In-game purchases are made by almost nobody. So how do the games make $10 billion a year? Patrick Beja and Tom Merritt discuss whether the same thing that made spam a success works for mobile games.

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Chat bots are getting a lot of buzz. Are they for real? Are the better for consumers or developers? Matt Hartman shares his insights with Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.

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A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

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A very long show from two chatty Australians, talking news, rumours, and a recent trip to China.

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A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

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Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

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Show Notes
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This guest post is from Travis Falstad who we met at last week’s DTNS meetup. Travis Falstad is an entrepreneur and builds new products. You can find out more about Travis at travisfalstad.com.

Recently Allison Sheridan sent me a link to an episode of Computer Chronicles about Virtual Reality from 1992. Stewart Cheifet does an excellent job summarizing the tech and breaking it down for viewers.

Allison noted that even in 1992 he was saying VR wasn’t just for games and talking about medical and educational uses and pretty much everything that we talk about today.

She said, “I love watching this but I’m also saddened that it’s so familiar to today.”

I see what she means. After all, other things have changed considerably. I really enjoyed the public service announcement to not pirate software, “Don’t copy that floppy.” Ha!

First, I would say that the persistent enthusiasm for using VR in education, medical, and many other fields beyond gaming just reinforces the fact that demand exists now that we’re starting to have supporting technologies in place that weren’t available 24 years ago.

There’s a great quote referenced from Scott Foster at Crystal River Technologies in the video. “The visual systems we’re working with today aren’t that good. It’s very difficult to build a very precise stereo imaging system.” That problem is solved! We’ve also now got inexpensive and powerful game engines with asset stores, smartphones, high resolution 360 video capture, photogrammetry model capture, high-speed internet connectivity, online payments, high resolution displays, miniature and cheap sensors like gyroscopes and accelerometers, updateable content through Content Management Systems, mobile and online payment platforms, microtransactions, and easy distribution through app stores. Each one of these puzzle pieces are critical to a tech like VR having mass adoption. Think about how the CyberGlove has changed from a bulky wired glove that tracks one hand to a Kinect that can track 6 people simultaneously from up to 20 feet away; entire bodies – including fingers and heart rate based on skin tone changes!

Also, many of the ideas weren’t that good in 1992. The ones that were good either were adopted and slowly improved by their respective segment (architectural, defense, auto manufacturing, etc). Even if the tech had existed, the standard internet paradigm also hadn’t evolved enough to know what products might work. One of the ideas I saw in the video was virtual shopping malls. I remember that was a focus in the dot com runup as well. While we were trying to figure out how ecommerce might work, people wanted to hold onto the old-world paradigm. When I was at Hot Topic in 2006, I had vendors pitching virtual shopping malls. While we did consider building a store in Second Life just as a test (why not sell a picture of a T-shirt instead of an actual T-shirt?), it always struck me as a silly shopping experience adding real-world constraints to an experience that can be so seamless online.

I’d like to use Aerosmith’s 1994 video for the song Amazing as an example. In 1994, it was just a fun “what-if” video that’s all filmed or pre-rendered graphics with some nice VR hardware (including the CyberGlove featured in Stewart’s video). I remember being 19 and watching that video thinking it would hit while I was in college and I could go Sky Surfing with Alicia Silverstone. Sadly, none of the above mentioned technologies were there to support my Alicia Silverstone Sky Surfing fantasies. I’d like to imagine if that video came out now (and the record company was willing to spend the money, which is a different topic).

A team of two or three people could use Unity 3D to build an environment with realistic physics. We could pick up models for items like motorcycles, guitars, and airplanes from the Unity Asset Store or Turbosquid. We could use photogrammetry to capture a photorealistic model of Alicia. We could use cut scenes captured with a GoPro 360 camera rig or even the Ricoh Theta S for $300. Then, we could easily export builds from the game engine to Android, Linux, iOS, Windows, and Mac and distribute those in app stores and on the web. We could even make a little bit of money for the band by including additional experiences as in-app-purchases. Then there’s the marketing element. Now, we could promote this VR product to the band’s database, the Ticketmaster list, and potential sponsors. So, we could market to millions of Aerosmith fans and use analytics platforms to fine-tune the message and segment to increase conversion, etc. We are able to reach millions of people to promote this product now with zero marginal cost. I know we’re all familiar with the marketing elements but I mention it as these innovations also drive adoption and monetization, which will be a big part of VR reaching mass appeal.

The only part in my mind that’s lagging behind is addressable market but with big publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal distributing millions of Google Cardboards and large festivals like Coachella giving away branded headsets to attendees, I believe that is only a matter of time. The point I’m trying to make here is that each one of the components needed to bring a fun silly product in an Aerosmith video in 1994 to an actualized product in 2016 just came into existence in the past few years.

I am a little bit contrary to the prevailing mindset in that I believe the consumer side will really be based on experiential products (tourism, porn, music, film, 360 video) in addition to gaming but not driven by gaming entirely. Not to mention, medical, eduction, and more specific cases.

Real tech stories. Really shaky analysis.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hitting theaters is a nice reminder that the Weekly Tech Views is to tech news what Lex Luthor is to Superman.

In Their Defense, I Did Start Conversations With “Here I Am, What Were Your Other Two Wishes?”
Microsoft has launched a new chatbot named Tay. She is designed to mimic the online chat behavior of an 18-to-24-year-old woman, which means, if my memory of talking with 18-to-24-year-old women is sound, Tay’s vocabulary will not stray far from “Not interested, jerkball.”

Update: After less than a day, Tay, influenced by her online chat partners, revealed herself to be a Hitler-loving racist. Not feeling so bad about “jerkball” anymore.

Guess This VR Fad Is Going To Make It
The website PornHub is partnering with BaDoinkVR to launch a virtual reality section to the site. If this news piques your interest, rest assured it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Partaking of this cinematic genre is a natural, accepted response to hearing “not interested, jerkball” one too many times.

With A Name Like Lithographic Process, It Has To Be Funny
Intel is moving away from the “tick-tock” cycle of chip advances, where the “tick” was a new lithographic process and the “tock” an upgraded microarchitecture.* They will now be adding a third element, “optimization,” and calling the new strategy PAO for Process (tick) – Architecture (tock) – Optimization. It was rumored that the engineers were adamant about keeping a two-part cycle, simply replacing “tock’ with optimization, until Intel CEO Brian Krzanich visited the department, pulled aside the head engineer, and said, “You may think you’re going to skip the architecture element of the cycle, but be aware…” and here, he lowered his voice to a menacing whisper, “we have ways to make you tock.”

Thanks for joining Old Joke Reboot Theater.

Wait, That’s What They Meant? Mind. Blown.
On Monday, Apple paid off on their suspense-building press conference invitation–which cryptically read “Let us loop you in.”–by unveiling… a different color Milanese Loop Apple Watch band. Wow! A new color! Space black, no less! Anticipation is already building for the knock-your-socks-off announcement sure to come this fall, based on the leaked invitation text “Phoning it in.”

The Studio Apartment Of Phones
Apple announced their cheapest phone ever, the iPhone SE, priced at $399 if you opt for the 16GB model, the version that allows you to stuff your device chock full of the operating system, all of Apple’s undeletable pre-installed apps, one Taylor Swift album, two low-res photos of your cat, a single Angry Bird.

Getting Ripped Off Has Never Been So Much Fun
Amazon has launched the Amazon Cable Store, from which you can search for the TV, phone, and internet bundles of various cable companies, where “various,” in this case, consists of Comcast. They do hope to add additional companies, providing, by all accounts, a much more user-friendly method of choosing the one overpriced option available for your city. Plus, you get to enjoy the mini-game of adding a plan to your cart and then trying to click “Complete Purchase” before the price increases.

We’re Looking Into It. Repeatedly.
Facebook is testing a way to report non-consensual use of intimate photos, often a function of an ex posting them as “revenge porn.” “Turns out some things can’t be handled algorithmically,” said twenty-two guys crammed in front of a 19-inch monitor.

Kids Hack The Darndest Things
It’s being reported that Cellebrite of Israel is the company helping the FBI unlock the iPhone that Apple is hesitant to assist with, based on the FBI committing to a $15,278 Action Obligation with the company. On the other hand, suspicions arose that Cellebrite is an alias for a completely different expert source when FBI Agent <redacted>’s fifteen-year-old daughter, formerly serving a month-long grounding for hacking each of her parents’ laptops for the fourth time this year, had her usual $20 weekly allowance bumped to fifteen grand for “spring break incidentals.” And $278 worth of Mountain Dew Code Red and Cherry Twizzlers were delivered to her bedroom.

It Is Better To Have Live Streamed And Lost…
YouTube is working on YouTube Connect, a live streaming app with functionality “similar to Periscope or Facebook Live.” “What the hell, now we don’t even get compared to the new services that pile on to our mangled remains?” said a Meerkat executive. “You know, it was just a year ago that we were the darlings of South by Southwest! You couldn’t turn around without… ah, screw it. Who’ll give me ten bucks for our logo?”

* I have close to zero idea what this sentence means, but damn it, this joke is going to happen.

Thanks for catching The Weekly Tech Views v Tech News. I’m kind of nervous about the Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Mike Range
@MovieLeagueMike

Weekly Tech Views by Mike Range is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

When one javascript module developer got angry it brought down a big chunk of the Internet. But it was fixed in less than two hours. Is this good news or bad news? Darren Kitchen and Tom Merritt discuss while Len Peralta illustrates!

MP3

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Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

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A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you are willing to support the show or give as little as 5 cents a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke, sebgonz and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes
To read the show notes in a separate page click here!