Why platform wars Matter | Zuck's legs | Checking facts |Not lost
Written while battling my first cold in two years
A moon photo taken with the Google Pixel 7 Pro (credit: Lance Ulanoff)
Platform wars
Over the past few months, I’ve tested phones and wearables from Samsung, Apple, and Google. By and large, these have been positive experiences. Everyone makes fast, powerful, and attractive phones of not-so-various shapes and sizes. Their wearables are generally good-looking and effective at tracking everything from my heart rate to my steps. They all also tie into their own ecosystems that include platforms and a growing collection of smart home gadgets.
I have the rare opportunity to experience all of them without, to be honest, fully adopting any of them. I’d say the Apple ecosystem has a huge chunk of my investment, but not all of it. For as much as I use the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, Apple has little control of my home. Google, it turns out, powers a big chunk of my smart home via Nest cams and Nest thermostats. I use Apple HomePod minis, but also Sonos speakers. My smart front door lock is from yet another company, Lockly.
I wonder how many other people are crossing these ecosystem boundaries. I know it’s fairly common when it comes to computing. In fact, it’s probably next-to-impossible to have just one tech ecosystem that encompasses, phones, tablets, PCs, smart home technology, and the cloud.
The good news is soon none of this will matter…see what I did there? At least when it comes to smart home gear, the Matter smart home standard. With it, it may not matter which ecosystem your new smart home gadget prefers. They will all, to some extent, speak the same language and let you control them with the voice assistant and platform of your choice. Matter, though, is just rolling out, and we’ll have to see how well it solves the smart home ecosystem diversity challenge.
Zuckerberg’s Legs
If Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is truly tilting at windmills with his massive Metaverse effort, at least his avatar now has the legs to do it.
Meta Connect launched a couple of weeks ago by showing off new VR hardware that breaks the barrier between virtual and reality with new pro-level mixed reality headgear. Still, it was Zuck’s new virtual legs that may have generated the most buzz.
I’ve used Facebook’s early Metaverse VR environment, Meta Horizon Worlds, and, while I found it slow and with sub-par graphics, I was also struck by how all the avatars, including mine, didn’t have legs (not to mention butts).
Meta wasn’t generating VR legs because it’s hard for VR headgear to accurate track legs and there was a good chance that whatever they did render on our bodies could look awkward or even grotesque
So, it was a big deal that Meta may have broken the legs barrier … sort of.
In the launch video, Zuckerberg and a colleague walked around and jumped. It looked pretty good, but it might also have been a faked video. I saw reports that Meta used high-end motion tracking to represent how the system would work in the future.
For me, the addition of legs remains important, though, because, without them, this environment, especially the ones Meta now plans to bring to the Web feels a little too much like the original virtual communities that sprung up during the early days of the Web.
I distinctly remembered “walking” around in these spaces as either frozen characters that resembled Lego characters or disembodied heads with little text bubbles floating over our heads.
If Meta and Zuckerberg want the Metaverse to work, they need not only compelling avatars, but a real reason for users to constantly strap on these headsets and live in these spaces for hours at a time.
How it works
Like millions of others, I watched the latest January 6th Committee Hearings and the videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi using her phone to talk to the former VP Mike Pence, various Governors, and other officials.
The next morning, I noticed a tweet that sought to dunk on Pelosi, claiming that the black screen on her phone pressed to her ear was an indication that she wasn’t really using it.
Someone smartly noted that this is how smartphones work. I expanded on the tech explanation, adding that smartphones like your iPhone have a proximity sensor on the front to detect your face/ear. This serves to turn off the screen and disable the touch screen, so your cheek doesn’t launch TikTok while you’re talking. “This is literally by design,” I tweeted.
It can be easy to make assumptions based on images, especially ones that are widely shared. I’ve noticed that people like to craft a narrative based on their own belief system, regardless of the facts. Technology specs and how they impact gadget use are, for the most part, incontrovertible. It would make sense to check those facts before making any assumptions.
Lost without it
Last week, I had my first routine colonoscopy (yay me). Nothing remarkable about that, but I’ve spent so little time in hospitals or as a patient in one (read never) that the whole experience was new to me.
As I lay on the gurney waiting for them to roll me across the hall to a room where they’d perform the procedure, I stared at the curtain surrounding me and started counting grommets. You see, they had me put all my clothes and belongings, including my phone, under the bed. I quickly found that I didn’t know how to entertain or distract myself without a smartphone.
I know, there are many situations where we’re not looking at our phones, but in moments of repose, waiting, and boredom, we pull it out of our pocket and start at the screen, willing it to entertain us.
There was, I must admit, a tiny moment of panic where I wondered how I would distract myself from what was to come. Then, I took a deep breath and started cataloging my space. Later, after they rolled me into the operating room (though I was having something far from an operation), I found myself staring at the monitor with all my vitals. I noticed that my heart rate was well over 100BPM. I was nervous.
Normally, this would’ve been the moment to pull out my phone and find something to calm me down. I didn’t even have pants. So, I closed my eyes and visualized flying over Manhattan. I did this for five minutes and eventually got my heart rate down to 84bpm.
It’s unfortunate how addicted I am to my phone and how much I think I need it. I need to remember that, while I like the device an all it can do for me, the only one who can really help me walk back from boredom, stress, and panic is me.
That’s all for now.
See you soon.