VR & AR

VR really impressed us in 2015. In fact — between you and me — we’re building some amazing VR & AR experiences next year. VR won’t be replacing mainstream digital channels you use anytime soon, but we have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to do well in 2016.

Reasons for our ‘Win’ rating

• The mass market is excited and engaged about VR’s second coming.
• There are multiple Hardware options making the market accessible and competitive.
• We’re seeing some seriously high quality experiences challenging those 70’s tron preconceptions of VR & VR.
• It gives studios like ours amazing UX challenges for new experiences.
• It’s futuristic!!

Improvements we’re expecting in 2016

• Less bulky hardware, ugliness and cost.
• Remove ‘That’ dizzy feeling from playing Temple Run style experiences.
• Less lag and higher quality screens.
• More brands making more meaningful, relevant experiences!

Prediction

We predict sony playstation will do amazingly well in VR this year with their Project Morpheus.

Slack

We can’t get enough of Slack. It crept into the office as an “email killer” and within about two days we had zero internal emails. It’s totally changed our internal process. It’s fun — gives us buckets of moments of delight and even helps us order pizza on Fridays.

Reasons for our ‘Win’ rating:

• It’s reduced our email usage.
• It helps us better communicate about projects.
• It’s easy to code extra bits of functionality by integrating with other platforms: slowly making it essential to our projects.

Improvements we’re expecting in 2016

• Cost — seeing as you have to keep your emails it does end up being a sizeable cost on top.
• We’d like to see a slackbot market.
• We’d like to see brands make some slackbots!

Prediction

We predict Slack will go from strength to strength in 2016. We reckon we’ll see big companies lose out on hires if they’re not using Slack. We hope Slack doesn’t release an ad funded version, but a more affordable version for medium sized companies would be great!

Creating Slack Bots!

We’ll be writing more about this later in the year. We made an app which allows us to control Sonos from slack. You just type ‘pause’ ‘play’ or ‘what’s playing’ and it controls your music. Bots are just another way to get the team talking and give us a fun way to hack the Sonos. (Get your own Sonos Bot here.)