The Mixed Bag of Mixed Reality

in of tech and squishy feelings. And today it doesn't get any squishy here because we're talking about virtual reality and augmented reality, a very squishy subject as it turns out, because it's a definition that continuously changes. And we've explored topics like augmented reality and virtual reality many many times

over the course of this show. You can find lots of different episodes where we've covered the the subject, and these days the two techn oologies tend to get categorized together in a bigger bucket that is called mixed or sometimes merged reality. And you could think of mixed reality kind of like a spectrum. So on one end of the spectrum you have near total virtual environments, so almost everything that you would experience under this area would be

created by a computer. You would be viewing it, likely through some sort of head mounted display. There'd be some sort of interface that you would use in order to have your physical interactions in the real space translated into the virtual space. But everything you are experiencing ideally would be created by computer. The ultimate version of this, of course, would be the Holia Deck from Star Trek the next generation.

You would never really want to use the Holia Deck because at least once a season that thing goes crazy and tries to kill everybody aboard the ship, and yet they keep using it. We'll talk more about Star Trek technology soon, but not in this episode but in another one. But that would be the ultimate representation a world where everything is computer generated. Everything you can taste, touch, smell,

see here, everything comes from a computer. These days, we don't really have anything that generates all of that kind of sensory data. Typically, the data that does get generated involves your vision and your hearing and uh you know. You might go to a specialized VR experience that incorporates other elements. Let's say that you go to one where you are going to uh go through like a virtual

firefighting experience. They might use heaters to generate enough heat to make it feel like you're actually passing close by flames that sort of thing, but you know, typically at home, you're not gonna do that, and you probably shouldn't for fear of burning down your house. Now, on the other end of that spectrum, you have almost everything rooted in a physical world. You just have some digital information overlaid

on top of that physical world in some way. It may be overlaid visually, so you might be wearing special glasses or a headset, and through that headset you're looking at the world around you, but there's also like a heads up display style overlay on top of it. Or it could be audio. It could be that you're looking at something and then an audio accused in the system you're using that you are interested in that thing, and it starts to play audio. It could be all sorts

of different things. It really just has to be computer generated information sent to you to augment your experience, thus the augmented reality. Both of these kind of fall in that spectrum where on one end you've got mostly the physical world with some virtual elements, and on the other end you've got mostly virtual world, perhaps with some physical elements.

All of that falls into mixed reality, which can be anywhere along that spectrum, and you might end up having a largely virtual world and physical objects that you use in the real world that are then mapped to the virtual world. So, for example, you might have a real set of table and chairs in the room that you

are currently in. You're wearing a headmounted display, so you can see a virtual set of table and chairs in front of you, and it turns out that they're mapped to the actual physical table and chairs that are in the real space, which means that you could actually go and sit down at that table because you have a real chair and table inside the room that you are currently in, your body is currently in, and the experience of your physical body and the experience of your virtual

representation can be analogous. Uh. That obviously doesn't happen with most implementations of virtual reality today. There's definitely some research and development labs that are doing that sort of thing, but typically if you're going out and buying a VR set, whatever it may be, you're not getting something quite as d as that, generally speaking, but it does fall into

that category of mixed reality. So it describes not just the headset, not just the philosophy, but some of those supplemental technologies we've seen rise up since the renewed push to make VR and A are a consumer technology. Uh, there are lots of different control systems. There's that interactive object approach I was talking about, and things along those lines that all fall into this category. But the question remains, is it actually ready to blossom as a consumer technology?

Is VR and a R is mixed reality for that matter, ready to become something that goes beyond just being interesting or gimmicky and become a common piece of of consumer tech, something analogous to a computer or a tablet or a smartphone, something that a lot of people would end up adopting and using a regular basis. Because we've had the same question before and the answer has turned out to be no,

or at least no, not right now. You might remember back in the if you're old enough, that virtual reality was becoming a really big buzzword around the mid nineties and there was this real push toward developing VR experiences. Hollywood was taking a stab at imagining what that would mean, and often they would create stories in which you had characters entering computer generated worlds where everything was so realistic that you could actually be directly affected by that computer

generated world. In other words, that whole idea of if you die in the matrix, you die in real life. That was a very common theme in those early VR movie days. Uh. Of course, the reality of VR was a world away from what was being depicted in Hollywood, even given the primitive computer generated graphics of Hollywood at that time, which are pretty sad. If you go back and watch movies from the nineteen nineties that were very heavy on computer generated graphics, you start to wonder why

anyone ever thought it was cool. But that's mostly from retrospect, obviously, because things have improved so much in the years since then. But as a consumer, it was incredibly disheartening to see the reality of virtual reality versus the way it was depicted in popular culture. You would go to, perhaps, say, a an arcade that would have a VR set up. There was one here in Georgia. It was actually at

Gwynette Place Mall. I'll never forget because I would spend five of my hard earned dollars to spend a few minutes in this experience, which involved you climbing onto a pedestal that had a raised little bar, kind of semicircular bar around you that would keep you from falling off said pedestal. They would lower an enormous headset onto you, and the headset itself was suspended by cables from the ceiling because it was too heavy for you to wear

as an independent headmelon display. This was much much bigger and more bulky than anything you would find on the market today. And then they would switch it on and you would be transported to a wonderful world of primitive polygons. The probably the the the big title that everyone encountered at some point or another in those days, if you were interested in VR, was Dactyl Nightmare. I think it was called Dactyal mindmare. Is either Dactyal Nightmare Dactyal terror.

It's not in my notes, but I do have distinct memories of experiencing, or perhaps enduring is a better word, this particular program and the way it worked was it was a multiplayer game, had various platforms. You can move around, and you would use a controller too to move forward or backward, or left or right. Your point of view was controlled by wherever your head was looking, but you're

a rule. Movement was controlled by a controller you held in your hands, so you didn't walk forward you just used your you know, thumbstick or whatever in order to move your character forward. And it was a multiplayer game where you were pitted against up to three other players. I think I think it linked for play, at least the version I played, I think it linked four players together. And you had a primitive looking little stick in your

virtual world in front of you. So if you held your hands out in front of you, you could see this primitive looking little stick with a little cube at the end of it that was actually a gun and a bullet, and you would fire the gun and the little cube would go flying at a less than bullet speed velocity toward whatever you're aiming at. And you were trying to take out your opponents. You're trying to score as many points, essentially a deathmatch, trying to score as

many points against your opponents as you could. Meanwhile, a pterodactyl made out of as many as perhaps six triangles would be flying overhead and trying to pick you up and drop you, uh them where else on the map, presumably to your death. And um. It was an interesting experience. It was fun. It was not terribly immersive because the graphics were so unrealistic. It was immersive in the sense that you got the feeling that wherever you were looking really was your point of view. So that was kind

of cool. But because of the limitations of the technology, the limitations of the graphics, the fact that it was this very bulky system that you could never completely ignore all of those different factors meant that you never could really lose yourself in that experience. And it's experiences like that that caused people to become disenchanted with the concept

of virtual reality. And when they realized that it just wasn't where they thought it should be based upon what they were given to think of, they began to reject virtual reality. The buzz really faded pretty quickly from the whole concept, and from that point forward, at least for the next decade or so, uh, the people who are working in the fields of virtual reality as well as

augmented reality found themselves struggling for funding. It was really difficult to get money to continue their research and development because there was such a there's the bubble of interest had deflated so rapidly. It really collapsed essentially, and the disciplines took a really big step backward, and so development was proceeding much more slowly, and most of the advances were happening in labs where people had very specific use

cases for virtual reality. So, for example, it's been used extensively in immersion therapy to help people deal with various types of anxieties and phobias, because it turns out that a virtual experience, even one with relatively primitive graphics, can inspire the same sort of physical reactions that we experience when we encounter something that causes us stress in the

real world. So let's say you're afraid of heights, and you try on a virtual experience that smulates being at the edge of a very tall surface, like perhaps at the edge of the building, you might actually start to feel your body react as if you were really in that location, even if the graphics are more cartoony. It doesn't have to be photo realistic for this to work.

So people who would suffer from the fear of falling from a great height would actually start to have that same physical reaction, and psychologists and psychiatrists could use this to help people get more accustomed to the feelings and to be able to control them and to be able to deal with them in a constructive way as opposed to being paralyzed by them with a phobia, and you would know ultimately during this process that you were safe. You're inside a room, inside a lab, You're nowhere close

to the edge of anything. You're not going to fall, you're not going to get hurt. So rationally you would be able to hold that onto that thought and you wouldn't go into a full panic, hopefully, But even if you did go into a full panic, it was very easy to turn the system off, remove it, and then

to re ground yourself. And it was a way to create this therapeutic approach to exposing somebody to the stimuli that would set them off and become better at coping with that situation so that they could then ultimately move about in the real world and not have that affect them. Well, it's a very powerful statement to say that virtual reality could allow you to do this, even when the graphics

are not that terribly powerful. So you did see a lot of various approaches using technology in that way, whether it was with phobias or anxieties or post traumatic stress syndrome. That kind of thing really kind of interesting and cool, but removed from the mainstream public's consciousness. It wasn't a consumer technology anymore. So VR did continue to advance, but it was within the specific implementations, and this was more or less the way things went for at least ten years.

Then fairly recently, within the last five or six years, you started seeing devices like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vibe come out in an attempt to bring VR back to the consumer space. A lot of things had changed since the nineteen nineties. Moore's law had continued to hold sway, and now we had computers that were much more capable of generating and processing graphics at a high level,

a high refresh rate, high level resolution. UH. The technology for tracking had become much cheaper, mostly because of smartphones. The smartphone market had created this need for sensors that were really small and very versatile. So you know, the iPhone has that feature, as do love smartphones today, of being able to flip from landscape to portrait mode depending

upon how you're holding the phone, whether it's horizontal or vertical. Well, those same sensors can be used in virtual reality gear and they're very small and they're relatively inexpensive because of

mass production. So we started seeing other industries grow, and then the VR world began to repurpose some of the technology from those industries and use them specifically in VR hardware, and as a result, they meant that they didn't have to develop all of that themselves, and it brought the cost of of of research and development down and ultimately ultimately the cost of the actual products once they were ready to ship to the consumer, because if they if

VR specialists had had to build everything from the ground up, VR sets would be way more expensive than they are now. They're still expensive, don't get me wrong. We'll talk about that problem in just a little bit. So Oculus and HDC Vibe they come out. They're trying really hard to make VR become a thing like it could have been in the nineties if it weren't for the fact that the reality was so far behind where our perception was.

They obviously still have some hurdles. Meanwhile, recently, actually Microsoft announced a platform called hollow Lens, and they were looking at getting into the augmented reality space, so a headset that would actually overlay information on top of the real world around you, as opposed to replacing the real world.

And obviously hollow Lens is just one example. There are plenty of augmented reality applications out there for various types of devices, but hollow lens was something that Microsoft developed that was intended to be an augmented reality headset and the UH. Since then, Microsoft has said that it's not going to be its own consumer product. It was more meant as a platform for developers to use in order to develop augmented reality experiences, which then would be incorporated

into future products. It would not be a hollow lens that you would go out and buy. It would be something else, UH, which is kind of a shame. I never got a chance to try a hollow lens. I know they still exist, but I've never been able to to try one on. I really hope one day to change that and get an experience with a hollow lens.

So today I want to look at the technologies and approaches companies are unleashing in an effort to get VR, a R and mixed reality off the ground again, because for a while it looked like there was the possibility that just like in the nineties when VR died, we could see the same thing happened today. And the reason for that there's actually several reasons. There's the fact that it's expensive, it's a fractured landscape. There are a lot

of different options out there, and they're not all equal. Uh, there's a perceived lack of content. So you could get the hardware, but then you wouldn't have a whole lot to do with it, because until recently, there just weren't as many experiences out there that you could point to and say, this is the reason you have to have this kind of technology. They're just there weren't enough titles. Whether it was an experience or a game or whatever you want to call it, there just wasn't enough there.

Let's get to that cost issue. So the Oculus Rift as of the recording of this podcast, retails for four dollars, and that includes the headset, some sensors, and the touch controls that you would use to move around within a virtual experience. The sensors track the movement of infrared LEDs that are on the headset itself. This more accurately reflects your head movements within a game environment, so as you move your head in the real world, it gets reflected

in the virtual environment. You can use three sensors and that will get to three hundred sixty degrees of tracking around you. Uh. Though there are some experiences that can simulate three D sixty degree tracking using just two sensors, but that's not for everything. You would need three sensors to achieve that with all the different experiences that Oculus works with. The HTC Vive retails for five dollars, so it's a hundred dollars more are that includes the headset,

a couple of base stations, and some controllers. You can set up the Vibe to work in a space of up to fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and that allows you to actually move around inside a physical environment and have those movements translate into the virtual world. So whereas with the Oculus Rift, you're sitting at a desk typically and you're using your point of view. You know, you move your head to change your point of view and

then use controllers to move around and stuff. You might stand up for that, but you don't really move around very much. HTC Vibe is meant to allow you to move within a physical space and actually have that effect the way the the experience is playing out that you

are actually seeing in your headset. Both the Oculus and the Vibe also require a fairly decent PC to to run, although those requirements have also come down as things have become optimized and the technology ends up getting less expensive

over time. When they first launched the Oculus in the HTC, people said that typically you would need to spend around a thousand to undred dollars to get a PC that was decent enough to run VR experiences and have it be a pleasant experience, not something that was frustrating or didn't measure up to what your expectations were. Today, it's about half that really, according to a lot of sites, you could build a basic VR ready computer a gaming rig for about six hundred dollars if you wanted to

make the baseline system. Now. Obviously, the more money you can invest in a rig with really good graphics, processing and memory, the better your experience will be. But a minimum, we're talking about six hundred dollars, and so that means your average VR bundle all told. Let's say you don't have this computer already, you want to go out and buy all this, you're looking at around a thousand dollars to maybe twelve hundred dollars just to start off, and

that's around your base level that's total. That's with the VR set and the PC to run it off of, and it could be much more expensive if you want to run it on a real beast of a gaming rig, and at that point we're talking about a few thousand dollars easy. Uh. So there are other restrictions with those particular implementations. Another big one is that you're tethered to a PC. And since you're tethered, meaning that you actually have a cable running from your headset to the computer,

you're limited in how far away you can get. Even with the HTC vive, you're limited and how far away you can get from that base station and still be able to uh to have your experience working. And it restricts your movement somewhat, especially if you're walking around a fifteen by fifteen foot environment. You could get tangled up pretty easily in that cable if you're not careful, and that will really literally in some cases, cause your virtual

experience to come crashing down around you. So there are other limitations beyond just the cost. But the cost is a big one. It's a big barrier to entry for a lot of people. It means a people who have a lot of disposable income, and they're big tech enthusiasts, tend to be your audience. You just it's too expensive for your average consumer who's just curious about it to get into it. It's it's too big of a financial commitment. Now.

Not long after Oculus started drumming up excitement, developers for smartphones began to create apps and supplemental products to turn phones into simple VR or a R headsets. So Google launched Cardboard, for example. On Cardboard was kind of a platform for apps to turn Android phones into make shift

VR headsets. You would actually build or order a cardboard headset with some lenses, and the lenses would align properly so that you could actually get the three D sort of effect of virtual reality, and the phone would act as both the processor and the screen. You would slip that into this cardboard headset and then you would be able to look around and have various virtual reality experiences.

There were interesting, they were fairly limited, but pretty cool ideas anyway, And the big draw of that approach was that you didn't have to spend nearly so much money

to have a VR experience. So, in fact, if you already had an Android phone capable of supporting cardboard, then you're really just talking about twenty dollars or less in order to get the stuff you need to either make or you're buying a cardboard headset, and that's the that's the financial uh investment you have to make, assuming you

already have the phone. Obviously, if you don't have the phone, then you have to add the phone's price in there, and that ends up getting you back up in that six eight hundred dollar arrange, depending up on the phone. But the idea being that if you've already got a big installation base, in other words, you've got a lot of people out there who have phones that meet the minimum requirements for cardboard, it makes it pretty easy to

distribute an augmented reality or virtual reality experience. And in fact, the last I checked cardboards user base was somewhere around twenty five million people just for decent But how many of those people are actually using cardboard on anything other than I want to try it out and then I'll never use it again level we don't know. The concept

evolved into slightly more sophisticated implementations based on this same idea. So, for example, you've got the Samsung Gear VR which is a headset that relies upon a Samsung Galaxy handset to be the processor and display, with the headset itself acting as the mount and controller for the system. It's basically the same idea as Cardboard, but kind of a step further. Now.

I've got a lot more to say about Cardboard and about the next evolution of Google's ARE strategy and VR strategy, as well as some other companies and what they're doing. Not to mention get into some of the cool stuff that's coming out right now. But before I jump into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Something that an update recently that also has helped kind of keep VR alive while while it's trying to find an

audience is the PlayStation VR system. So Sony launched PlayStation VR quite some time ago, and it's kind of again,

sort of an in between system. It's more capable than the smartphone based approaches, but it is less robust than some of the ones that hook up to PCs, and in fact, some people say that the the tracking software, in particular when you're using the the PlayStation camera and you're using the move controllers, that there's there's a little bit of a disconnect there sometimes like it can get lost and suddenly, uh, you know, you realize that the hands you were using that has a flashlight attached to

it inside the game is slowly drifting up into the right despite the fact that you're holding your hands straight out in front of you. And it would be this tracking disconnect that would occasionally recorrect itself, but it pulls you out of the game because suddenly your body is not in the game, your body is not behaving the way your body is in real life, and there's that part where they just aren't meeting together. It's and it's

not a great experience. Well Sony has continued to support the platform rather than just let it die, which is encouraging. It means that the company is really trying to make sure that VR gets a good shot. And because so many people own a PS four, it's a it's an install base that already exists. You don't have to go out and buy a new computer to run the PlayStation VR. If you have a PS four, you've got the base

computer necessary to have that experience. So the new version of the PlayStation VR, which was announced recently as the recording of this podcast UH. It has some minor tweaks to the design. One of those is that there are headphones that are now integrated directly into the headset. Before you had to have separate headphones, but now it's all part of the same headset um that simplifies cable management. There are fewer cables to on around and so you're

not gonna get as many tangles that way. Also, there's an external processor unit box which allows for HDR pass through, which makes it more convenient. HDR being high dynamic range. It has to do with the display of colors and brightness on a screen, but to get more into that would be more technical. The important thing to remember is that Sony is working hard to try and make sure that they give their VR platform the best chance for success,

which I think is encouraging. Now. Generally speaking, the experiences that you have with the Oculus or HTC VIVE or comparable headsets are more robust and impressive than the counterparts that are smartphone based. There's just a lot more processing power their great air capabilities. There are a lot more opportunities to incorporate different types of sensors to get more precision with the tracking. UH now that's not to say the smartphone approach is bad. It's still compelling. It's just

a little more limited. It's certainly less expensive if you already own a smartphone, because then you can just repurpose the technology you already have, or you can think of it as added value to the technology you already have and a new use case for that technology. So it's a smartphone that you use for texting, email, taking photos, and also having VR or a R experiences. That's really compelling because if you already have it, you don't need

to invest more money into buying a new thing. Meanwhile, on the a R side, you had a few interesting implementations apart from Hollowlands, stuff like Google Glass, which I've talked about in the previous episode. It's still technically a thing, but it never really managed to become a real consumer product. Google tried to make that happen and then ultimately made the decision that it just wasn't quite ready to be

a consumer product. So there are some consumers, some crazy folks like myself who plopped down the money to buy a pair of Google Glass, And yes I did at one time own a pair, although technically I didn't own them, the company owned them, and I got to use them, but the cost of them and the limited use cases, I mean, there really weren't a whole lot of things you could do with Google Glass when they first came out, and meant that it was a tough sell to the

average person. It became kind of a status symbol among tech geeks. But beyond that, you know, I had very limited use. The coolest thing you could do with it is use your voice to take a photo with your glasses, and people thought that was awesome because they felt like

you were using the future to take their photograph. I know because I attended a Dragon Con wearing a set of Google Glass and I would ask people in cosplay outfits if I could take their photo, and they would say yes, And then I would use the phrase, which I'm not gonna use because it's the same one that will make my phone in my pocket take a picture inside my pocket. But I would use that that phrase and out loud, just say it out loud, and my

glasses would take the photo. And so the first image I would take of every single cause player was one of them looking confused because I had just said out loud what I was going to do and then stared at them and then they realized what I had done and thought it was super cool, and then I would have to take a second photo so that there would actually be one that was good and not just as someone going what uh, fun little tangent, but the point being that that a R experience was very limited and

it just wasn't ready, and so we didn't really ever see that become a mature consumer product. There is still Google Glass out there. It's being used, uh, mostly in manufacturing and other like business to business operations, not so much for consumers. Uh. But another limitation of consumer VR headsets has been the use case for consumers, they fall into what Microsoft refers to as various scales of experiences and what what can you do with it? And and

how limited are you? Like, how restricted are you to a specific space? So Microsoft says that you can look at VR experiences in terms of the scale they provide.

A simple VR headset might allow you to change your point of view by moving your head left and right, so you turn your head left or you turn your head right, or you might tilt it up or down, and your perspective would change in accordance with that you're essentially changing the camera view that you are seeing with the displays that are right in front of your eyes. But that's about it. That would be like the head scale level of VR, and it's also the least immersive

of the various scales. Other head orientations would not be able to be captured with that type of technology necessarily just wouldn't have the capability. So if you were to tilt your head, not just turn it, but tilted to the side while you're turning it, it may not reflect that, it may not change that that that plane of view with that particular scale. Now, out of all the headsets that are out there on the market, none of them really fall into that category, except maybe some of the

smartphone based technology. But the standalone headsets, or or rather the dedicated handsets, they're not and alone because they pair with a computer. Those dedicated headsets can do more than that. That next scale is called desk scale. Again, this is according to Microsoft, and in this implementation of VR, the headset has other sensors that can track movement and head orientation, so that if you tilt your head, your perspective will

change accordingly. And at that scale you can even lean forward, or you can lean back and your point of view will change. You'll you'll appear to get closer or further away from whatever it is you are looking at within the virtual environment. Or you can even bend over and look under a virtual object and actually see, Like imagine that there's a table in front of you. You could squat down and your point of view would go below the table. You can even lean forward and look up

and look under the underside of the table. Maybe you see that someone's written something down there, such as tech stuff rocks, and you think, wow, that's kind of cool. What an easter egg. Everyone should know that. I don't know why they didn't carve it on the top of the table. Carve it on the top of the table. Don't don't car unreal tables, only virtual tables, all right, But that would be what the basic Oculus Rift could do. When it first launched. It had this level of UH interactivity,

but that was that was the extent of it. That's as far as you could go. The next scale up would be the room scale, and that's what Microsoft would say the HTC Vibe would fall into. So the Vibe has those supplemental base camp sensors that often you would hear them just called lighthouses, and you would set these

up to map out the dimensions of a room. You would typically put them in opposite corners of a room, and they could map out a room as large as fifteen feet by fifteen feet or anything smaller than that up to a certain amount. And these base camps, they were sensors that could detect where the headset was in relation to, say, the walls of the room, and it meant that you could move around in your physical space, and the base camp would allow you to see how

that movement is translated into the virtual brands. And if you got too close to an actual physical wall, it would alert you in the virtual experience by having the wall in front of you shimmer, or you would see something that would indicate, hey, you're getting kind of close to the edge. You need to change direction or else you're gonna slam face first into this wall that you cannot see because you're looking at a display, You're not looking at the physical world around you. So it was

kind of like the Holia deck. If you've ever watched Star Trek and you saw whenever the the image was flickering and you get that grid pattern of the actual Holi deck without any program running. It's kind of like that. Typically you get this little display that lets you know, hey, you're getting a little too close to the wall. You may want to stop this before you end up hurting yourself or causing any damage. Now, Microsoft envisions a new scale.

They call it the world scale. This would allow you to move through various physical spaces. You would not be limited to a single room necessarily. Uh. You wouldn't have to designate a specific room in your house for VR because the heads that you wear would be able to send your environment from the inside out. They call it inside out tracking, So it frees you of the need for supplemental sensors. You don't need any base camps or anything like that. Everything is built into the headset, at

least for the sensing part of it. It's the philosophy that they decided to follow when they launched the mixed Reality headset program now uh now. In November, Google then unveiled the new initiative called Daydream. Daydream represents a shift in Google support of augmented reality and virtual reality functionality.

So instead of making those features an app level function where you would build an app, and the app then communicates with the operating system stack and gets the processing information it needs and thus translates it into the experience that you have. Google said, how about we build some of that capability directly into the operating system. That was what Daydream does, and it's available on Android builds from

newgat which is seven point one and later. And that means that if you have a Daydream capable phone, it has this capability built into the operating system itself. It gives deeper or the capability of building deeper, more rich

augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. They also launched several cases. Essentially, they are headsets that are phone cases that you wear, and very recently they announced updates to that, and the updates I think cost twenty dollars more prepare on the low end, so it used to be seventy nine dollars now it's for one of these things. But they also come in different colors, so if you want to hot

pink one, you can get one. They're pretty So I'm recording this particular episode in early October, and not long before I went into the recording booth, Google launched some new day dream products, and that includes those headsets I was talking about. And Google has consistently earned itself a reputation over the past for creating products that were designed by and four engineers, which sometimes, at least on casual glance, seems to go hand in hand with a certain lack

of aesthetic appeal. If you compare that to a company like Apple, which really puts aesthetics very high up on the list of important features, higher up than including the latest technologies. In fact, you see that, you know that has a more immediate appeal to the consumer than Android ones do. But now we're starting to see some updates to that, which is kind of nice. Also, I'll touch back on Apple a little bit later in this episode. Now we know that Google has brought over people from

HTC to work on hardware. HTC makes mobile devices. They also make the HTC Vibe, which I've talked about already in this podcast. We also know the HTC is hard at work on a standalone device in its Vivee line. And this standalone device is truly stand alone, uh the Oculus and the HTC Vibe. Like I said, they require a PC to do all the processing. The ht C Vibe standalone would be its own independent piece of machinery. You wear it on your head. It does not connect

to a phone or a computer. It does all the processing right there on the unit itself, and there's no real word on what the specs are going to be or what sort of experiences it will deliver. Uh, if you actually were to visit the HTC website, you would see a futuristic representation of the headset, but you would not actually see the hardware itself. It would be kind of this illustration over actual real people. So you see like this virtual glowing green headset that is transparent and

clearly it's computer generated on top of actual people. You know, that's not what it's gonna really look like when it launches. That's kind of a cool video. It's likely to be somewhere in between the existing smartphone based headsets and the dedicated tethered headsets like Oculus and HTC Vibe as far as the experience as it can deliver. But it does mean it's completely untethered, which is very attractive piece of of of our very attractive feature. I should say, You're

not going to be tied down with any cables. Google strategy for this device is to incorporate a technology for the company is calling up World Sense, and it sounds to me like World Sense is a lot like that Microsoft approach I talked about earlier, the idea that inside out tracking. So in this implementation, the headsets would contain multiple sensors and they would not rely just on those

sensors for orientation but also environment tracking. And Microsoft the inside out tracking strategy relies largely on optical sensors, in other words, cameras, So you're not using base sensors like you would with HTC vive. Everything is built into the headset itself, and so the headset is gathering all the

information it needs to feed into your virtual experience. Uh they face outward the cameras, they can detect walls or other surfaces or obstacles, and then as they detect them, it can incorporate that information into whatever your experiences, depending upon how people have programmed the experience. So it may again be kind of like that Holio deck thing where if you get too close to the wall, it starts to shimmer and tell you, hey, don't hurt yourself. Now,

Microsoft isn't necessarily developing its own hardware. They do have kind of a developer kit that you can order if you're a developer, but they're not really interested in making the hardware themselves. Instead, the company has developed a set of specifications that headsets must meet at minimum to qualify as one of the immersive headsets that falls under Microsoft Mixed Reality. Other companies like acer A, Sous, Samsung, and

things like that are actually developing the headsets themselves. So this is sort of like just looking at the world of PCs. Microsoft doesn't make computers. Microsoft makes the operating system that PCs use, so or at least Windows based PCs obviously, so it's similar to that Microsoft has created the bare minimum specs that a system must meet in order to be part of this mixed reality platform. Typically, these headsets have a display that consists of two high

resolution displays, so one for each eye. Typically they're liquid crystal displays for your base models l c d s. In other words, that style display will not as crisp as something like an oh LED screen can provide a

high resolution experience at a reduced costs. So the HP Windows Mixed Reality development addition, so there's kind of like the base level for if you want to develop a R experiences or VR experiences using this It has two high res l c D displays at fourteen forty by fourteen forty resolutions, so fourteen forty pixels across fourteen forty pixels down per PERV display. The displays refresh at ninety hurts, which means the image in those displays regenerates ninety times

a second. Refresh rate is one of the factors that really helps create a smooth and seamless experience, and a bad refresh rate can have a similar effect as that of latency. Latency is that delay between when you send a command to a system and when that command is executed. So in a traditional video game, you might notice that if you press a jump button, your character might take

a moment before it actually jumps. There's a delay between when you hit the button and when something happens, which makes those kind of games incredibly frustrating because getting the timing down for jumping when you want it to is really really tricky. The latency and VR is typically way worse than that, because if you notice a delay between when you say turn your head and when your point

of view shifts. As a result, you start getting this unpleasant swimmy feeling, and if you do it long enough, you can end up getting motion sickness or VR sickness as your brain tries to suss out what's going on because it can tell you're moving, but your point of view doesn't move, and then your point of view starts to move and doesn't stop until after you've stopped moving. This disconnect is enough to make your brain say, hey,

you know what we need to do. Just get rid of everything you've eaten for the day, so get out of here, guys, And you start feeling really nauseated. It is not a fun experience, and it can take a couple of hours for you to start feeling normal again. A slower refresh rate can also create a similar situation.

For one thing, you can get dropped frames. Dropped frames being like if you were imagine you're watching a movie and somehow some of the frames between one moment and another moment are gone, so you're starting to see the movie move in these really herky jerky motions where things are jumping across the screen instead of moving smoothly. The same thing can happen if you've got a poor refresh rate with your various equipment, and that can also create

this jagged, inconsistent experience. It's like living in one of those awful horror movies where everyone's moving in really quick starts and stops. The developer kit has a three and a half millimeter jack or for headphones or microphone support, so you can actually pair headphones with a mic to the headset itself, but it's not incorporated directly into the headset. Other manufacturers can choose to incorporate the speakers so that they are part of the headset itself if they want to.

H The headset has to connect to a computer station through an HDM two point O and USB three point oh cable, which are packaged together as a single cable. They have outlets or plugs to go in both, but uh, they end up being one cable, so you don't have to have two cables dangling from this headset. It does

mean you're tethered to a machine. So technically, yeah, you could move around different rooms because the headset has got all the equipment to sense the environment, but you're still limited by distance to your computer because you have to be wired to a machine that's doing all the processing.

The latest headset in this mixed reality lineup as of the recording of this podcast, and the rate is the Samsung Odyssey, and several outlets like The Verge, c net and Digital Trends have had very positive things to say about their experiences. They've named it as the best Microsoft mixed reality headset so far. About probably about half a dozen different headsets have launched already, and this one appears

to be the front runner. It sports some oh LED screens, so it's not using l c D, and it has a larger field of view than the other headsets that have come out so far. It also includes built in speakers. The resolution on those oh LEDs is also a little bit better than the l c D ones. It's at fourteen forty by six hundred. It's priced at five hundred dollars, which puts it right in line with the Oculus Rift and other mixed reality headsets have launched at price points

between three and four d fifty dollars. The reviews make it sound like the Samsung device is the one to go for if you're interested in this Microsoft mixed reality platform. I have to point out, however, I have not personally tried out any of these headsets. I have no personal experience, so what do I know. I just read some reviews that seemed really really positive on it. So do your research. If you're going to get into VR in any way, make sure you research all the different options before you

make your choice. I think an informed opinion is the most important thing from a consumer standpoint. I do want to try all of these at some point, just to kind of see what the gamut of experiences really happens to be. And another part of the Microsoft approach involves these interesting controllers. Typically you would hold one in each hand, and they look like little sticks with like a ring

shaped extension at one end of them. That same end also has an analog thumbstick and a touchpad that you can use with your thumbs, and the body of the controller features a button and a trigger, which gives you a lot more options to interact with your virtual environment.

The rings at the end of the controllers have l e d s on them, so the cameras that are mounted on your headset can view the l e d s. It actually tracks the movement of the controllers by keeping an optical view of where those l e d s are and how they're aligned. So by tilting your hand, it can actually detect that tilt by the way those L e D s are displayed and reflect that in

the virtual world. It's supposed to give you much more precision for the way you move your hands in real life and how that is translated in the virtual environment. And uh, you don't again have worry about any sort of external sensors because it's all built into the headset. I really do want to give it a try and see what that experience is like. Now, there are other interfaces that people are looking at. Uh. We you know, I just talked about controllers, and all of these different

headsets have various controller systems that are similar. Some of them have controllers that have a lot of those sensors built into the controllers themselves, so you've got like gyroscopes, accelerometers, that kind of thing. A lot of them also include some other form of tracking. So with the oculus you might be able to use L e ed uh l E ed um that are led that are are projecting an infrared which means that we can't see the light, but a computer can see it with the right camera

and track the movements of those controls that way. But we also are seeing people work with other forms of interfaces, things like voice commands or just your controls, or if you listen to the recent episodes about eye tracking techno oology and gaming, you realize that eye tracking technology is

also a potential interface with virtual reality. Where you are looking and where you're paying attention could end up becoming a way to actually interact with your environment, either directly or in concert with some other interface like a controller. So we are seeing some other innovation in the space, although that's rolling out a little more gradually than this basic approach, which is to be expected. You know, every evolution, we're going to see more of these different interfaces built

into the system itself. Now, before I go into the next break, I do want to talk about one thing that isn't going to happen as well as one thing that is still continuing, and that both of these things come from Intel. So in tween, Intel had been working on a project called code named Alloy Project Alloy, and this was supposed to be a standalone headset. It was not going to require a an additional PC or phone or anything of those lines. It was gonna do all

the processing itself. It was gonna be a VR or mixed reality headset. It was going to have the cameras sort of this inside out tracking that that Microsoft is also using. UH. It was to include all sorts of interesting technologies and strategies for dealing with mixed reality. It looked really, really cool, but it's now dead in the

water Until has discontinued the project. And the stated reason, and I have no reason to dispute this, is that Intel was finding it very difficult to find partners to actually build the parts that would be used to create the project Alloy headsets. They were not finding people interested in that, partly because the Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets were coming out, and so people were kind of migrating towards that platform instead of wanting to divide their attention to

two different but similar platforms. So Intel eventually he said, you know what, we'd be better served going a slightly different route. That it's not going to pay off in the long run if we stick with this. There's too much UH competition in the market space. Even if you just look at Microsoft Mixed Reality. Like I said, about a half dozen different headsets have already launched, so there's

already gonna be crazy competition. Just in that category than to launch something that is similar but in a different category, it would be even more difficult to get a dedicaid consumer base. So what they have pivoted towards doing is working on a technology that would be very beneficial toward people who are making headsets for virtual reality that would pair with a PC, but they would not need a cable between the two. And that is why gig as in WiFi, but why gig like in the the gigabit

spectrum for data transfer, so it has a lot more throughput. Like, it's not it's not that the information is going fast, suster. Keep in mind informations traveling at the speed of light. You can't make it go faster. You can just send more information at a time so it gets to its destination and can return faster because you're sending bigger groups, bigger chunks of data. Not that it's going faster, but you're seeing the bigger chunks. Well, that's what Intel is

working on. They're working on this y gig technology so that future implementations of these headsets will be able to work with properly equipped PCs and have this wireless data transfer at very high throughputs. So that you can have that virtual reality experience without being tied down to the machine. As long as you are within range of the transmission of that data, you would be able to continue this experience.

Then you would really have that inside out tracking experience where you're you're not you're not tethered physically to a device. You can move from room to room and you don't have to worry about tripping. Oh, we're at least not tripping over a cable. You can trip over, say a pet or something else that you cannot see that the system has not picked up on, but you wouldn't be

tangled up in cables this way. So while I'm sad to see Project Alloy go away or really never materialize, I am really pleased to hear about the y gig initiative and hope that that ends up turning into something special. Now I'm gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'm gonna tell you about how Apple, the company I infamously apparently despise according to some of you out there, I don't despise Apple, but a lot of

people say I've gotten anti mac bias. We're gonna talk about how Apple is making a really big impact in the world of a R. But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now let's talk a little bit about Apple and Apple's recent approach to augmented reality, because I think it's actually a really important step for a R as a whole. And you guys, if you've listened to tech stuff for a while, you know I'm

not someone who owns an iPhone. I own Android devices, I don't have a Mac, I own PCs, but I recognize the important contributions Apple has made to the field of technology, and when it comes to a R, I think it's one of the most important steps so far. And I'll explain why it's actually not so much from

a technology perspective as it is a market perspective. So in September of Apple made augmented reality a really big part of its launch of the iPhone eight and iPhone ten handsets or iPhone X if you were like me and not sure if they were going to call it the iPhone ten or not. Also a side note, whatever

happened to the number nine? Windows skipped it and iPhone skipped it, So that's kind of sad, right, So this particular pair of handsets they introduced upon the launch the the creation of the A R Kit platform directly incorporating a R functionality in to the Apple operating system. So again, kind of like Daydream, it's no longer a layer that's excluded only or reserved only for apps. It actually goes

deeper into the operating system stack itself. There's there's fundamental support for augmented reality features inside iOS at this point, and that's a big deal. So when you pair it with something like the A eleven bionic chip that was being used in processing power for the iPhone eight and iPhone tent, it creates the opportunity for really powerful are experiences. And if you watched that demonstration, you've got to see some of those A R demos that were really kind

of cool. It showed you what you could potentially do with one of these apps, especially the games. I love the various games you could play where you can turn a blank tabletop into a massive gaming virtual gaming uh board if you want. The The possibilities there are really limitless when you think about it's kind of cool. Well, the thing that I think is really important here is not necessarily the technology side, but as I said, the

market side. And by that I mean if you look at market share for the mobile operating systems that are on the market. If you look at most sources, they tell you that Android handsets make up somewhere in the seventy percentile range, typically in the mid seventies, somewhere around there, sometimes as high as eight depending upon the source. If you look at iOS, they tend to be in the twenties,

the low twenties. So averaging that all out, it means that there are three times as many Android devices as there are Apple devices out in the wild for the mobile side. Uh, that's just rough math. So you've got way more Android phones than you have iOS phones. However, it has only been this year, that is twenty seventeen, that we've seen the Google Android app store make as

much revenue as the Apple iOS store. So there are fewer Apple devices out there in the wild, but they were making more money on the apps side than Google was. This tells you that people who buy iPhones are more likely to pay money for the apps than people who buy Android phones. So when Apple starts to natively support augmented reality, that creates a business opportunity for developers who want to make a r experiences, but they also want to make money from it. They they can't just make

it just to make it. They they got to cover their costs. They've got to make a profit. They have to run a business. So by having a very popular mobile platform, one that has a proven track record for having an audience of engaged, passionate users who are willing to spend money on apps, that's a very powerful use case scenario from the developer side. Now, as consumers, you don't necessarily care about that right away, unless you're an iPhone user, in which case you care about it because

it means you get to benefit from it. But if you're an Android user, or you use some other operating system for your mobile device for whatever reason, you might say, well, why do I care if Apple does this, It's because it drives that research and development. And because it drives that research and development, you're going to see similar activity

on other platforms. So even if you don't have an iPhone, you'll start to see more and more work done in the augmented reality space, with people coming up with new ideas for using augmented reality in ways that actually add value to an experience. So it's not just a gimmick. It's not just you hold your phone up to a movie poster and you see a trailer play out of that movie. It's not something so transitional as that, or or just you know, just just this this light experience

that doesn't really mean anything. It could actually be something

much more powerful. For example, the the implementation I saw most recently that I love is a NASA augmented reality app where you can take a globe and you hold your phone up so that you're looking at the globe through your phone, and it projects over the globe the position of various satellites in real time, so you can see where the International Space Station is in orbit around the Earth in relation to the globe, and you can actually see its pathway in which way it's going, And

so anytime you hold your phone up, it will show you the current location of that particular satellite. I think that's amazing to be able to actually visualize where something is by using a physical object in combination with digital information that you're able to access through some device like a phone. To me, that's a very powerful statement. There's also an exhibit going on at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia where they have terra cotta warriors, the statues that

were dug up in China. These warriors, the statues have remained pretty resilient over hundreds of years, but they used to hold weapons and tools that have since rotted away. There's nothing left of them. They've disintegrated. There have been a lot of archaeologists, art historians, people on those lines, along with designers, artists, computer scientists who have worked together to create an augmented reality application where you can see

this exhibit at the Franklin Institute. You can download this app, You hold your phone up and it will project onto the the image of the statue. Whatever the tools were, or weapons or whatever that the statue should be holding, but they're now gone. So if the statue was supposed to have its hands resting on a sword, you will see the sword in the augmented reality application, and you can actually see what the statue look like just after it was built, as opposed to what it just looks

like now. Those are just two little examples of how augmented reality can really truly augment your experience. It's doing what the name implies, it's actually adding to your experience of whatever that moment is, and to me, that's incredibly powerful because you can imagine all sorts of implementations of augmented reality that could make a learning experience much more

rich and impactful, and it will stay with you. It's something that you walk away from and you have a greater understanding of whatever it was you were witnessing, as opposed to just that was cool. I saw a little cartoon elephant run by on a poster, which ad italy is cool, but again, isn't really going to stick with you the way a learning experience will. So I think that Apple incorporating this into their operating system is going to add a lot more omph behind the industry. We're

gonna see a lot more development. We're going to see people thinking about augmented reality in new ways, and that's going to benefit everybody Further down the line. It's going to benefit iPhone users first, which is unfortunate for me because I don't own an iPhone, but I'm very optimistic about how that's going to affect the industry overall in the long term. So I would say that Apple getting into that game is one of the best shots in

the arm for augmented reality in a long time. It's something that can actually have a demonstrable positive effect on the industry as a whole that otherwise we would have been possibly watching this fade away or be reduced to a much more niche market, things like research and development, manufacturing, um you know, uh, various types of assemblies where you need to be able to see where things are going to go together, so you use augmented reality so that

way you know where to place various components. Actually, that's how augmented reality got started. Someone created a really clever program that would show you where the wires, where the cabling needed to go inside of an aircraft's infrastructure, so that you would actually have the proper ablingh and that way you knew exactly where you need to lay the cables in order for it to fit within the construction

of that that airplane. Same sort of thing. We might have only seen a R used in those areas if we didn't get companies like Apple behind it. Now, that doesn't guarantee that augmented reality is going to take off. It doesn't guarantee that virtual reality is going to emerge and become its own, fully fleshed consumer technology, but it definitely improves the odds. It's giving it every chance of success. There's some other things I want to chat about, just

very briefly. We've got some upcoming technology that has not yet come out. There's an HTC vibe standalone I mentioned earlier that hasn't yet come out, but should be out any month now by the time you listen to this podcast. Maybe it is out. I don't know. But then there's something that I wanted to chat about because we've been hearing about it for a couple of years and it's become one of those legendary almost mythical beasts in the technology world. You might argue that it is the Duke

Nukem Forever a VR, and that is Magic Leap. Magic Leap is a company that people have been really paying attention to for, like I said, a couple of years. They've raised millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in fundraising and there's no product out there to speak of yet. Magic Leap refresh their website in September. They raised half a billion dollars in funding, so five million dollars in funding. They may have a project to launch in six months.

We don't know. Supposedly, this device will require a secondary device to run off of, so it'll it'll depend upon processing power from something else like a PC or maybe a smartphone. It's supposed to be an experience that's going to be bigger than something like Google Glass, but maybe less inclusive than a full VR headset um and some people are saying that the cost of it maybe anywhere

between fills. And the question is is will the technology be so compelling, will the experience be so phenomenal, Will the implementation be so effective that people will find that that important enough to actually spend more than a thousand dollars on the product? Or are we going to see enough devices that are at the few hundred dollar level that don't have all of those features, that they don't have all the capabilities of this this seemingly magical device

that we have not yet seen. Will they be seen as being valuable enough that no one will bother with Magic Leap because there are cheaper alternatives on the market that yes, they're not going to deliver the same experience, but the experience they do deliver will be quote unquote good enough. Uh, it's too early to say. Some people,

like including myself, would say, are a little skeptical. They think that magically perhaps has taken too long from the point where people knew something was in development, too launching anything. But that doesn't mean that they can't turn around and completely blow us all away. It just makes that barrier more challenging to overcome. So magic leap is something that everyone's really taking a close look at and hoping that

they learn more about it. The last thing I want to talk about is a little bit on the philosophy of virtual reality and augmented reality and the concept of reality itself, which starts to get a little philosophical. Now, before I get into this discussion, I gotta admit I'm a pragmatic son of a gun. I tend to be

very practical. I have very little use for most philosophical arguments because when you boil it down, if you if the answer at the end of the day is there's no possible way of knowing, I just find it useless to talk about. Uh So, I'm I'm a terrible full bosophy student. You don't want me in your class. I am. I am very much like why does this matter? And you know, eventually are like, could you just go somewhere else and do something else, and I'll say thank you.

But there is something about philosophy that I need to talk about, and that is our ability to experience reality. So I would consider myself kind of an objectivist. I think there is an objective reality that exists. However, our experience of reality is by definition subjective. It is subject to the information our senses bring in to our ourselves,

to our brains. That we experience reality based upon how our senses pick up the information around us, whether it's site or whether it's our sense of hearing or touch or taste, whatever it may be. But that's how we filter reality our brains constructed. We experience the senses. Our brains take the information create the construct that is reality. So every and has their own subjective experience of reality.

There's no way to know if your subjective experience of reality is exactly the same as mine, and maybe that there's some things that are different. We can tell with some people obviously that their experiences are different. Perhaps uh, they are not able to experience colors on the same way that the the mean person can the average person. So people who have color blindness, they obviously have and

they cannot detect certain colors they cannot differentiate them. There are some people who are able to recognize a much wider array of colors at at tinier gradations, much better than the average person is, so we know the scale goes the other way too well. You could argue that they are actually experiencing reality slightly differently than the rest of us are. We're not able to perceive that, and we know that there are things going on in reality

that we cannot perceive. For example, we call it the visible spectrum of light because by definition, it's the spectrum of light that we ourselves can perceive, but things like ultra violet light and infrared light without the aid of electronics, we can't see those. So there are definitely things that are happening around us all the time that are imperceptible to us. It doesn't mean they don't exist. They do.

We just cannot experience them consciously, and so to our day to day existence, it's almost as if that stuff doesn't exist. However, with virtual reality and augmented reality, we can take some of that stuff and convert it into experiences that we can consciously understand. A very simple example of this, you could argue that one type of augmented reality would be night vision goggles, which end up picking up things like infrared wavelengths and then translating that into

visible light that we can actually see. So it's taking something that is invisible to us and converting it into a format that is visible. Augmented in virtual reality could do the same thing. Beyond that, you could construct whatever stimuli you like in the virtual environment and people could

experience it that way. And because our sense of reality is shaped by the data our senses bring in, it means we could literally reshape reality, at least on a subjective level, on an individual basis, for a temporary amount of time. And that sounds like a lot of qualifiers,

but it is an incredibly powerful idea. We've already seen that you can use this sort of approach to treat people who are having anxieties or phobias about different subjects, but you could use it for all sorts of different applications. You could have your reality shifted in very subtle ways or dramatic ways. And because our our brains are synthesizing our sense of reality based upon all of this information,

our reality changes as a result. I think that's pretty cool idea, even if it's just a temporary thing, and even if it never really sinks in on a deeper level, it's just a really fascinating concept to me. It's one of those potentials for technology that I find simultaneously exciting and potentially terrifying, depending upon the implementation. If I'm being perfectly honest, But when do you have the opportunity to

talk about something so kind of brainy and cool like that. Now, maybe you don't agree, Maybe you think, God, most of this is a passing entertainment and there's nothing really deep or meaningful about it beyond the fact that it's a new way to accept information. And I'm not really going to argue with you, because I might just be reading too much into this and I might just have stars in my eyes, largely because of the head mounted display

I'm currently wearing. And if you're not watching this live, you don't know if I'm telling the truth or not, So don't test me, guys. That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff. If you want to know more about augmented reality or virtual reality, I've got other episod szades of tech stuff that I published on the subject. There's also some great articles on how stuff works dot com. That's the website I I used to work for how stuff works dot com as a writer. Now I'm a

podcaster and video host extraordinaire. But if you guys want to check out that, you'll see tons more information about the subject, really fascinating research as well. And of course, if you want to reach out to me, you wanna Hey, maybe you have some comments or some questions. Maybe you're someone who works in the field and you want to talk to me more about either mixed reality or one of the specific implementations I've chatted about. Please reach out.

Let me know. My email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. I use the same handle at both of those for this show. The handle is text stuff h s W. If you would like to watch me record shows live, go to twitch dot

tv slash tech Stuff. I've got the schedule there. I typically record on Wednesdays and Fridays, and you can watch as I ramble about technology and occasionally chat with the chat room and uh frequently make mistakes and make Ramsey have to record me again. Anyway, I hope to see you guys there and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it hostaff works dot com