Vlog 20160618 (Patreon)

https://www.htcvive.com/ca/

https://www.tiltbrush.com/

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Okay hello Patrons it is Saturday and I'm just going to do a quick blog update.

So what's been going on week let's see... Basically just been continuing to work on it the extra bonus pages for the books which hopefully you've been seeing go up in your Patreon stream and other than that...

Work has been interesting we got an HTC Vive in the office which is a new VR rig-- I don't know if you've heard of it or not-- it's pretty new technology. I've tried a range of different VR and AR technologies in the past but the Vive was new to me as well and was a really interesting experience. I think the biggest difference between the Vive and the oculus is that the Vive just feels like you're stepping into a different space. So you put the headset on and then suddenly you're there-- you're somewhere else-- it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel very jarring, you don't have to like get used to it in terms of... You don't have to make an internal adjustment to feel like you're in the virtual world. It is a very smooth transition it didn't make me feel dizzy, I could continue to wear my glasses.. And so all of that was really interesting. And were trying now to think of how this type of technology will affect our world in the future because as a product design company we have to have a good understanding of how cutting-edge technologies are going to make an impact so that we can prepare for them rather than trying to catch the wave.

For myself I'm not I'm not certain yet how VR is going to impact things. It's something that I've been trying to give more and more thought to but I haven't been able to come to any conclusions. A lot of my coworkers are very hype on it-- they think it's it's really going to be impactful. For myself I'm more interested in augmented reality, I think. There is a lot of interesting data that's being collected and transmitted and a lot of phones now are able to serve interesting information to you in real time. Google Now was a really interesting application of that. And that was the promise of Google glass right? That they would be able to do augmented reality services on top of what you were normally doing.

I'm not so sure what role VR will really play-- I mean for now it's just at the point where the technology is good enough that we can start having that conversation. I think it has some interesting applications for remote work-- for example if a colleague or a distributed team is trying to meet in the workplace right now that is one of the biggest hurdles. It's something that our company struggles with continuously-- trying to get a bunch of people in the meeting when only some of them are actually physically in your country or in your office. And you know we waste the first 10 minutes of the meeting just getting video and speakers configured on everyone's computer ..so adding a virtual-reality component might actually be more of a headache than it's worth if we can't even get sound and video to work yet... now that I think about it ...

But in the future if there was a a unified meeting place where you could all log into and if there was some kind of mapping where your gestures and your expressions were projected onto another representational avatar... That might be a much more interesting way to conduct remote work. So that interests me... The gaming aspects obviously are very interesting as well but it's not something that I'm personally very passionate about. So that was interesting.

There is also the idea of being able to create something in 3-D space. The most common art application that's currently available for this type of technology is called "tilt brush" and I got the opportunity to play around with tilt brush a little bit and that was cool. It's a very different way of drawing and a very different way of thinking about drawing and that took a lot of getting used to. You're not just drawing something as you would drawing on the wall although you can but once you do that you have to add volume to that shape that you're trying to create. What's more interesting I think is when you use broad street sweeping strokes around you and you know... You create a swirl and then something that goes through that swirl and you yourself are able to navigate and look at that shape from all the different angles. That has really interesting applications... A lot of people have asked me whether it has implications for 3-D CAD because that something that I work with a lot obviously, and I do think it does have significant applications for that.

Being able to create something in CAD and actually see it in front of you in real life at scale is really important. Being able to tell what the scale of something is is tremendously important. Quite often we can be working on a assembly or component and in SolidWorks or the program that you're using you're really zoomed in on it and it's difficult for you to get a good sense of how big a certain feature or wall really is in real life and if you were actually able to see that component in virtual reality and manipulate it in 3-D space I think that might have a tremendous amount of value. Whether or not it will have real tangible value to a tangible real business environment... It's difficult to say how long it'll take before you can conclusively say that.

3-D printing is kind of the same way so if you want to map it to a technology like 3-D printing it was very nascent for a long time and a lot of people are like 'yeah I can see how this is cool and it's going to change the way product design is happening but when is it really going to stop being a toy or a demonstration technology'. And 3-D printing is now a viable manufacturing method it is a method that we rely on quite a bit. It has changed the way that we prototype and the way that we implement certain designs. And it's certainly true that holography and virtual reality and augmented reality could have the same kind of impact on the same trajectory. It'll just be interesting to see what applications come out for it and when... It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the benefits to outweigh the annoyance of trying to get it set up properly... And I think I'm excited to see what other applications will come out for it that I haven't even thought of yet.

So yeah that's basically my week is trying to... I've been spending a lot of time wondering and asking people and talking to people about virtual-reality/ augmented reality and how they see that going forward in the future. And I think I'll be spending even more time thinking on that. Otherwise I have to run off to a friend's house ...she's having a barbecue even though it's pouring rain, so I better get going on my Saturday and I will leave you to yours. Have a good week everyone!