What is it that’s so exciting about VR?
The military has been using VR to train soldiers, pilots, ship captains, and tank drivers for over a decade. Surgeons have practiced using VR HMDs even longer. It’s not new, nor novel. But for some ...
This market is going to be HUGE, I tell ya
Have I ever been wrong about these things? The forecast is strong, the future bright—what could possibly go wrong? Look at the numbers. How can this miss, everyone wants one. Now that the latest gold ...
The fallacy of TAM
Give ’em what they want, and sleep better The SAM, TAM, and PAM are not characters in a new situation comedy, although some of the uses of these terms can be pretty amusing. The PAM ...
Flashing
Mozilla’s Firefox crashes about every hour on my machine. I get a polite dialog box that asks me to report it, and I do, and then the noble open source browser tries diligently to restore ...
On being first
Doesn’t always mean you win AMD and Nvidia have been leaders in being first; Intel, ARM, Apple, Samsung, and others have been quick, but seldom first. Qualcomm has had some firsts. First-to-market (FTM), also referred ...
I know a conspiracy when I see one…
They can deny it all they want In the second week of April 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the neo-economic arm of the DoD, DoE, DHS, NSA, and FBI, told Intel to take 50,000 ...
From CES to GDC to NAB – The alphabet tour continues
As always, the year begins with CES, at least if you work in technology land, and if you don’t, you’re probably not going to be reading this brand-new shiny issue of the TechWatch Quarterly, unless ...
The ultimate selfie and safety – Who’s driving your car?
Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a year or two, three max, autonomous cars will be operating on the highway, but probably not in city and residential streets. However, we won’t instantaneously have highways filled with ...
Moore’s Law turns 50
Where were you when it was postulated? Moore’s Law has been a fantastic observation, and a self-fulfilling prophecy that has spurred us on to do more, do it faster, make it smaller, and cheaper. We ...
ROPS, FLOPS, and BOPS
What spec works for you? For as long as I can remember— which is kind of a redundant statement because who can remember longer than they can remember?— we in the computer industry have been ...
The week of gaming
I’ve been gaming so long, I don’t know when I’m not This is the week of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC has been going on since 1988 when Chris Crawford organized it. Even before ...
VR Sickness; It’s a real thing
After fading away in terms of consumer popularity in the late 1990s, with advent of low cost sensors and optics, and the unmitigated enthusiasm of Palmer Luckey Virtual Reality (VR) has roared back to life ...