In a recent article Remote Working expert Shauna Moran asked a series of interesting questions around trust issues for remote teams. I found her battery analogy particularly useful - It’s helpful to think of trust like a battery, similar to the one on your phone. When you hire for remote…

For me the most important VR advance of 2018 was undoubtedly the Oculus Go. Finding a real sweet-spot in quality and price-point it created a super low friction, pick-up-and-go tetherless experience that is bringing new people in VR in droves. A recent report by International Data Corporation (IDC) has shown…

How long will it be before we’re producing holographic home movies? Not long. Not long until we’re recording, lifestreaming and projecting phantom-like images of ourselves and our loved ones. Like John Anderton [in ‘Minority Report’] reliving joyful moments with his son Sean. …

The term hyperreality sounds like just another nebulous buzzword because it’s been bandied about like so many others in the Reality-Virtuality continuum. But it does have a clear definition — “Hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies…

Trivia question: What do the following actors have in common — Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Caine & Matthew Broderick? Well, yeah, the title of this article does kind of give it away — they’ve all played characters who famously broke the fourth wall, of course. “Breaking the…

Last year was an interesting time for us here at Simvirtua. Having incorporated in 2013 it was very exciting for us to finally see the commercial launch of both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. It was a year full of promise and yet one full of…

[WARNING: ‘Arrival’ spoilers ahead!] The central premise of ‘Arrival’ (go see it!) is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — the view that language actually shapes the way you see reality, or the way you perceive it. Of course being a work of science fiction the movie stretches the concept to…

Don’t Skeuomorph Virtual Reality. Morph Reality. A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original. [Wikipedia] In 2012 Tom Hobbs made a plea for user interface (UI) designers to “stop aping real-life bookshelves and suede calendars like Apple does, and go for a new philosophy”. Of…

‘A magazine is an iPad that does not work’. So declares the title of a YouTube video from 2011, that has since garnered nearly 4.7 million views, depicting a toddler’s struggles with printed images that won’t respond to pinch-zoom gestures - I was reminded of the above recently when seeing a child fall over while attempting to lean on a desk that existed only in the Virtual Reality she was experiencing though a HTC Vive headset (she wasn’t hurt!) -