Innovations stuck on the road to techno-Olympus
Welcome to our readers on the pages of the blog iCover ! It happens that the most successful companies with billions of budgets for the development of ambitious projects, a sophisticated board of directors and a bloated staff of analysts make annoying mistakes and get a result that is far from expectations. Sometimes an innovative idea is decades ahead of its time and is forced to wait until existing technologies “catch up” behind it. I would like to dwell on the five failed attempts to take technological Olympus by storm in this article.
The development of a standard for magneto-optical disks MiniDisk (MD) was launched in 1986. And the first products, positioned as a replacement for compact cassettes that had reached their technological limit by that time, appeared in January 1992. At that time, the world was already using non-rewritable CDs. Sony, which developed the format, was sincerely convinced that the new product, presented in the MD ARTAC encoding format and suitable for storing any digital data, is doomed to success, and we are sure that we integrated several of our own complex and expensive patented technologies into MD.
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Although the format and enjoyed some popularity in Japan and Europe immediately after its appearance, to consolidate success in the market, due to the ill-conceived and inconsistent marketing policy of Sony, for a long time he did not succeed. Since March 2013, due to the almost complete lack of demand, the company has announced a halt in the production of the entire line of devices for recording and playing MiniDisk. At the same time, today minidisks are sometimes used as a solution in the composition of car and stationary audio systems both by Sony itself and by such recognized authorities as Yamaha, Pioneer, Kenwood, Aiwa, Sharp.
Today, a person who has not yet been born into the world has heard about virtual reality. Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $ 2 billion. Valve is teaming up with HTC to collaborate on Vive. Sony immediately presents Project Morpheus. Even Samsung with Gear VR and Google with CardBoard Cardboard are pulled. Such a vigorous activity makes you think that the usual technical means and ways of interacting with games will soon go to the collectors' garages, as happened once with arcade machines. Experts of the VR world are convinced with this opinion, convinced that virtual reality in just a few years will completely and permanently change the ways and rules of the relationship between man and cyberspace. But, analyzing the level of technical capabilities of leading companies' gadgets, most of us do not even suspect that the first working prototypes, the “great-grandchildren” of today's Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, were created by the standards of our dynamic time in the “prehistoric era”.
The idea of ​​creating a VR helmet, embodied at the level of a specific engineering solution by Mort Heilig, was patented in 1960 by the American Patent Office. In spite of some successes about his offspring - the telespherical mask presented in the documentation as a “television set for individual use”, the inventor successfully forgot almost immediately after registering the patent. But, two years later, the world was destined to see another creation by the same author - a wild-looking stationary “kiosk” with a non-standard stool called Sensorama. The engineer proposed to recreate the atmosphere of virtual reality due to the effect of the generation of smells, stereo sound, artificially created air streams, stereoscopic 3D, and even the vibration created by the vibration motor below the fifth point. Alas, the number of special effects created did not affect the quality of the finished solution.
The first commercial products that allowed to form an idea of ​​VR as a three-dimensional world, where there is “their own” space, where EyePhone , CyberFace and Virtuality Visette were marketed and even looked around at the end of the 80s and early 90s -h. Naturally, like the first personal computers, these devices were completely different from today's analogues, both in size and weight, and in functionality, caused headaches and nausea. The only thing that in some way related them to the representatives of the product line of our days is almost cosmic prices.
In 1997, Sony decided to try its capabilities in the field of virtual reality by presenting several models of the Glasstron to the market at once - a miniature helmet equipped with a pair of LCD displays and headphones. But due to the negative reviews of the unpleasantly surprised public, Sony almost immediately removed the helmet from production, citing such a decision with concern for the health of its customers.
Somewhat later, the company again tried its luck with the premium line of HMZ Personal Viewer helmets - and again epic fail. The series of failures that Sony suffered at that stage partly explains how quickly the company managed to get involved in the current race and present the finished Project Morpheus prototypes.
As it becomes clear from our short insight into the history of the development of VR technologies, the first releases clearly demonstrated how much the idea itself was ahead of the software and hardware available at that time for its implementation.
Today, despite the obvious successes of leading companies in promoting VR technology to the market, it’s clearly premature to talk about real breakthroughs in such fundamental points as appearance, weight and ergonomics. Certain questions arise in connection with the consequences of an excessively active switching of attention to the world of VR. A well-known experiment conducted back in 1995, during which a student at the University of Chicago spent several hours wearing a virtual reality helmet. In general, the impressions were the most favorable, except for the fact that the attempt to drink a soda after a VR session ended in that the girl poured it into her eye, not into her mouth.
As John Carmack, the technical director of Oculus VR, explained, the problem does exist, her name is “cyber disease” and is equally susceptible to both those who immersed in VR wearing helmets of 1995, described in the experiment with the student, and those puts on 2015 models. For the same reason, Samsung calls to stop wearing Gear VR if similar problems are found, and to fully protect children under 13 from such a possibility. “In the real world, you receive incoming signals from several senses, and they are all in perfect agreement with each other. In virtual reality, our brain expects the same consistency. But in fact, different feelings are not synchronized, and there is a rift, ”says Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at the University of California.
If the situation developing on the VR market looks extremely ambiguous, then with respect to the first Tablet handheld personal computer Newton, announced by Apple in 1993, everything is much simpler. Apple Newton MessagePad 100 (official name MessagePad) - a device with a monochrome screen successfully enough to handle handwriting recognition and support the work with the stylus, alas, became one of the few gadgets of the company, which the audience rather quickly forgot, but not the story.
Initially positioned as a prototype of the personal computer of the new generation, digital assistant (Personal Digital Assistant, PDA) with a large screen, solid internal memory and a full-fledged object-oriented graphics core Apple Newton MessagePad was produced for 6 years, but failed to find its place on the market.
The expected almost vertical rise of popularity, as well as increased attention even to the most loyal Aplle audience, the gadget did not receive in many respects due to its space price, which rose from the announcement of 2000 and 2100 models to $ 1000 and unusual sizes, which did not allow to comfortably place the gadget in the pocket of a jacket and trousers , shirts, and any other item of clothing. There were also critics who considered the innovative function of handwriting input insufficiently perfect for convenient execution of operations declared by the manufacturer.
After the appearance of the Palm Pilot handhelds, the era of the expansion of tablet PCs under the tacit patronage of Apple has been decisively postponed for almost two decades until the triumphant appearance of the first iPad. The new product from Palm was much smaller, thinner, had an improved handwriting recognition system “Graffiti”, and most importantly, it was much cheaper. In 1998, the release of Newton was suspended, but Palm Computing, led by former Apple employee Donna Dubinsky, on the contrary, gave the market hope for some time to restore the PDA segment after the disappointed and largely underestimated MessagePad.
HD DVD (High-Definition / Density - “High Definition DVD / Capacity”) is an optical disc recording technology developed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. HD DVD (like Blu-ray Disc) uses standard-size discs (120 millimeters in diameter) and a blue-violet laser with a wavelength of 405 nm. One of the key advantages of the technology was the ability to save large amounts of information. So on a single-layer disc it was possible to record 15GB, on a double-layer one, respectively, twice as much. The three-layer disk announced by Toshiba, the main ideologue of the new format, allowed to save up to 45GB of data. And yet, the first Blue Ray discs, 25GB on one layer, and 100GB on three layers, appeared in 2006 easily crossed the threshold set by HD DVD, which from the very beginning of the race had a significant effect on the outcome of the “format war” ".
Both formats used the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC-1, based on Windows Media 9 format) and H.264. A major advantage of HD DVD over Blu-ray was the fact that most of the equipment for producing DVD could be easily and cheaply reoriented to produce HD DVD using the same technology in production. At the same time, Blu-ray HD DVDs didn’t manage to make a serious competition, and more precisely, could not.
In 2008, Toshiba officially ceased production of HD DVD discs due to the recognition of their products as uncompetitive and the desire to end the protracted “format war”.
Google Glass is a product of Google, a headset for smartphones and a kind of “wearable computer” based on Android, using a transparent display mounted on the head (head-mounted display) and located in the stowed position just above the right eye. The built-in camera of the device is capable of recording high-quality video, and the gadget itself - to perceive voice commands. The first stage of product testing started in April 2012, while the New York Times was setting the stage for the upcoming announcement from the end of February 2012. Prototypes of the headset model Explorer Edition priced at $ 1,500 each were handed over to software developers at the Glass Foundry event in February 2013. The product became available to the general public on May 15, 2014 at the same price.
Already on January 15, 2015, Google announced the suspension of production of Glass in its current performance and content, noting that the product had completed its experimental stage at Google Labs and from that moment the development and further production was transferred from the Google X laboratory to another division, while remaining patronage of Babak Parviz.
According to the developers, the Smart Glass concept should implement three independent functions for the money required from users, bringing them together: access to augmented reality, provision of mobile communication + Internet, access to a video diary. The first version of the points, despite the impressive declared value, turned out to be rather raw, capable of fully implementing only the video diary and only partially augmented reality and the possibility of communication.
Despite the confidence of the developers themselves in the success of the project and contrary to the hopes of the end user, the smart glasses announced by the IT giant did not become a true technological breakthrough. Google itself was forced to admit: in the mass, they did not accept the novelty, not only due to technical flaws, but also to the average user’s unwillingness to overcome the psychological barrier and go out into the world "so smart."
It will be an obvious exaggeration to say that the product is gathering dust on the shelves of the museum of the history of technology and is not at all in demand. So, for example, Google Glass smart glasses do an excellent job with the tasks of an information guide at factories and training centers. The future of the project and the prospects for the full implementation of what was planned in this regard now largely depend on Google.
Dear readers, we are always happy to meet and wait for you on the pages of our blog. We are ready to continue to share with you the latest news, review materials and other publications, and we will try to do everything possible so that the time spent with us will be useful for you. And, of course, do not forget to subscribe to our headings .
Our other articles and events
Sony MiniDisk
The development of a standard for magneto-optical disks MiniDisk (MD) was launched in 1986. And the first products, positioned as a replacement for compact cassettes that had reached their technological limit by that time, appeared in January 1992. At that time, the world was already using non-rewritable CDs. Sony, which developed the format, was sincerely convinced that the new product, presented in the MD ARTAC encoding format and suitable for storing any digital data, is doomed to success, and we are sure that we integrated several of our own complex and expensive patented technologies into MD.
')
Although the format and enjoyed some popularity in Japan and Europe immediately after its appearance, to consolidate success in the market, due to the ill-conceived and inconsistent marketing policy of Sony, for a long time he did not succeed. Since March 2013, due to the almost complete lack of demand, the company has announced a halt in the production of the entire line of devices for recording and playing MiniDisk. At the same time, today minidisks are sometimes used as a solution in the composition of car and stationary audio systems both by Sony itself and by such recognized authorities as Yamaha, Pioneer, Kenwood, Aiwa, Sharp.
VR reality - first experiments, successes and failures
Today, a person who has not yet been born into the world has heard about virtual reality. Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $ 2 billion. Valve is teaming up with HTC to collaborate on Vive. Sony immediately presents Project Morpheus. Even Samsung with Gear VR and Google with CardBoard Cardboard are pulled. Such a vigorous activity makes you think that the usual technical means and ways of interacting with games will soon go to the collectors' garages, as happened once with arcade machines. Experts of the VR world are convinced with this opinion, convinced that virtual reality in just a few years will completely and permanently change the ways and rules of the relationship between man and cyberspace. But, analyzing the level of technical capabilities of leading companies' gadgets, most of us do not even suspect that the first working prototypes, the “great-grandchildren” of today's Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, were created by the standards of our dynamic time in the “prehistoric era”.
The idea of ​​creating a VR helmet, embodied at the level of a specific engineering solution by Mort Heilig, was patented in 1960 by the American Patent Office. In spite of some successes about his offspring - the telespherical mask presented in the documentation as a “television set for individual use”, the inventor successfully forgot almost immediately after registering the patent. But, two years later, the world was destined to see another creation by the same author - a wild-looking stationary “kiosk” with a non-standard stool called Sensorama. The engineer proposed to recreate the atmosphere of virtual reality due to the effect of the generation of smells, stereo sound, artificially created air streams, stereoscopic 3D, and even the vibration created by the vibration motor below the fifth point. Alas, the number of special effects created did not affect the quality of the finished solution.
The first commercial products that allowed to form an idea of ​​VR as a three-dimensional world, where there is “their own” space, where EyePhone , CyberFace and Virtuality Visette were marketed and even looked around at the end of the 80s and early 90s -h. Naturally, like the first personal computers, these devices were completely different from today's analogues, both in size and weight, and in functionality, caused headaches and nausea. The only thing that in some way related them to the representatives of the product line of our days is almost cosmic prices.
In 1997, Sony decided to try its capabilities in the field of virtual reality by presenting several models of the Glasstron to the market at once - a miniature helmet equipped with a pair of LCD displays and headphones. But due to the negative reviews of the unpleasantly surprised public, Sony almost immediately removed the helmet from production, citing such a decision with concern for the health of its customers.
Somewhat later, the company again tried its luck with the premium line of HMZ Personal Viewer helmets - and again epic fail. The series of failures that Sony suffered at that stage partly explains how quickly the company managed to get involved in the current race and present the finished Project Morpheus prototypes.
As it becomes clear from our short insight into the history of the development of VR technologies, the first releases clearly demonstrated how much the idea itself was ahead of the software and hardware available at that time for its implementation.
Today, despite the obvious successes of leading companies in promoting VR technology to the market, it’s clearly premature to talk about real breakthroughs in such fundamental points as appearance, weight and ergonomics. Certain questions arise in connection with the consequences of an excessively active switching of attention to the world of VR. A well-known experiment conducted back in 1995, during which a student at the University of Chicago spent several hours wearing a virtual reality helmet. In general, the impressions were the most favorable, except for the fact that the attempt to drink a soda after a VR session ended in that the girl poured it into her eye, not into her mouth.
As John Carmack, the technical director of Oculus VR, explained, the problem does exist, her name is “cyber disease” and is equally susceptible to both those who immersed in VR wearing helmets of 1995, described in the experiment with the student, and those puts on 2015 models. For the same reason, Samsung calls to stop wearing Gear VR if similar problems are found, and to fully protect children under 13 from such a possibility. “In the real world, you receive incoming signals from several senses, and they are all in perfect agreement with each other. In virtual reality, our brain expects the same consistency. But in fact, different feelings are not synchronized, and there is a rift, ”says Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at the University of California.
Apple Newton MessagePad - the ancestor of modern tablets
If the situation developing on the VR market looks extremely ambiguous, then with respect to the first Tablet handheld personal computer Newton, announced by Apple in 1993, everything is much simpler. Apple Newton MessagePad 100 (official name MessagePad) - a device with a monochrome screen successfully enough to handle handwriting recognition and support the work with the stylus, alas, became one of the few gadgets of the company, which the audience rather quickly forgot, but not the story.
Initially positioned as a prototype of the personal computer of the new generation, digital assistant (Personal Digital Assistant, PDA) with a large screen, solid internal memory and a full-fledged object-oriented graphics core Apple Newton MessagePad was produced for 6 years, but failed to find its place on the market.
The expected almost vertical rise of popularity, as well as increased attention even to the most loyal Aplle audience, the gadget did not receive in many respects due to its space price, which rose from the announcement of 2000 and 2100 models to $ 1000 and unusual sizes, which did not allow to comfortably place the gadget in the pocket of a jacket and trousers , shirts, and any other item of clothing. There were also critics who considered the innovative function of handwriting input insufficiently perfect for convenient execution of operations declared by the manufacturer.
After the appearance of the Palm Pilot handhelds, the era of the expansion of tablet PCs under the tacit patronage of Apple has been decisively postponed for almost two decades until the triumphant appearance of the first iPad. The new product from Palm was much smaller, thinner, had an improved handwriting recognition system “Graffiti”, and most importantly, it was much cheaper. In 1998, the release of Newton was suspended, but Palm Computing, led by former Apple employee Donna Dubinsky, on the contrary, gave the market hope for some time to restore the PDA segment after the disappointed and largely underestimated MessagePad.
HD DVD
HD DVD (High-Definition / Density - “High Definition DVD / Capacity”) is an optical disc recording technology developed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. HD DVD (like Blu-ray Disc) uses standard-size discs (120 millimeters in diameter) and a blue-violet laser with a wavelength of 405 nm. One of the key advantages of the technology was the ability to save large amounts of information. So on a single-layer disc it was possible to record 15GB, on a double-layer one, respectively, twice as much. The three-layer disk announced by Toshiba, the main ideologue of the new format, allowed to save up to 45GB of data. And yet, the first Blue Ray discs, 25GB on one layer, and 100GB on three layers, appeared in 2006 easily crossed the threshold set by HD DVD, which from the very beginning of the race had a significant effect on the outcome of the “format war” ".
Both formats used the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC-1, based on Windows Media 9 format) and H.264. A major advantage of HD DVD over Blu-ray was the fact that most of the equipment for producing DVD could be easily and cheaply reoriented to produce HD DVD using the same technology in production. At the same time, Blu-ray HD DVDs didn’t manage to make a serious competition, and more precisely, could not.
In 2008, Toshiba officially ceased production of HD DVD discs due to the recognition of their products as uncompetitive and the desire to end the protracted “format war”.
Glasses Augmented Reality Google Glass
Google Glass is a product of Google, a headset for smartphones and a kind of “wearable computer” based on Android, using a transparent display mounted on the head (head-mounted display) and located in the stowed position just above the right eye. The built-in camera of the device is capable of recording high-quality video, and the gadget itself - to perceive voice commands. The first stage of product testing started in April 2012, while the New York Times was setting the stage for the upcoming announcement from the end of February 2012. Prototypes of the headset model Explorer Edition priced at $ 1,500 each were handed over to software developers at the Glass Foundry event in February 2013. The product became available to the general public on May 15, 2014 at the same price.
Already on January 15, 2015, Google announced the suspension of production of Glass in its current performance and content, noting that the product had completed its experimental stage at Google Labs and from that moment the development and further production was transferred from the Google X laboratory to another division, while remaining patronage of Babak Parviz.
According to the developers, the Smart Glass concept should implement three independent functions for the money required from users, bringing them together: access to augmented reality, provision of mobile communication + Internet, access to a video diary. The first version of the points, despite the impressive declared value, turned out to be rather raw, capable of fully implementing only the video diary and only partially augmented reality and the possibility of communication.
Despite the confidence of the developers themselves in the success of the project and contrary to the hopes of the end user, the smart glasses announced by the IT giant did not become a true technological breakthrough. Google itself was forced to admit: in the mass, they did not accept the novelty, not only due to technical flaws, but also to the average user’s unwillingness to overcome the psychological barrier and go out into the world "so smart."
It will be an obvious exaggeration to say that the product is gathering dust on the shelves of the museum of the history of technology and is not at all in demand. So, for example, Google Glass smart glasses do an excellent job with the tasks of an information guide at factories and training centers. The future of the project and the prospects for the full implementation of what was planned in this regard now largely depend on Google.
Dear readers, we are always happy to meet and wait for you on the pages of our blog. We are ready to continue to share with you the latest news, review materials and other publications, and we will try to do everything possible so that the time spent with us will be useful for you. And, of course, do not forget to subscribe to our headings .
Our other articles and events
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/390031/
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