Pages

Wednesday, 9 March 2016

NOT AT WORK!




Due to technical and personal reasons, I, Aditya Kumar Saroj, announce that I will not be posting any new content on PlayBlox! for an uncertain period of time.
Sorry, if regular followers who were waiting for my return are hurt.
Also, on Twitter I have changed my handle to @AdiKumarSaroj from @Tech_Emperor.
Hopefully, I post for you again.

Monday, 22 February 2016

VR And AR Will Be Mobile’s Demand Driver, Not Its Replacement


With each of the six biggest global consumer technology companies now deeply invested and feverishly in development, VR/AR has become too big to fail. Facebook Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR (powered by Oculus), Google Cardboard and its Magic Leap investment (and perhaps even Google Glass’ second coming), Sony PlayStation VR and Microsoft HoloLens are public. And the eventual entry of Apple is presumed, given hiring headlines and Tim Cook’s pronouncement that VR is not a niche.
However, as much as 2016 will see the launches of the best VR/AR to date (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR), this generation of hardware — not portable and tethered to a bulky PC or console  —  is merely intended for millions of early adopter enthusiasts consisting mostly of gamers.
Oculus Rift consumer edition headset with positional tracker and controller
Oculus Rift consumer edition headset with positional tracker and controller

Becoming mass

The devices that will turn VR/AR into an interface for hundreds of millions will blend into our lives much more easily. To do that, they will embrace the one device that rules them all  — the smartphone  — and in doing so, pull it out of its stagnation.
They will look and feel much like ordinary glasses, featuring clear lenses with built-in waveguides transmitting the output of tiny projectors on each arm across the entire surface of each lens, covering a 120-degree field of view with 60-90 frame-per-second 1080p video (960 x 1080 resolution for each eye) delivered wirelessly by your phone. In the out-years it is even possible the projection + waveguide combination will be replaced with beyond-retina-level transparent edge-to-edge LCDs in each lens.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
They’ll have the ability to go from being completely clear to displaying images that augment what you see (AR) to displaying images that cover the lenses edge-to-edge (VR), and will leverage next-generation phones for all the computing necessary.
While these displays will sacrifice some image quality and the perfect sense of virtual reality “presence” that large, fully enclosed head-mounted displays tethered to PCs can deliver, they will suffice for the vast majority of popular VR/AR applications and be dramatically easier to wear and carry, driving much greater volume than high-end HMDs.

Demanding technology

The technical requirements here are deceptively steep, and have to do with everything from making the round-trip from the nine-way head-tracking sensors and dual cameras on the glasses to the phone for re-computing the image, to sending the uncompressed resulting video back to the glasses wirelessly at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds, to refreshing the projection in the lenses all in 20-30 milliseconds to prevent the “motion-to-photon” lag that causes VR discomfort.
Although these hurdles cannot be met in 2016, early prototypes of everything required will exist this year.
In addition, the requirements to miniaturize the components on the glasses to give them the rough weight, portability and style of the glasses you’re used to are serious.
Although these hurdles cannot be met in 2016, early prototypes of everything required will exist this year (see the likes of Lumus in-glass projection modules, WHDI multi-Gb/s wireless HDMI point-to-point transmission and Apple’s A9X processors), making 2018 consumer products plausible.

Phones and glasses as best friends

With this approach, the glasses benefit from the portability, connectivity, computing, touch and voice control the phone can deliver, and the phone benefits from the display options (bigger than any display you use today; virtual 120″ television set for Netflix anyone?) and new applications the glasses make possible (spherical and 3D spherical photos and video, and the kind of casual VR entertainment that ustwoResolution Games and Oculus Story Studio are pioneering).
This is why VR/AR will not be a competitive platform to mobile, but an interface and ability extension of it, and therefore a demand driver.
Google Cardboard App
Google Cardboard App

How big can this “medium on top of a medium” get? Looking at the market for tablets may be instructive as an upper bound, as prices ($500-$800)  —  and to a lesser degree use cases —  are similar:
Taking out 2-in-1s from the tablet installed-base projection (as it is a different, more general purpose, use case), and cutting the remainder in half because glasses may not go as far into the low end as tablets, an installed base of more than 500 million units for glasses by 2026 is plausible. That’s roughly twice as big as video game consoles and half as big as tablets.

Projections for the big players

If things go in this direction, here’s how it may play out for The Big Six:
Apple. Wades into the premium part of the market for glasses in late 2018, paired with the iPhone 8, which will have the necessary processing and wireless communication to be the furnace for the glasses (and may extend the rumored multi-lens system of the iPhone 7 to be capable of the spherical and spherical 3D photos and videos that shine on glasses).
The glasses will help with demand for iPhone and bring new life to the $499-$799 price points occupied by iPads, which have flat-lined. For extra credit, Apple Glasses 2 will play well with Apple Car 1 (~2020). Projection: Majority of category profits — again.
Google. Will continue to lead the way on breadth with Cardboard, but these 2-3 minute experiences are low-end tasters. They’ll compete on the high end (paired with Android phones) with some combo of Magic Leap and/or a revived Google Glass as the Nexus showpieces of the segment. Projection: Platform for volume — again.
Facebook. On the hardware side, Oculus will pair with both Google Android and Apple iPhone, bifurcating its product line into high-end true presence tethered headsets and more mainstream glasses with Oculus Rift 3 in 2018. On the software side, we’ll access the vast majority of VR/AR content (photos, videos, games) through one or more of Facebook’s services, as we do for “flatland” content today. Projection: Our portal(s) to the world — again.
Samsung. Partners with Google and Facebook to play defense. Projection: Volume hardware, low profits — again.
Sony. Wades in early with PlayStation VR and sticks with it. Projection: Wins the second-division battle (e.g., consoles) — again.
Microsoft. Trying to throw the ball downfield the farthest and the earliest with the standalone HoloLens headset (everything is on-board, including processing) that is neither fish (high-end VR) nor fowl (portable). Projection: Impressive , but not winning , technology — again.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Friday, 8 January 2016

Sunday, 3 January 2016

Free basics is a walled garden: Here’s a much better scheme — Direct Benefit Transfer for internet data packs

Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah
Whenever Sanjay Sahni, a school dropout working as an electrician in New Delhi, returned to his village, Ratnauli in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district, he would hear complaints that his fellow villagers had not received their Nrega wages or job cards. One day in Delhi, he got his hands on a computer and simply typed: “Nrega Bihar”. Among the many links he found was a list of job cards for his village that turned out to be riddled with discrepancies. Armed with 3,000 pages of data, he empowered the villagers of Ratnauli to fight for their rights.
Sahni’s crusade was only made possible because he had access to an open internet. Sanjay could enter data into any search engine, visit any website and find the relevant information. What if Sanjay’s first foray into the online world was not on the open internet, but through Facebook’s Free Basics platform? Would the same, freely published government information be available on Free Basics?
The internet is a powerful poverty alleviation tool, offering unbounded opportunities limited only by imagination, whether it is a farmer looking for information on monsoon preparedness, artisans connecting with buyers in a marketplace or a college student from rural India enrolling for an online course. Against this backdrop, we have Free Basics, a Facebook-run programme where partnering telcos offer free access to specific websites. Free Basics’ defendants are puzzled by the opposition to the programme. We think Sanjay Sahni’s story makes the reasons for opposition obvious.
We have witnessed Facebook’s massive multimedia campaign over the last few days – double spreads in newspapers, ad campaigns on television and heavy promotion on Facebook itself. While similar earlier attempts from telecom operators were stalled by the volunteer-run SaveTheInternet campaign, Facebook has mounted a multi-million dollar campaign powered by marketing muscle and its own platform to generate support for Free Basics without explaining all the facts.
The walled garden of Free Basics goes against the spirit of openness on the internet, and in the guise of being pro-poor, balkanises it. Only Free Basics-approved websites will be accessible for free. In theory, anyone meeting the technical guidelines today can participate. However, services that may potentially compete with telco offerings may not join Free Basics. Since Facebook does not currently subsidise free usage, telcos will have to foot the bill by raising prices.
The future is uncertain – the rules governing participation may change arbitrarily, there may be Facebook ads on the platform, or businesses may need to pay to be included. How can innovation flourish in such a claustrophobic space? In the next few years, government services at the central, state and local levels will go online. Must every government agency then submit its website to Facebook? With Free Basics, Digital India is as good as dead on arrival.
We propose a different solution – one that respects net neutrality, aligns incentives, can be rolled out swiftly, and which allows Facebook to also participate. We propose that the government take the approach of a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) for internet data packs. This idea is based on the success of LPG DBT or Pahal, where over 100 million families receive LPG subsidy in their bank accounts.
Suppose the government announces a Data Pack DBT scheme that offers 120MB annually to every subscriber with the first 10MB free every month. A scan of various existing data packs suggests that 1MB data over 3G conservatively costs 25 paisa. At government’s scale, this could be much lower.
Even with all existing 400 million data users plus 400 million new data users being offered a free Data Pack DBT, the cost to the government would be 30/user x 800 million users = 2,400 crore a year. People may buy multiple SIMs for free data, but this problem is easily solved by linking mobile numbers to Aadhaar numbers (now held by 950 million people) so that one person can get access to only one Data Pack DBT.
This may sound like a lot of money, but we as a country can afford this cost to bring everyone online. The Department of Telecom’s Universal Service Obligation Fund today has a corpus of 40,000 crore with contributions from all telecom operators over time. Facebook can simply contribute to the same fund and achieve its own stated goal of bringing all of India online without distorting markets. With our design, government can roll out Data Pack DBT nationwide within 3 months.
The Internet and Mobile Association of India reports 400 million internet users in India. All these users came online not through Free Basics, but because of the inherent value the internet has to offer. With the diversity of India, it is easy to imagine thousands or perhaps even millions of entrepreneurial experiments playing out over the next few years over the internet. Consider innovations like the India Stack which combines Aadhaar authentication, e-KYC, esign, Digital Locker and UPI interoperable mobile payments to provide cashless, paperless and presence-less transactions. All these innovations will be stifled if we as a society take the wrong road at this important juncture.
Our government must immediately announce and enact laws protecting net neutrality and preserving our right to freely access the full internet. Anything less, and India runs the risk of serving someone else’s interests instead of our own, becoming a digital colony of the internet giants.
Nandan Nilekani was chairman of UIDAI and Viral Shah led the design of government’s subsidy platforms using Aadhaar
Government could start a Data Pack DBT scheme that offers 120MB data annually to every subscriber with first 10MB free every month … funded through Universal Service Obligation Fund, to which Facebook can contribute too.

Monday, 21 December 2015

The NoPhone: A plastic slab for that special someone

Pros: Inexpensive, doesn't need a battery.
Cons: It's a rectangular slab of plastic that does absolutely nothing.
I'm talking about the NoPhone, which -- as the name implies -- has no camera, no screen, no music and, you guessed it, no phone. (It is, however, toilet bowl-resistant.)
The product of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the NoPhone comes in three models. There's the completely featureless $5 NoPhone Zero (aka "the least advanced phone ever created by mankind," according to its website), the $10 NoPhone (with fake buttons and ports) and the $15 NoPhone Selfie, which comes with an adhesive-backed mirror. All are guaranteed to do absolutely nothing, just like the Pet Rock from 1975's holiday season.
The $10 NoPhone features buttons that do nothing and a port that's useless. It is, however, toilet bowl-resistant.
"NoPhone simulates the exact weight and dimensions of your most beloved gadget in order to alleviate any feelings of inadequacy generated by the absence of a real smartphone," Van Gould wrote on his personal webpage. Gould is the co-founder of the company behind the "device," also called NoPhone.
The slab of plastic could be the perfect stocking stuffer for (a) your loved one who already has everything, (b) that person with extreme digital device envy or (c) someone you'd just as soon never hear from again.
So far, the NoPhone has sold more than 4,000 units, according to Gould, who also happens to be an art director for a New York ad agency. For whatever reason, Gould received a bulk order from Reunion Island, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. "I didn't even know this place existed," he told me.
The NoPhone began in 2014 as a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $18,000 -- about the same time a now-famous potato salad recipe eventually pulled in more than $55,000. Coincidence? Sunspots? Or was it just the right time to appeal to a nation's oddball sense of humor?
Whatever the reason, the NoPhone touched on a basic truth: We can't seem to take our eyes off our phones. Go to any restaurant, and you'll see families with mom, dad and the kids all looking at their phones. Heck, I've even asked a surgeon if I could check my emails while he was operating on my arm. (He said I couldn't.)
"[The NoPhone is] definitely a joke," Gould told me, "but there's something true behind the joke."
For a product that does so little, it actually accomplishes a lot by reminding us to give our phones a rest. Gould said he swaps out his real smartphone for the NoPhone once a week during date nights with his girlfriend.
Now I'm thinking I should do something similar. Not that my marriage is in trouble, as far as I know. (My wife wasn't immediately available to comment.) It's just that I have a hard time keeping phones and tablets away from our bed. Maybe the NoPhone will keep my wife from snapping at me after my umpteenth email check in the middle of the night.
Others may want the NoPhone just because it's so absurd. And people do seem to want it. After getting off work, Gould spends his nights packing and shipping the plastic rectangles from his 400-square-foot apartment on New York's Upper West Side.
"I'm not sure if we'll be the next Apple, but who knows?" Gould said. "We're the biggest fake-phone company in the world."