Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

  Apple has given us a vision of what their VR and AR future might entail. But as have others pointed out numerous times, the whole point of the showcase at the WWDC 23 was to let people experiment, I’ve heard others say that it’s like the launch of the Apple Watch when Apple didn’t really know what would become of it. This is similar and yet different.  Just like the Apple Watch (and the iPad before it), Apple sought to porting its whole ecosystem onto a watch – granted, the Apple Watch can’t live on its own and a better comparison would probably be the iPad. The iPad can live without any other Apple device and unlike the iPhone, never really had a clearly defined function other than to watch movies and browse the web. It was not until it gained the ability to be used with a pencil that artists and designers started to explore the potential.  I’m trying to point out that Apple took 5 years from the first iPad in 2010 to the iPad Pro with pencil in 2015 to find its “kille...

Quo Vadis, Metaverse? If you read popular Science Fiction, then you probably already have an idea of what the Metaverse is or at least how it is portrayed. Basically, we would be immersed in a virtual reality world with the idea of meeting, playing and working together in a fantastic setting while remaining physically separated. If you look at the difference in vision between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (who thinks we could all have meetings virtually or at least augmented) and Epic’s Tim Sweeny (Who believes the Metaverse should be a world for games and interaction), then you will see these visions are somewhat different. My ideal Metaverse is a global, immersive, digitally created computer environment that is accessible via the Internet, is open to everyone (and is governed by both commercial and non-commercial interests), may require devices that can translate between the virtual world and human senses, and allows for interoperability with other generated digital worlds.   But regar...

We have been toying with VR for like the last two years. And we got some interesting experiences out of VR, for example, BeatSaber has become my exercise routine. However, so far, I have not seen anything that would have given me this “wow” experience that VR had always promised. BeatSaber is great, I absolutely love it, but it is a one-dimensional experience that is akin to something you would play at Arcades. In short, not unlike Space Invaders, just a lot more physically demanding. So here comes Alyx – Alyx is a prequel or sequel (I am not sure) to the Half-life game series that have been popular in the early 2000s. Now for full disclosure: I have always been a fan of half-live and I could have written the same article 17 or so years ago by pointing out how half-live has changed the game industry (literally). So, it is with some excitement that I can proclaim that another title of the half-life series is changing the game industry – the virtual reality game industry that...