This evening at a coffee shop we were discussing virtual reality. I was excited because I’ve just bought the Samsung Gear VR, which was developed in partnership with Oculus Rift. I was explaining how if you hook the Gear VR headset up to a Galaxy Note 4 smart-phone (I’m getting one of those too), you get a really good quality virtual experience, considering how little it all costs.
Then the waiter came over. He told us that he’d overheard parts of our conversation, and he’d realized we were talking about virtual reality. He said that he has tried the Oculus Rift dev kits 1 and 2, and we compared notes about those. I told him that the Gear VR provides a much more polished experience.
Then he proclaimed, with real enthusiasm, “I love the future!” It turns out that he is an engineering student, and he is incredibly excited about all of the new technologies coming out in support of virtual and augmented reality.
“But what about the possibilities for things to go wrong?” my friend asked him.
The waiter was undeterred. He acknowledged that any technology can be used for both good and bad purposes, but he was very confident that these new capabilities would make the world a better place.
That is a wonderful thought, isn’t it?
And it might even be true.