The author checks in, September 2018

Spoiler Alert: the newest edition from The Old Hand discusses the lack of innovation in smart technology and the saturation of the smartphone market. I’ll leave it to you to read it for yourselves, but he discusses what we have been able to plainly see for months now: smartphones are everywhere. Everybody has one, and everybody is happy with theirs because the technology that governs even the most basic smartphone is amazing.

As a result, the desire to upgrade annually has sunk and continues to sink. Can smartphones innovate in a way that will continue to appeal to people? With respect to hardware, it remains to be seen. I personally believe that it is software that will push the innovations of portable technology forward. Not only will it be incorporated into phones and tablets, but new devices will be created because the software requires it. It’s not coming — it’s already here.

For this edition of The Handelot Times, I decided to focus on innovations in the area of augmented reality and virtual reality. The idea of VR has existed forever, but if you haven’t heard of AR then these pages will get you all caught up. According to Statista, worldwide shipments of VR devices numbered 3.7 million units in 2017, and number around 4.65 million this year. Chief among those are Sony, Facebook’s Oculus, HTC and Microsoft, which we’ll go into detail about later on. It’s all about the gear on the VR side. You’ll read about the current crop of devices that serve to transmit a whole array of rich, lush worlds for people to get themselves lost in. Some of them are less expensive than you think, and of course they’re only getting started. Respect is paid...actually, no respect is paid to VR attempts from the past as we look back at blunders from those who tried to bring us the technology a bit too prematurely.

With respect to AR, I’ve taken the time to interview the Polish firm Displar, who produces AR software that helps realistically design homes and facilities both inside and out. They’ve got a great team, and are incredibly enthusiastic about what they do. They envision all sorts of uses for AR to help people in their everyday lives, and in a few years we could be hailing them as one of the trailblazers of this technology. Whereas VR has a lot to do with devices, AR is all about the software. However, innovation here drives the necessity to create new devices to accommodate it, perhaps ones we haven’t even imagined yet.