the other as there is this year.

Ford announced its partnership with Amazon to connect their cars to Alexa, operating IoT devices such as lights, heating, A/C and garage doors. In home, the same tech offers status updates from your car via Echo. Ford also displayed their new smaller autonomous car sensors and announced their plans to become beyond an auto manufacturer in 2016, becoming a mobility company.

Major announcements have been timed to coincide with CES by big players such as BMW and Ford but it’s a new arrival that has grabbed some of the brightest headlines – Faraday Future. This new kid on the block plans to set up local operations right here in Vegas, with design and production of their first electric vehicle planned to start in 2017.

They revealed their FFZERO1 concept last night and it’s a truly stunning piece of design, not just from a physical product perspective, but also the well considered internal digital design and augmented reality and how this and the experience will translate to our personal devices. They're a young team that prides itself on rapid turnaround and they've designed a connected car from the ground up.

The concept of the connected car doesn’t just refer to a phone and a dashboard, it’s also the communication with the surrounding environment and how this awareness will eventually deliver the first credible autonomous vehicles. You’ll know of my love of cars and an unhealthy fascination with technology so you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m all for self-driving cars. I’ll sit on the central reservation here as I’ll happily hand over the controls on a motorway commute as long as I get the wheel back for the twists and turns of a challenging country road.

For me it’s an unwillingness to hand over the whole experience because I still love driving. For many others, it will be a trust issue as they’ll expect it all to go horribly wrong, or have all their travel data sold to the highest bidder (Google is building a car after all).

Our intelligent connected world holds great promise for things like interactive storytelling (I hinted at this in Mark Peising’s recent article for Publishing Perspectives) or making life simpler when travelling the globe. We’ll also have to wade through a pile of connected crap on the way as manufacturers and designers still seem hell-bent on adding ‘smart’ to everything they make.

It’s only a matter of time before a tabloid headline exposes a man caught having virtual sex with his SmartFridge.

“Siri, write another article about CES”.

Festive Reality

Happy Christmas, Happy Holiday or just enjoy your break from reality. However you refer to this seasonal respite, there's actually an even better way to escape from it all – in Virtual Reality.

OK, I'm not suggesting you ignore your 'real' friends and family but If you've just invested in Samsung's Gear VR, the best VR headset on the market (for now), then you should probably grab a couple of new titles to justify the purchase.

The free apps are best experienced by trial and error but you should start with Jurassic World: Apatosaurus, Battle for Avengers Tower and James's Legacy - The Prologue.

Gear VR works with Samsung's Galaxy Note and S6 phones and as they're on the Android platform, paid-for titles tend to be unfamiliar territory. Take my advice – as you've just spent $99 on a new headset, spend some more on these two...

Land's End $7.99

This audio-visual masterpiece is a 3D strategy game from UsTwo, the team behind the hit app Monument Valley. I don't even like puzzle games but I refused to return to reality until I'd completed all five levels. The finale won't disappoint – it's spectacular!

EVE: Gunjack $9.99

I tested EVE: Valkyrie earlier this year on the consumer edition of Oculus Rift. It is scheduled to ship with this hardware in 2016 and the audience will love it. I won't go into detail as you basically pilot a spacecraft around er, space, shoot lots of stuff and marvel at the world as it floats by your cockpit.

It's an adrenaline-fuelled ride and visually stunning but couldn't be further removed from the look of Land's End. You're in a movie – and an impressive one at that! In EVE: Gunjack you're in control of a gun turret rather than the whole ship, but it never feels like the poor relation. It's still a mightily impressive VR experience.

It's worth noting that Samsung's gamepad enhances the gameplay so is a good investment for this and many other titles.

There's an increasing number of titles appearing for the Gear VR, some good, others not so. Enjoy the best of the bunch in the standalone VR headset market until the full-blown Oculus Rift, HTC's Vive and Sony's Playstation VR arrive in 2016.

If you don't own a Samsung phone, there's still a healthy selection of Google Cardboard headsets available. I'd recommend looking at a couple of robust options that still hold iOS and Android handsets – Mattel's View-Master reboot and the Zeiss VROne.

I'll feature a more in-depth report on the VR market when I write from CES next month. Have a very Happy Virtual Christmas!

Lost in The Void

Virtual Reality 2.0 has come a long long way in the last two years. Each time we discover a VR experience to amaze and engage, the industry finds a new way to raise the bar. This week I was at The Void in Utah, where the bar has been raised to the stratosphere.

VR can be measured in incremental experience. What that really means is we start with Google cardboard, progress to quality phone units like the Zeiss VR One, add substance with the Samsung/Oculus GearVR then hit the big time with Sony’s Morpheus, HTC’s Vive and the biggest player – Oculus Rift.

The last three have yet to hit high streets but when they do, these headsets will offer something the others don’t – real-world movement. The original Rift allowed us to look around 360º from a fixed point. The second generation added the ability to lean in and this brought a new awareness of presence.

Although Sony’s Morpheus sticks with the lean-in approach, both the Vive and Rift allow the wearer to stand up and walk around, and the difference is breathtaking. Once you realise you can move naturally within a virtual environment, your brain stops playing by the rules and you believe you’re actually where the visuals say you are.

So that’s the ultimate VR experience then? For now, it’s the best you can expect in a home or office. But there’s more, oh so much more. It’s time to enter The Void.

I’ve just spent a day in a small town called Linden, less than an hour from Salt Lake City. This is home to The Void – the world’s first Virtual Reality theme park.

Brainchild of CEO Ken Bretschneider, James Jensen and Curtis Hickman, The Void demonstrates the advantage of mixing virtual and physical environments. Not in the way Augmented Reality headsets or the hybrid Sulon Cortex do, this is full VR with enhanced tactile environments.

These environments are given substance by walled corridors, alien pods, blasts of air and heat and motorised monoliths.

This 4D experience has an incredible effect but when combined with The Void’s wireless headsets, physical weapons and props, the results are nothing short of transformational, especially when you're sharing the same space with multiple players. I felt as if I’d been beamed onto the Holodeck of the Enterprise or the far reaches of Mordor.

Bretschneider and his talented team of designers, developers and engineers have big plans (including continuous development of their own hardware) but the first public opening of The Void is scheduled for late 2016 in Utah, with additional ‘Virtual Entertainment Centres’ rolling out to other locations over the following 12 months.

Content for these environments will invariably lean towards gaming but the scenarios are limitless. From fast and frantic shoot-em-ups to creepy spine-tingling horror, the opportunity exists to commandeer the senses like never before. Storytelling has never had it so good!

I can’t eulogise enough about how incredible The Void is. The simple act of touching a wall or sitting down on a rock in a virtual world is mind-blowing. I fought off hoards of giant spiders with a gun I could not only see in hi-res detail but feel and fire as if I were at the heart of a fire-fight. The next generation guns also feature recoil and pump action reload. I had high expectations before visiting Utah, but The Void delivered so much more.

Virtual Reality offers a creative platform like no other and we’re now seeing clear distinctions between the levels of experience on offer. The Void is the VR Premier League, but its halo effect helps to support development for the ‘lesser divisions’. The takeaway from a 4D adventure is a hunger for the next best thing in-home. Audiences will still love the VR on their phones, PCs and games consoles, but they’ll flock to the Virtual Entertainment Centres when they open. And they won’t be disappointed.

E3: The Blockbuster Generation

Hollywood is rejoicing as cinema-goers flock back to the big screen this summer. In recent years the movie theatre experience looked as if it was going the way of the music business, but now the 2015 summer of excess is serving up the blockbusters.

The current box office takings merely provide the warm up act to this winter’s releases where we’ll see the long-awaited extension to the Star Wars franchise following on from James Bond’s November action in SPECTRE.

I have a point to make here, relating to the millennials amongst us (the kids born this millennium) and my time spent at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in LA this week. Having sat through Avengers: Age of Ultron last month, I came away feeling a little despondent and wondering which came first… the story-less all action ADHD blockbuster or the constantly distracted audience?

I had an interesting conversation in the back of a cab last year. I was heading to the airport having just delivered my TEDx talk in Athens, before jetting off to LA for the next big adventure.

I say the talk was interesting, but I mean ‘challenging’. My esteemed car-sharer was a seasoned TED speaker, with years of experience in the field of human behaviour. He held the view that kids today are bombarded with too much information, especially of the digital variety. He believed that mobile devices should be strictly rationed as they cause more problems for kids than they solve.

I told him that I agreed in principal but ‘all things in moderation’ is a better approach than insisting on a non-digital solution. You don’t filter the noise out by turning it all off, you learn to live with it, categorise it and make use of it.

I’d be the first to admit that my kids don’t lead a normal life. The very nature of my job exposes them to a new piece of tech hardware or delivery platform on a regular basis. They are a fabulous sounding board for the reactions of the next generation of consumers as they’re quick to dismiss and not afraid to speak their minds. They have none of the social or business diplomacy to worry about – it just works or it doesn’t.

They’ve been fascinated by and indifferent to various smart watches and VR headsets over the past couple of years and it’s easy to see that a constant supply of digital watch faces will appeal more than garage door openers and short-form film and games are perfect for VR.

At E3, the audience is hungry for new games, but still prefers the familiarity of a sequel and will happily immerse themselves in a single game for hours on end if the content offers enough variety and a continual challenge.

Minecraft is already huge but Microsoft demonstrated a whole new level of immersion at E3 – on HoloLens. If you’re not familiar with this new platform, it’s Microsoft’s foray into the augmented reality market. projecting seemingly real content into the wearer’s field of vision. I’ll be getting hands-on today and will update this article in a few hours.

So where does this leave our kids? Lost in a digital world of shock and awe, content and distraction? Yes, all of the above and it’s brilliant.

I saw the Disney movie Tomorrowland a couple of weeks ago and I loved it. It touched a creative and technological nerve and moved me to write this article. It’s not an explosion-a-second blockbuster like Age of Ultron as it manages to combine an all-action adventure with something subtly cerebral.

It’s a film with a message. Don’t lose your sense of wonder, investigate new technology and be creative with it. Use it to push boundaries, not live within them. We wouldn’t have reached the moon or built electric cars without a commitment to improve the world in which we live. We can also have fun whilst doing it!

It’s our responsibility to encourage kids to live with and use technology to their advantage, rather than distance themselves from it, and a brighter future.