Put the headset away. Everybody has got to stop confusing AR and VR. This article is about AR (Augmented Reality), not about people stumbling into things while locked away inside a virtual world via their sci-fi goggles.
‘Knowing the ropes’ has entered popular parlance as a metaphor for acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to do a job. It comes directly from sailing, particularly the days of tall ships when a deck hand had to master the complex arrangement of ropes and pulleys on a particular vessel. Knowing which one did what was crucial to the ship and crew’s welfare and navigation.
Have you seen Ready Player One? In a not-too-distant future, the film depicts humanity spending most of its time in a virtual world called the Oasis. Built by fictional software genius James Halliday, the Oasis becomes a refuge for the world’s population in the face of grim living conditions in the real world due to a breakdown in geopolitics and overpopulation. In this VR world, you can be anyone or anything you want, go anywhere you like, and live out your fantasies. It’s like Second Life on steroids.
Modern smartphones have a host of software tricks to make photos look better, plus cameras in some models that are as good as dedicated digital cameras. Almost everybody has a good quality camera in their pocket at all times now. But, as the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The technology takes care of a lot of things, like exposure, colour and effects processing, but it does not (yet) point the camera in the right place and compose a scene for you.
Many of us have dreamed about a simple and wholesome life making something at home with our own hands and selling it to make a living.
That’s cool when you’re selling samples of your handiwork to friends and family, but how will you fare on the open market with real customers making real buying decisions? They have the power to buy whatever they need from Amazon with a few clicks, and will generally only buy things with lots of five star reviews.
Writing is lonely and bad for your back, but it’s also a thrilling adventure of self-discovery and a potential money spinner. Those who feel driven to write will write regardless of what anyone says – but many a desk drawer is full of manuscripts that never see the light of day. Furthermore, writing can be a very slow process if most of the time is spent staring out of the window waiting for inspiration to strike.
If we really want the cool stuff we see in Science Fiction Movies, we are going to have to train more people in nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. We’ve already got graphene, bendy screens, hydrophobic coatings and bandages infused with silver nanoparticles to help heal wounds faster. Those are cool. But where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Where are the sci-fi chairs that grow out of the floor and disappear when you stand up?
In 2010, Katy Perry walked into the MET Costume Institute Gala wearing a dress that constantly changed colour. 3000 shimmering LEDs created the effect, with Perry lighting up like a rainbow in the couture dress designed by wearable tech company CuteCircuit. Back in 2009, Sony Ericsson and the London College of Fashion ran a contest to design digital clothing, and the winner was a Bluetooth-enabled cocktail dress that lit up when a call was received.
When we go into a restaurant, we put our trust in its staff to give us food that’s in tip-top shape. Our health and happiness depend on procedures like maintaining the cold chain, cleaning surfaces, sterilizing utensils, checking cooking temperatures and a lot of other details that can make the difference between healthy and dangerous. A chef can kill a customer with a bad scallop, and even if everything is impeccably clean, you can still kill an allergy sufferer with a fragment of peanut. Hence the need for a tightly-regulated catering industry.
The macros function within Excel is such a powerful feature that only the initiated can handle it. You are ready to enter the realm of Excel macros when you are a confident and experienced use of Excel and comfortable creating formulas and manipulating spreadsheet data. A little experience in Visual Basic won’t go amiss, either. You will have mastered most of the functions that come as standard with Excel and be ready to create your own.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
