The Ledger
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Russell: Facebook brain-computer interfaces will track emotional reactions over typing speed
“What wouldn't shock me, despite the lofty goals of getting this hundred words per minute, You know, kind of success rate. I have a strong feeling that what we're actually going to see is kind of getting ground truth reactions to, for instance, posts on social …”
Russell: Public metrics turn Instagram and Facebook feeds into happiness theater
“So a little bit of a counterpoint or pushback against that is, you know, if you look at Instagram or Facebook, the nature of having metrics publicly exposed to people and comment counts and things like that means that content typically can devolve into somethi…”
Russell: Facebook was a poor steward of Messenger's early developer platform
“My kind of read on this has been that Facebook hasn't been, let's say, the best steward of Messenger as a platform, for instance, for the first six to nine months of it, other than the kind of Bots that Facebook itself specifically highlighted and linked to in…”
Russell: Full-Stack Standalone VR Will Deliver 2x-4x Mobile VR Performance
“But basically they'll be able to get two to four X the performance of the gear VR based headsets with the same hardware because they'll own the full stack.”
Russell: PSVR sales will surpass Oculus before 2016 holidays end
“At the very least, they will probably surpass Oculus plus Rift combined before the holidays are even out.”
Russell: Real-time global camera coverage ('panopticon') is becoming reality
“The panopticon is going to be real. So this idea of a camera where you have a live view at any spot in the real world at any time, that's essentially becoming possible.”
Russell: Apple and Google have hundreds working on VR
“It's clear that they have hundreds of people working on these”
Russell: Mobile VR is a non-revolutionary teaser that feels gimmicky
“If you're looking at mobile VR, it's a step up from the kind of video where you move your phone around you. But it's still at times can feel gimmicky. It really depends on implementation, but It's not that revolutionary of an experience. It's a teaser.”
Russell: Mobile VR power will eventually render desktop graphics gaps irrelevant
“And, you know, once they're as powerful as a gaming PC of today, you don't really mind the jump in graphics compared to, like, what your desktop could provide.”
Russell: VR room-scanning will replace traditional phone calls
“I think that we're gonna see a lot of social usage of people getting in their VR headsets and quickly scanning in the room they're in and then hanging out with their mom for 20 minutes instead of doing the phone call.”
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Russell: Microsoft HoloLens costs $3,000 and has only a few hundred users
“You look at HoloLens, and it's 3000 dollars, and maybe a couple hundred people own it.”
Russell: A socially acceptable Apple AR headset is still years away
“You have to make a headset that you're not embarrassed to wear in public, so maybe Apple can do it but probably gonna be a couple years.”
Russell: Screen usage perceived as antisocial is actually highly social behavior
“What looks like antisocial behavior is actually social behavior because there's more interesting people on the other side of that screen.”
Russell: VR motion sickness is caused by software design, not hardware
“Something I think isn't communicated well enough today is the fact that nausea typically, it's not the hardware itself. Oh, if you use this gadget, you're going to get sick from VR. It's experiences built in a certain way, using acceleration a certain way, mov…”
Russell: AR glasses will float LinkedIn profiles above people's heads
“You're never going to go to an event like this and meet someone where you're pretty sure you've seen them before, but you don't remember their name. You're never going to have that awkward exchange because their LinkedIn profile is going to be floating above t…”
Russell: AR is a couple years behind VR in development
“With that said, AR is a couple years out, even relative to VR in terms of difficulties around optics, in terms of computer vision.”
Russell: Interactive VR is the future of education and museums
“And all I can think is this is the future of museums in the near term and the further term. This is the future of education. Like, why you know, why read a textbook about, you know, significant moments in history when you could just kind of actually get to liv…”
Russell: Most VR users will come from mid-tier and mobile devices
“And then kind of the PlayStation VR tier, whatever the mobile such standalone tier looks like, you're going to have trickle down of quality from the high end, but that's probably where actual, you know, numbers of users will, you know, that's where we'll see t…”
Russell notes the iPhone 6s lapped the Note 7 in app loading.
“The iPhone from last year was able to lap the Note seven that came out just a few weeks ago.”
Russell: Generic Pokémon game mechanics would have produced only short-lived success
“They could have slapped it on almost any gameplay concept, say, like, an endless runner along the lines of what was, what's the one that we all, or everyone played Temple Run. You know, you can imagine, like, in the same way that there's, like, a Spider-Man ga…”
Kyle Russell: AR glasses will be worn daily by 2021
“In five years there'll be glasses, and you'll just always have these virtual things floating around you as you're going through the day.”
Russell: Future games will replace utility apps via core gameplay hooks
“What we're going to see is more games that end up accomplishing the goals of utility applications by keeping you hooked on the gameplay mechanisms.”
Russell: World of Warcraft kept millions paying $15/month via endgame content
“World of Warcraft has done the best job of periodically adding more and incredibly, increasingly difficult endgame content for its most hardcore players, and this is what has kept it millions of people paying 15 dollars a month for north of a decade now.”
Russell: Mobile will permanently be ten times larger than desktop
“Mobile as a platform is, you know, 10 times larger than desktop will ever be”
Russell: Hard science VR advances will drive mainstream applications in 10 years
“I think that the hard science things are going to be what lead to the totally unexpected use cases that we're all going to be used to 10 years from now.”
Russell: Entire events will be recorded via volumetric capture within years
“And, you know, over the next couple of years as volumetric capture kind of, you know, it's invested in more you know, new breakthroughs happen because people are really paying attention to it because of VR arising. You'll start to see just events entirely reco…”
Russell: VR facial tracking will enable realistic virtual meetings within a couple years
“And I think we're only a couple years out from having things where it's tracking the muscles on your face, tracking the movement of your eyes, where your avatars could really reflect what you look like at that time, and you could do things like have an entire …”
Russell: VR will not fill micro-moments of downtime like smartphones do
“What makes mobile devices like smartphones so powerful is it can fill kind of the empty times throughout your day... Whereas, you know, with VR, you're not gonna fill empty time. AR, you know, the case could be made that you could use in that way.”
Russell: VR users will combine gloves, controllers, and tracking cameras
“In a few years, we're, you know, people like us who are really into the cutting edge are going to have, what, gloves, Plus hand controllers, plus maybe cameras tracking our hands. We're going to have all of these different constraints that are going to limit w…”
Russell: Facebook trained ML models on celebrity photos to generate avatars
“Facebook made the system that they made a giant data set of celebrity photos plus bitmojis associated with those faces to train a machine learning model that then generalized to Regular people, and so it looks at your profile photo, then makes a kind of cartoo…”
Russell: Mobile VR device sales outpace high-end PC headsets 5x
“The thing is, because it's so much cheaper, it's something like five X more devices have been sold than on the high end things attached to a PC.”
Russell: Snapchat has 150M daily active users using AR filters
“Well, we're already expressing ourselves every day, one hundred and fifty million daily active users expressing ourselves with these filters that Apply these three D models and textures to our faces because we think that that reflects our personality at that p…”
Russell: Apple's iOS app platformization mirrors Facebook and Google developer strategies
“Frankly, it sounded a lot like what Facebook and Google have been showing off taking apps that people use every day and introducing ways for developers to kind of become part of that experience.”
Russell: Processing one second of volumetric capture takes an hour
“And right now they can, that takes, like, an hour of processing to get one second worth of footage.”