Innovations stuck on the path to techno-Olympus
Welcome to our readers on the iCover Blog Pages ! It happens that the most successful companies with billions of budgets for the development of ambitious projects, sophisticated board of directors and a bloated staff of analysts make unfortunate mistakes and get results that are far from expectations. Sometimes an innovative idea is decades ahead of its time and has to wait until existing technologies “catch up” on it. I would like to dwell on five failed attempts to storm the technological Olympus in this article.
The development of the MiniDisk (MD) standard for magneto-optical disks started back in 1986. And the first products, positioned as a replacement for compact cassettes, which had reached their technological limit by that time, appeared in January 1992. At that time, the world was already in full swing using non-rewritable CDs. At Sony, the developer of the format, they were sincerely sure that the novelty, presented in the MD ARTAC encoding format and suitable for storing any digital data, was doomed to success, and they were so sure that they integrated several of their own complex and expensive patented technologies into MD at once.
Although the format enjoyed some popularity in Japan and Europe immediately after its appearance, it failed to consolidate success on the market due to Sony's ill-conceived and inconsistent marketing policy. Starting in March 2013, due to the almost complete lack of demand, the company announced the suspension of production of the entire line of devices for recording and playback of MiniDisk. At the same time, even today, mini-disks are sometimes used as a solution in car and stationary audio systems both by Sony itself and by such recognized authorities as Yamaha, Pioneer, Kenwood, Aiwa, Sharp.
Today, except for a person who has not yet been born into the world, has not heard of virtual reality. Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $ 2 billion. Valve teams up with HTC to co-develop Vive. Sony immediately introduces Project Morpheus. Even Samsung is pulled up with Gear VR and Google with Cardboard Cardboard. Such violent activity makes us think that the usual technical means and methods of interacting with games will soon go to the garages of collectors, as happened once with arcade machines. Experts of the VR world are in solidarity with this opinion, convinced that in a few years, virtual reality will completely and forever change the ways and rules of the relationship between humans and cyberspace. But, analyzing the level of technical capabilities of the gadgets of leading companies, most of us do not even suspectOculus Rift and HTC Vive were created by the standards of our dynamic time in the "prehistoric era."
The idea of creating a VR helmet, embodied at the level of a specific engineering solution by Mort Heilig, was patented back in 1960 by the American Patent Office. Despite some successes about his brainchild - a telescopic mask, presented in the documentation as a “television apparatus for personal use,” the inventor successfully forgot almost immediately after registering the patent. But, two years later, the world was destined to see another creation of the same author - a wild-looking stationary “kiosk” with a non-standard stool called Sensorama. The engineer proposed to recreate the atmosphere of virtual reality due to the effect of generating odors, stereo sound, artificially created air currents, stereoscopic 3D, and even vibration created by a vibration motor under the fifth point. Alas, the number of special effects created did not affect the quality of the finished solution.
EyePhone , CyberFace and Virtuality Visette appeared in free sale in the late 80s and early 90s as the first commercial products that allowed to create the idea of VR as a three-dimensional world, where there is “your own” space, where you can walk and even look around. s. Naturally, like the first personal computers, these devices were fundamentally different from today's counterparts, both in size and weight, and in functionality, and caused headaches and bouts of nausea. The only thing that made them somewhat related to the representatives of the product line of our days is almost cosmic prices.
In 1997, Sony decided to try its capabilities in virtual reality by introducing several Glasstron models to the market at once - a miniature helmet equipped with a pair of LCD displays and headphones. But, in connection with the negative reviews of the unpleasantly surprised public, Sony almost immediately took off the helmet from production, motivating such a decision with concern for the health of its customers.
A little later, the company again tried good luck with the premium line of helmets HMZ Personal Viewer - and again epic fail. The series of failures that Sony suffered at that stage partly explains how quickly the company managed to get involved in the current race and present ready-made prototypes of Project Morpheus .
As it becomes clear from our short excursion into the history of the development of VR technologies, the first releases clearly demonstrated how the idea itself was ahead of the software and hardware available at that time for its implementation.
Today, despite the obvious successes of leading companies in promoting VR technology on the market, talking about real breakthroughs in such crucial moments as appearance, weight and ergonomics is clearly premature. Certain questions arise in connection with the consequences of an overly active shift of attention to the VR world. A well-known experiment conducted back in 1995, during which a student at the University of Chicago spent several hours wearing a virtual reality helmet. In general, the impressions remained the most favorable, with the exception of the fact that the attempt to drink soda after the VR session ended with the girl pouring it into her eye and not in her mouth.
As John Carmack, the technical director of Oculus VR, explained the problem really exists, her name is “cyber sickness” and is equally affected by those who were immersed in VR in 1995 helmets described in an experiment with a student, as well as those who puts on 2015 models. For the same reason, Samsung urges to refuse to wear Gear VR in case of detection of similar problems, and children under 13 years of age should be completely protected from such an opportunity. “In the real world, you receive incoming signals from several senses, and they are all in perfect coordination with each other. In virtual reality, our brain expects the same consistency. But in fact, the various feelings are not synchronized, and there is discord, ”says Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at the University of California.
If the situation on the VR market looks very ambiguous, then with respect to the first Newton tablet handheld personal computer announced by Apple in 1993, everything is much simpler. Apple Newton MessagePad 100 (the official name MessagePad) - a device with a monochrome screen that successfully coped with handwriting recognition and supported working with a stylus, alas, became one of the few gadgets of the company that the audience quickly forgot, but not history.
Initially positioned as a prototype of a new generation personal computer, the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with a large screen, solid internal memory and a full object-oriented graphic core, Apple Newton MessagePad was produced for 6 years, but could not find its place on the market.
The gadget did not receive the expected almost vertical take-off of popularity, as well as the increased attention of even the most loyal audience of Aplle in many respects due to its space price, which rose with the announcement of models 2000 and 2100 to $ 1000 and the unusual size that does not allow you to comfortably place the gadget in the pocket of a jacket, trousers , shirts, and any other item of clothing. There were also critics who considered the innovative function of handwriting insufficiently perfect for convenient execution of operations declared by the manufacturer.
After the advent of the Palm Pilot handhelds, the era of tablet expansion under the tutelage of Apple was decisively delayed by almost two decades until the triumphant appearance of the first iPad. Palm's new product was much more compact, thinner, had an improved Graffiti handwriting recognition system, and most importantly, it was much cheaper. In 1998, the release of Newton was suspended, but Palm Computing, under the leadership of former Apple employee Donna Dubinski, on the contrary, gave the market some hope for the recovery of the PDA segment after MessagePad, which did not justify the hope and was largely underestimated.
HD DVD (High-Definition / Density) is an optical disc burning technology developed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. HD DVD (like Blu-ray Disc) uses standard sized discs (120 millimeters in diameter) and a 405 nm blue-violet laser. One of the key advantages of the technology was the ability to save large amounts of information. So on a single-layer disc, it was possible to write 15GB, on a two-layer disc, respectively, twice as much. The three-layer disc announced by Toshiba, the main ideologist of the new format, allowed storing up to 45GB of data. And yet, the very first Blue Ray discs, with 25GB on one layer and 100GB on three layers, appeared in 2006 and easily crossed the threshold set by HD DVD, which from the very beginning of the race significantly affected the outcome of the “format war” ".
Both formats used the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC-1, based on Windows Media 9 format) and H.264. A major advantage of HD DVD over Blu-ray was the fact that most DVD production equipment could be easily and cheaply reoriented to produce HD DVDs using the same technology. At the same time, they did not manage to make serious competition for Blu-ray HD DVD, or rather, they could not.
In 2008, Toshiba officially discontinued production of HD DVD discs due to the recognition of its products as uncompetitive and the desire to end the protracted “format war”.
Google Glass is a Google product, a headset for smartphones and a kind of “wearable computer” based on Android, using a transparent display mounted on the head (head-mounted display) and located in the stowed position just above the right eye. The device’s built-in camera is capable of recording high-quality video, and the gadget itself can receive voice commands. The first phase of product testing started in April 2012, while the New York Times paved the way for the upcoming announcement from the end of February 2012. $ 1,500 Explorer Edition headset prototypes each were handed over to software developers at the Glass Foundry event in February 2013. The product became available to the general public on May 15, 2014 at the same price.
Already on January 15, 2015, Google announced the suspension of Glass production in its current execution and content, noting that the product had completed its experimental stage in Google Labs and from that moment development and further production was transferred from the Google X laboratory to another unit, while remaining under patronage of Babak Parviz.
According to the developers, for the money required from users, the Smart Glass concept should implement three independent functions, bringing them together: access to augmented reality, providing mobile communications + Internet, and access to a video diary. The first version of the glasses, despite the impressive declared value, turned out to be quite crude, capable of fully realizing only a video diary and only partially augmented reality and communication capabilities.
Despite the confidence of the developers themselves in the success of the project and contrary to the expectations of the end consumer, smart glasses announced by the IT giant did not become a true technological breakthrough. Google itself was forced to admit: for the most part, they did not accept the new product, not only due to technical flaws, but also because the average user was not ready to overcome the psychological barrier and enter the world “so wiser”.
It will be an exaggeration to say that the product is gathering dust on the shelves of the Museum of the History of Technology and is not in demand at all. So, for example, Google Glass smart glasses perfectly cope with the tasks of an information guide in production facilities and training centers. The future of the project and the prospects for the full implementation of the plans conceived in this regard now largely depend on Google.
Dear readers, we are always happy to meet and wait for you on the pages of our blog. We are ready to continue to share with you the latest news, review materials and other publications, and will try to do our best to make the time spent with us useful for you. And, of course, do not forget to subscribe to our sections .
Our other articles and events
Sony MiniDisk
The development of the MiniDisk (MD) standard for magneto-optical disks started back in 1986. And the first products, positioned as a replacement for compact cassettes, which had reached their technological limit by that time, appeared in January 1992. At that time, the world was already in full swing using non-rewritable CDs. At Sony, the developer of the format, they were sincerely sure that the novelty, presented in the MD ARTAC encoding format and suitable for storing any digital data, was doomed to success, and they were so sure that they integrated several of their own complex and expensive patented technologies into MD at once.
Although the format enjoyed some popularity in Japan and Europe immediately after its appearance, it failed to consolidate success on the market due to Sony's ill-conceived and inconsistent marketing policy. Starting in March 2013, due to the almost complete lack of demand, the company announced the suspension of production of the entire line of devices for recording and playback of MiniDisk. At the same time, even today, mini-disks are sometimes used as a solution in car and stationary audio systems both by Sony itself and by such recognized authorities as Yamaha, Pioneer, Kenwood, Aiwa, Sharp.
VR-reality - the first experiments, successes and failures
Today, except for a person who has not yet been born into the world, has not heard of virtual reality. Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $ 2 billion. Valve teams up with HTC to co-develop Vive. Sony immediately introduces Project Morpheus. Even Samsung is pulled up with Gear VR and Google with Cardboard Cardboard. Such violent activity makes us think that the usual technical means and methods of interacting with games will soon go to the garages of collectors, as happened once with arcade machines. Experts of the VR world are in solidarity with this opinion, convinced that in a few years, virtual reality will completely and forever change the ways and rules of the relationship between humans and cyberspace. But, analyzing the level of technical capabilities of the gadgets of leading companies, most of us do not even suspectOculus Rift and HTC Vive were created by the standards of our dynamic time in the "prehistoric era."
The idea of creating a VR helmet, embodied at the level of a specific engineering solution by Mort Heilig, was patented back in 1960 by the American Patent Office. Despite some successes about his brainchild - a telescopic mask, presented in the documentation as a “television apparatus for personal use,” the inventor successfully forgot almost immediately after registering the patent. But, two years later, the world was destined to see another creation of the same author - a wild-looking stationary “kiosk” with a non-standard stool called Sensorama. The engineer proposed to recreate the atmosphere of virtual reality due to the effect of generating odors, stereo sound, artificially created air currents, stereoscopic 3D, and even vibration created by a vibration motor under the fifth point. Alas, the number of special effects created did not affect the quality of the finished solution.
EyePhone , CyberFace and Virtuality Visette appeared in free sale in the late 80s and early 90s as the first commercial products that allowed to create the idea of VR as a three-dimensional world, where there is “your own” space, where you can walk and even look around. s. Naturally, like the first personal computers, these devices were fundamentally different from today's counterparts, both in size and weight, and in functionality, and caused headaches and bouts of nausea. The only thing that made them somewhat related to the representatives of the product line of our days is almost cosmic prices.
In 1997, Sony decided to try its capabilities in virtual reality by introducing several Glasstron models to the market at once - a miniature helmet equipped with a pair of LCD displays and headphones. But, in connection with the negative reviews of the unpleasantly surprised public, Sony almost immediately took off the helmet from production, motivating such a decision with concern for the health of its customers.
A little later, the company again tried good luck with the premium line of helmets HMZ Personal Viewer - and again epic fail. The series of failures that Sony suffered at that stage partly explains how quickly the company managed to get involved in the current race and present ready-made prototypes of Project Morpheus .
As it becomes clear from our short excursion into the history of the development of VR technologies, the first releases clearly demonstrated how the idea itself was ahead of the software and hardware available at that time for its implementation.
Today, despite the obvious successes of leading companies in promoting VR technology on the market, talking about real breakthroughs in such crucial moments as appearance, weight and ergonomics is clearly premature. Certain questions arise in connection with the consequences of an overly active shift of attention to the VR world. A well-known experiment conducted back in 1995, during which a student at the University of Chicago spent several hours wearing a virtual reality helmet. In general, the impressions remained the most favorable, with the exception of the fact that the attempt to drink soda after the VR session ended with the girl pouring it into her eye and not in her mouth.
As John Carmack, the technical director of Oculus VR, explained the problem really exists, her name is “cyber sickness” and is equally affected by those who were immersed in VR in 1995 helmets described in an experiment with a student, as well as those who puts on 2015 models. For the same reason, Samsung urges to refuse to wear Gear VR in case of detection of similar problems, and children under 13 years of age should be completely protected from such an opportunity. “In the real world, you receive incoming signals from several senses, and they are all in perfect coordination with each other. In virtual reality, our brain expects the same consistency. But in fact, the various feelings are not synchronized, and there is discord, ”says Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at the University of California.
Apple Newton MessagePad - ancestors of modern tablets
If the situation on the VR market looks very ambiguous, then with respect to the first Newton tablet handheld personal computer announced by Apple in 1993, everything is much simpler. Apple Newton MessagePad 100 (the official name MessagePad) - a device with a monochrome screen that successfully coped with handwriting recognition and supported working with a stylus, alas, became one of the few gadgets of the company that the audience quickly forgot, but not history.
Initially positioned as a prototype of a new generation personal computer, the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with a large screen, solid internal memory and a full object-oriented graphic core, Apple Newton MessagePad was produced for 6 years, but could not find its place on the market.
The gadget did not receive the expected almost vertical take-off of popularity, as well as the increased attention of even the most loyal audience of Aplle in many respects due to its space price, which rose with the announcement of models 2000 and 2100 to $ 1000 and the unusual size that does not allow you to comfortably place the gadget in the pocket of a jacket, trousers , shirts, and any other item of clothing. There were also critics who considered the innovative function of handwriting insufficiently perfect for convenient execution of operations declared by the manufacturer.
After the advent of the Palm Pilot handhelds, the era of tablet expansion under the tutelage of Apple was decisively delayed by almost two decades until the triumphant appearance of the first iPad. Palm's new product was much more compact, thinner, had an improved Graffiti handwriting recognition system, and most importantly, it was much cheaper. In 1998, the release of Newton was suspended, but Palm Computing, under the leadership of former Apple employee Donna Dubinski, on the contrary, gave the market some hope for the recovery of the PDA segment after MessagePad, which did not justify the hope and was largely underestimated.
HD DVD
HD DVD (High-Definition / Density) is an optical disc burning technology developed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. HD DVD (like Blu-ray Disc) uses standard sized discs (120 millimeters in diameter) and a 405 nm blue-violet laser. One of the key advantages of the technology was the ability to save large amounts of information. So on a single-layer disc, it was possible to write 15GB, on a two-layer disc, respectively, twice as much. The three-layer disc announced by Toshiba, the main ideologist of the new format, allowed storing up to 45GB of data. And yet, the very first Blue Ray discs, with 25GB on one layer and 100GB on three layers, appeared in 2006 and easily crossed the threshold set by HD DVD, which from the very beginning of the race significantly affected the outcome of the “format war” ".
Both formats used the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC-1, based on Windows Media 9 format) and H.264. A major advantage of HD DVD over Blu-ray was the fact that most DVD production equipment could be easily and cheaply reoriented to produce HD DVDs using the same technology. At the same time, they did not manage to make serious competition for Blu-ray HD DVD, or rather, they could not.
In 2008, Toshiba officially discontinued production of HD DVD discs due to the recognition of its products as uncompetitive and the desire to end the protracted “format war”.
Google Glass Augmented Reality Glasses
Google Glass is a Google product, a headset for smartphones and a kind of “wearable computer” based on Android, using a transparent display mounted on the head (head-mounted display) and located in the stowed position just above the right eye. The device’s built-in camera is capable of recording high-quality video, and the gadget itself can receive voice commands. The first phase of product testing started in April 2012, while the New York Times paved the way for the upcoming announcement from the end of February 2012. $ 1,500 Explorer Edition headset prototypes each were handed over to software developers at the Glass Foundry event in February 2013. The product became available to the general public on May 15, 2014 at the same price.
Already on January 15, 2015, Google announced the suspension of Glass production in its current execution and content, noting that the product had completed its experimental stage in Google Labs and from that moment development and further production was transferred from the Google X laboratory to another unit, while remaining under patronage of Babak Parviz.
According to the developers, for the money required from users, the Smart Glass concept should implement three independent functions, bringing them together: access to augmented reality, providing mobile communications + Internet, and access to a video diary. The first version of the glasses, despite the impressive declared value, turned out to be quite crude, capable of fully realizing only a video diary and only partially augmented reality and communication capabilities.
Despite the confidence of the developers themselves in the success of the project and contrary to the expectations of the end consumer, smart glasses announced by the IT giant did not become a true technological breakthrough. Google itself was forced to admit: for the most part, they did not accept the new product, not only due to technical flaws, but also because the average user was not ready to overcome the psychological barrier and enter the world “so wiser”.
It will be an exaggeration to say that the product is gathering dust on the shelves of the Museum of the History of Technology and is not in demand at all. So, for example, Google Glass smart glasses perfectly cope with the tasks of an information guide in production facilities and training centers. The future of the project and the prospects for the full implementation of the plans conceived in this regard now largely depend on Google.
Dear readers, we are always happy to meet and wait for you on the pages of our blog. We are ready to continue to share with you the latest news, review materials and other publications, and will try to do our best to make the time spent with us useful for you. And, of course, do not forget to subscribe to our sections .
Our other articles and events