In 2017, is nothing new. But a spectacular new first-person drone flyover of the Swiss Alps will drop your jaw — and quite possibly give you vertigo, too.
Titled, the short film was shot by Gabriel Kocher, a Swiss physicist living in Montreal, who moonlights as a racing drone pilot. Having finished second in the ’s Allianz World Championship earlier this year, Elevations is part of Kocher’s — designed to focus on more creative uses of drones as a way of exploring rugged landscapes.“This shoot came about while I was hiking in the Swiss Alps in early September this year,” Kocher told Digital Trends. “The drone is a small 220mm diameter custom-built racing drone made for long range that I built myself. It gets strapped to my backpack, along with all the photographic gear that I carry wherever I go. What makes this unique is that the drone is flown FPV first-person view, through video glasses that allow me to see through a small camera placed on the drone. In contrast to regular camera rigs, this kind of machine brings through all the control movements made by the pilot, capturing much more of the sensation of flight. Its very high power-to-weight ratio — around 8:1 — allows it to get very close to obstacles and acrobatic flights.”.
The footage is accompanied by a second video offering an uncut, lower resolution look at the material shot by Kocher. The final edit includes an added sheen — although the only thing that’s tweaked is the addition of driving background music and some footage stabilization to iron out wind-related wobbles.“The biggest challenge in capturing this kind of footage is that it is shot at the edge of what the technology can do,” Kocher continued. “Not outrunning the battery capacity is a key factor, but the hardest one is keeping the drone in view from the ground station. While I’m looking for a maximum of proximity to the terrain, dropping behind an obstacle will result in a control loss and likely a crash — so this is a constant memory and mental 3D-mapping game.”On this occasion, we think Kocher won this particular game!Editors' Recommendations.
You are here? In this imaginary composite, the virutal world of Second Life–as embodied in the author’s avatar–meets the real world of Google Earth. This story is part of our July/August 2007 issueA thunderhead towers at knee level, throwing tiny lightning bolts at my shoes.
I’m standing–rather, my avatar is standing–astride a giant map of the continental United States, and southern Illinois, at my feet, is evidently getting a good April shower.The weather is nicer on the East Coast: I can see pillowy cumulus clouds floating over Boston and New York, a few virtual meters away. I turn around and look west toward Nevada. There isn’t a raindrop in sight, of course; the region’s eight-year drought is expected to go on indefinitely, thanks to global warming. But I notice something odd, and I walk over to investigate.The red polka dots over Phoenix and Los Angeles indicate a hot day, as I would expect. But the dot over the North Las Vegas airport is deep-freeze blue.
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That can’t be right. My house is only 30 kilometers from the airport, and I’ve had the air conditioner running all day.Once you've downloaded the appropriate software from and, many locations mentioned in this story can be accessed using special links in the copy. Links saying 'SLurl' will open a Second Life viewer. Links saying 'Google Earth location' will open Google Earth and spin the virtual globe to the proper coordinates.“Any clue why this dot is blue?” I ask the avatar operating the weather map’s controls. The character’s name, inside the virtual world called, is Zazen Manbi; he has a pleasant face and well-kept chestnut hair, and the oval spectacles perched on his nose give him a look that’s half academic, half John Lennon. The man controlling Manbi is Jeffrey Corbin, a research assistant in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the.“Let me check something,” Manbi/Corbin responds. “I can reset the map–sometimes it gets stuck.” He presses a button, and fresh data rushes in from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s network of airport weather stations.
The clouds over the East shift slightly. Los Angeles goes orange, meaning it’s cooled off a bit. But there’s still a spot of indigo over Vegas. Multimedia.“I guess it’s feeling blue,” he jokes.The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island sustained entirely by servers and software at San Francisco-based, which launched Second Life in 2003. (On the map’s scale, my avatar is about 500 kilometers tall, which makes Illinois about three paces across.) Corbin, who’s on a personal mission to incorporate 3-D tools like this one into the science curriculum at Denver, paid Linden Lab for the island so that he could assemble exhibits demonstrating to the faculty how such tools might be used pedagogically. “Every student at DU is required to have a laptop,” he says.
“But how many of them are just messaging one another in class?” A few more science students might learn something if they could walk inside a weather map, he reasons.Corbin’s got plenty to show off: just west of the map is a virtual planetarium, a giant glass box housing a giant white sphere that in turn houses a giant orrery illustrating the geometry of solar eclipses. And he’s not the only one to offer such attractions. Just to the south, on an adjoining island, is the International Spaceflight Museum , where visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon.Second Life, which started out four years ago as a 1-square-kilometer patch with 500 residents, has grown into almost of territory spread over three minicontinents, with 6.9 million registered users and 30,000 to 40,000 residents online at any moment.
It’s a world with birdsong, rippling water, shopping malls, property taxes, and realistic physics. And life inside is almost as varied as it is outside.
“I help out new citizens, I rent some houses on some spare land I have, I socialize,” says a longtime Second Lifer whose avatar goes by the name Alan Cyr. “I dance far better than I do in real life.
I watch sunsets and sunrises, go swimming, exploring, riding my Second Life Segway. I do a lot of random stuff.”. But aside from such diversions, the navigation tools provided by Second Life–users can fly and hover like Superman and zoom between micro and macro views of any object–make it an excellent place to investigate phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to visualize or understand. In that sense, this hideaway from the reality outside is beginning to function as an alternative lens on it. Ever wondered when the International Space Station might pass overhead? At the spaceflight museum, your avatar can fly alongside models of the station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and many other satellites as they orbit a 10-meter-diameter globe in sync with real-world data from the Air Force Space Command. Or perhaps you suspect a bad call by the line judges at Wimbledon.
If so, just stroll a inside Second Life and examine the paths of every serve and volley of a match in progress, reproduced by IBM in close to real time.Of course, from within a virtual world like Second Life, the real world can be glimpsed only through the imperfect filters of today’s software and hardware. Barring a startling increase in the Internet bandwidth available to the average PC user or a plunge in the cost of stereoscopic virtual-reality goggles, we will continue to experience virtual worlds as mere representations of 3-D environments on our flat old computer screens. And your avatar obviously isn’t really you; it’s a cartoonish marionette awkwardly controlled by your mouse movements and keyboard commands. Moreover, at the moment, every conversation inside a virtual world must be laboriously typed out (although Linden Lab will soon add an optional function to Second Life).So while virtual worlds are good for basic instruction and data representation, professionals aren’t yet rushing to use them to analyze large amounts of spatial information.
For that, they stick to specialized design, animation, modeling, and mapping software from companies like. But there’s another new genre of 3-D visualization tools that are accessible to both professionals and average Internet users: “virtual globe” programs such as, Microsoft’s, and NASA’s open-source.
Virtual globes let you plot your city’s sewer system, monitor a network of environmental sensors, count up the frequent-flyer miles between New York and New Delhi, or just soar through a photorealistic 3-D model of the Grand Canyon.Even as social virtual worlds incorporate a growing amount of real-world data, virtual globes and their 2-D counterparts, Web maps, are getting more personal and immersive. Digital maps are becoming a substrate for what Di-Ann Eisnor, CEO of the mapping site in Portland, OR, calls “”: an explosion of user-created content, such as travel photos and blog posts, pinned to specific locations (see “,” October 2005). Using Platial’s map annotation software, people have created public maps full of details about everything from the to. Google has now built a directly into Google Maps.
“The idea that maps can be emotional things to interact with is fairly new,” says Eisnor. “But I can imagine a time when the base map is just a frame of reference, and there is much more emphasis on the reviews, opinions, photos, and everything else that fits on top.”As these two trends continue from opposite directions, it’s natural to ask what will happen when Second Life and Google Earth, or services like them, actually meet.Because meet they will, whether or not their owners are the ones driving their integration. Both Google and Linden Lab grant access to their existing 3-D platforms through tools that let outside programmers build their own auxiliary applications, or “mashups.” And many computer professionals think the idea of a “Second Earth” mashup is so cool that it’s inevitable, whether or not it will offer any immediate way to make money. “As long as somebody can find some really strong personal gratification out of doing it, then there is a driver to make it happen,” says, a consultant who cofounded the futurist website and helps organizations plan for technological change. The first, relatively simple step toward a Second Earth, many observers predict, will be integrating Second Life’s avatars, controls, and modeling tools into the Google Earth environment.
Groups of users would then be able to walk, fly, or swim across Google’s simulated landscapes and explore intricate 3-D representations of the world’s most famous buildings. Google itself may or may not be considering such a project. “It’s interesting, and I think there are people who want to do that,” says, director of the division of the company responsible for Google Earth. “But that’s not something where we have any announcements or immediate plans to talk about it.”A second alternative would be to expand the surface area of Second Life by millions of square kilometers and model the new territory on the real earth, using the same topographical data and surface imagery contained in Google Earth. (The existing parts of Second Life could remain, perhaps as an imaginary archipelago somewhere in the Pacific.) That’s a much more difficult proposition, for practical, technical reasons that I’ll get to later.
And in any case, Linden Lab says it’s not interested.But within 10 to 20 years–roughly the same time it took for the Web to become what it is now–something much bigger than either of these alternatives may emerge: a true Metaverse. In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, a classic of the dystopian “cyberpunk” genre, the Metaverse was a planet-size virtual city that could hold up to 120 million avatars, each representing someone in search of entertainment, trade, or social contact. The Metaverse that’s really on the way, some experts believe, will resemble Stephenson’s vision, but with many alterations. It will look like the real earth, and it will support even more users than the Snow Crash cyberworld, functioning as the agora, laboratory, and gateway for almost every type of information-based pursuit. It will be accessible both in its immersive, virtual-reality form and through peepholes like the screen of your cell phone as you make your way through the real world. And like the Web today, it will become “the standard way in which we think of life online,” to quote from the, a forecast published this spring by an informal group of entrepreneurs, media producers, academics, and analysts (Cascio among them).But don’t expect it to run any more smoothly than the real world. I called programmer and 3-D modeler, who created the immersive weather map for NOAA, to see if she could explain that pesky blue dot over Las Vegas.
As it turns out, a networking glitch was preventing the airport weather feed from reaching the map inside Second Life. And when the map doesn’t get the data it’s expecting, the temperature dots default to blue. So Corbin was right, in a way.While Second Life and Google Earth are commonly mentioned as likely forebears of the Metaverse, no one thinks that Linden Lab and Google will be its lone rulers. Their two systems are interesting mainly because they already have many adherents, and because they exemplify two fundamentally different streams of technology that will be essential to the Metaverse’s construction.Second Life is a true virtual world, unconstrained by any resemblance to the real planet. What unites it and similar worlds such as, and –beyond their 3-D graphics–is that they’re free-flowing, ungoverned communities shaped by the shared imaginations of their users.
“Consensual hallucinations” was the term William Gibson used in his groundbreaking 1984 cyberpunk novel, which posited a Matrix-like cybersphere years before Snow Crash. These worlds are not games, however. Users don’t go on quests or strive to acquire more gold or magic spells; they’re far more likely to spend their time at virtual campfires, discos, and shopping malls. This sets these environments firmly apart from massively multiplayer 3-D gaming worlds such as Sony’s, Blizzard Entertainment’s, and NCsoft’s, which together have far more users.
Google Earth and competing programs such as Microsoft Virtual Earth, on the other hand, are more accurately described as mirror worlds–a term invented by Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter (see “”) to denote geographically accurate, utilitarian software models of real human environments and their workings. If they were books, virtual worlds would be fiction and mirror worlds would be nonfiction. They are microcosms: reality brought down to a size at which it can be grasped, manipulated, and rearranged, like an obsessively detailed dollhouse. And they’re used to keep track of the real world rather than to escape from it. Rolston has already had plenty of experience building such separate worlds. Some of Forterra’s simulations are “geotypical”–plausible imitations of generic landscapes and urban environments–and others are “geospecific,” reproducing actual places such as the entrances to Baghdad’s battered Green Zone.
The worlds of the Metaverse will be much more diverse but still bridgeable, Rolston predicts. “Portions of this 3-D Internet will be anchored to the real planet and will involve real-world activities, and others will not be,” he says. “People will move freely between representations of the real world and representations of synthetic fantasy worlds, and feel equally comfortable in both.”For people who haven’t spent much time in a 3-D world, of course, it’s hard to imagine feeling comfortable in either. But such environments may soon be as unavoidable as the Web itself: according to technology research firm Gartner, current trends suggest that of active Internet users and Fortune 500 companies will participate in Second Life or some competing virtual world by the end of 2011. And if you take a few months to explore Second Life, as I have done recently, you may begin to understand why many people have begun to think of it as a true second home–and why 3-D worlds are a better medium for many types of communication than the old 2-D Internet.To begin with, Second Life is beautiful–wholly unlike the Metaverse one might imagine from reading Snow Crash. It has rolling grass-covered hills and snowy mountains, lush tropical jungles, tall pines that sway gently in the breeze, and Romanesque fountains with musically tinkling water.
Linden Lab thoughtfully arranges a gorgeous golden-orange sunset every four hours.A beautiful environment, however, isn’t enough to make a virtual world compelling. Single-player puzzle worlds such as provided riveting 3-D graphics as long ago as the early 1990s, but these worlds were utterly lonely, leaving users with no reason to return after all the puzzles had been solved. Part of Second Life’s appeal, by contrast, is that it’s always crowded with thousands of other people. If you want company, just head for a clump of green dots on the Second Life world map–that’s where you’ll find people gathering for concerts, lectures, competitions, shopping, museum-going, and dancing. “Second Life is best viewed as a communication technology, just like the telephone,” says Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab’s chief technology officer.
“Except that you don’t communicate by voice; you communicate by shared experience.” And unlike the telephone system, Second Life is free (unless you want to own land, which means upgrading to for $9.95 per month).Second Life residents also communicate through the buildings and other objects they create. Using built-in 3-D modeling tools, any resident can create something simple, like a flowerpot or a crude hut. But the revered wizards of the community are those who can quickly conjure basic building blocks called “prims” and reshape and combine them into complex objects, from charm bracelets and evening gowns to airplanes and office buildings. Alyssa LaRoche, creator of the NOAA weather map, is one of these builder-wizards. She started creating things as soon as she joined Second Life in January 2004, and by April 2006 she had quit her day job as an IT consultant in the financial-services industry to start a Second Life design agency called (after her avatar’s name).
Business has been so brisk that LaRoche now employs four other full-time modelers and 19 contractors. “I’m certainly making more money than I made at my job as a consultant,” she says. Her agency recently finished an entire island of oceanographic and meteorological exhibits for NOAA, including a glacier, a submarine tour of a tropical reef, and an airplane ride through a hurricane.NOAA commissioned its island as a kind of educational amusement park, a Weather World.
But other parts of Second Life are more businesslike. Dozens of companies, including IBM , Sony Ericsson , and American Apparel , have bought land in the virtual world, and most have already built storefronts or headquarters where their employees’ avatars can do business. In March, for example, Coldwell Banker opened a Second Life real-estate brokerage where new residents can tour model virtual homes and make purchases at below-market rates. In 2006, Starwood Hotels used Second Life as a virtual testing ground for a new chain of real-world hotels, called Aloft. The company constructed a prototype where visitors could walk the grounds, swim in the pool, relax in the lobby, and inspect the guest rooms.
It’s incorporating suggestions from Second Lifers into the design of the first real Aloft hotel, set to open in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, in 2008. Most structures in the Second Life universe, of course, lack any serious business purpose. But that doesn’t mean they have no relation to the real world. One of Second Life’s most trafficked places is a detailed re-creation of downtown Dublin.
The main draw: the Blarney Stone Irish pub, where there is live music most nights, piped in from real performance spaces via the Internet. A short teleport-hop away from virtual Dublin is virtual Amsterdam, where the canals, the houseboats, and even the alleyways of the red-light district have been textured with photographs from the real Amsterdam to lend authenticity.This reimagining of the real world can go only so far, given current limitations on the growth of Linden Lab’s server farm, the amount of bandwidth available to stream data to users, and the power of the graphics card in the average PC. According to Ondrejka, Linden Lab must purchase and install more than 120 servers every week to keep up with all the new members pouring into Second Life, who increase the computational load by creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land.
Each server at Linden Lab supports one to four “regions,” 65,536-square-meter chunks of the Second Life environment–establishing the base topography, storing and rendering all inanimate objects, animating avatars, running scripts, and the like. This architecture is what makes it next to impossible to imagine re-creating a full-scale earth within Second Life, even at a low level of detail. At one region per server, simulating just the 29.2 percent of the planet’s surface that’s dry land would require 2.3 billion servers and 150 dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them running. It’s the kind of system that “doesn’t scale well,” to use the jargon of information technology.But then, Linden Lab’s engineers never designed Second Life’s back end to scale that way. Says Ondrejka, “We’re not interested in 100 percent veracity or a true representation of static reality.”And they don’t have to be. As it turns out, simulations need not be convincing to be enveloping. “It’s not an issue of engaging the eyes and the hands, but rather of engaging the heart and the mind,” says Corey Bridges, executive producer at the, which sells a standardized virtual-world platform that developers can tailor to their own needs.
“If you can form a connection with someone, even just with a mouse and a keyboard and a video screen, whether it’s in Second Life or World of Warcraft, that is far more powerful than even the best virtual-reality simulation.”Personal connections may be what a lot of people want, but going by the numbers, Google Earth is far more popular than any other type of virtual world, including the big role-playing worlds like Lineage II (which has 14 million subscribers) and World of Warcraft (more than 8 million). An equally detailed vision of a virtual earth was laid out in another book from the same era, David Gelernter’s. “The software model of your city, once it’s set up, will be available (like a public park) to however many people are interested,” Gelernter predicted.
“It will sustain a million different views. Each visitor will zoom in and pan around and roam through the model as he chooses.” Institutions such as universities and city governments would nourish the mirror world with a constant flow of data. The latest information on traffic jams, stock prices, or water quality would appear exactly where expected–overlaid on virtual roads and stock exchanges and water mains. But just as important, mirror worlds would function as social spaces, where people seeking similar information would frequently cross paths and share ideas. They would be “beer halls and grand piazzas, natural gathering places for information hunters and insight searchers.”On page 203 of Mirror Worlds is a striking architectural drawing showing a bird’s-eye view of a fictional city distinguished by elegant skyscrapers, broad avenues, and abundant parkland.
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Superimposed on the view are several blank white boxes where, in Gelernter’s hypothetical mirror world, information about the streets and buildings would be displayed. The caption describes the drawing as “an abstract sketch, merely the general idea” of what a mirror-world interface might look like.If the sketch looks familiar today, it’s because thousands of views like it can be found using Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth, complete with 3-D buildings and white pop-up info boxes.
There are superficial differences: the Google and Microsoft cityscapes, for example, are photorealistic, at least in the limited areas where buildings are covered with “skins” based on photographs of the real structures (like the virtual Amsterdam in Second Life). But Gelernter anticipated so many features of today’s virtual-globe software that these programs could readily serve today as the windows on a mirror world as he imagined it. In fact, Google Earth users can access a growing library of public and personal data, from national borders to Starbucks locations, jogging routes, and vacation photos–in effect, any kind of information that’s been “geocoded.”Open geocoding standards allow anyone to contribute to the Google Earth mirror world. Just as Web browsers depend on HTML to figure out how and where to display text and images on a Web page, Google Earth depends on a standard called, the keyhole markup language, to tell it where geographic data should be placed on the underlying latitude-longitude grid. If you know how to assemble a KML file, you can make your own geographical data appear as a new “layer” on your computer’s copy of Google Earth; and if you publish that KML file on the Web, other people can download the layer and display it on their own computers.This layering capability transforms Google Earth from a mere digital globe into something more like a 3-D Wikipedia of the planet.
Best free flight simulator pc. The results can be unexpectedly arresting. In one recent example, the worked with Google to create a layer highlighting the locations of 1,600 villages ravaged by the Sudanese government’s ongoing campaign to wipe out non-Arab tribes in the Darfur region.
By zooming in on these locations, a user can see the remnants of the actual settlements destroyed by the Janjaweed, the government’s proxy militia. The closest views reveal that house after house has been reduced to a crumbling wreck–roofs burned away, contents apparently looted. Pop-up boxes contain testimony from survivors, statistics on the displaced populations, and dramatic, often grisly photographs taken in the field or at refugee camps.This evidence of genocide is attached to the same digital earth where most U.S. Residents can quickly zoom and pan to North America and look down upon their own houses or their children’s schools. With the barrier of distance dissolved, it’s hard not to feel a greater sense of connectedness to tragedies abroad.
Which is exactly what the Holocaust museum intends: “We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most,” museum director Sara Bloomfield said. (The Sudanese themselves cannot download Google Earth, owing to U.S. Restrictions on software exports.).
Just as anyone can create a new layer for Google Earth, anyone with basic 3-D modeling skills can add buildings, bridges, and other objects to it. Google Earth uses the open 3-D modeling format, which was originally created by Sony as a way to speed the development of video-game worlds for the Playstation Portable and the Playstation 3. Using a Google program called, amateur architects have built thousands of Collada models and uploaded them to the Google, a free library of signature buildings and other 3-D models. Larger organizations around the world now have terabytes of Collada-formatted virtual objects in storage and can easily transform them into data layers for Google Earth. That’s what the city government of Berlin did in March, when it published a KML layer containing a meticulous 3-D model of the city, prepared as part of a new digital infrastructure for city management and economic development. The model is so finely detailed that a deft user of the Google Earth navigation controls can steer the camera through the front door of the newly renovated Reichstag and into the chambers of the German parliament.But a true mirror world shouldn’t be static, as the Berlin model and the Darfur layer are; it should reflect all the hubbub of the real world, in real time. As it turns out, KML also supports direct, real-time exchanges over the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the basic communications protocol of the Web.
One hypnotic example is the 3-D flight tracker developed by, a company that offers online flight-planning tools for general-aviation pilots and enthusiasts. Download the KML layer for one of the eight major U.S. Airports that Fboweb covers so far, and tiny airplane icons representing all the commercial aircraft heading toward that airport at that moment will be displayed at the appropriate altitude in Google Earth. As time passes, each flight leaves a purple trail recording every ascent, turn, and descent, all the way down to the runway. It’s a plane-spotter’s dream.Microsoft, as one might expect, isn’t far behind Google in its effort to bridge map worlds and the real world.
Scientists at Microsoft Research are perfecting a system called that collects live data from any location and publishes it in (the latest name for Microsoft’s online 2-D maps) or Microsoft Virtual Earth. Autocad 2014 keygen xforce free download windows 10. Researchers at Harvard University and BBN Technologies in Cambridge, MA, won a grant from Microsoft this spring to create a SensorMap interface for “,” a network of 100 Wi‑Fi-connected weather and pollution sensors they’re installing in Cambridge.
Other scientists, however, are already using Google Earth to monitor live sensor networks. At the at the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers have connected a network of wireless climate sensors and webcams in the, a wilderness area in California’s San Jacinto Mountains, to a public KML layer in Google Earth.
Click on an icon in Google Earth representing one of the reserve’s nest boxes, and you get a readout of the temperature and humidity inside the nest, as well as a live webcam picture showing whether any birds are at home.“Google Earth itself is really neat,” comments Jamais Cascio, the Metaverse Roadmap coauthor. “But Google Earth coupled with millions of sensors around the world, offering you real-time visuals, real-time atmospheric data, and so on–that’s transformative.”Indeed, it’s important to remember that alongside the construction of the Metaverse, a complementary and equally ambitious infrastructure project is under way. It’s the wiring of the entire world, without the wires: tiny radio-connected sensor chips are being attached to everything worth monitoring, including bridges, ventilation systems, light fixtures, mousetraps, shipping pallets, battlefield equipment, even the human body. To be of any use, the vast amounts of data these sensors generate must be organized and displayed in forms that diagnosticians or decision makers can understand; “” is the term researchers from Accenture Technology Labs, the MIT Media Lab, and other organizations are using for this emerging specialty.
And what better place to mine reality than in virtual space, where getting underneath, around, and inside data-rich representations of real-world objects is effortless? In the field, technicians or soldiers may get 2-D slices of the most critical information through wireless handheld devices or heads-up displays; in operations centers, managers or military commanders will dive into full 3-D sensoriums to visualize their domains.
“Augmented reality and sensor nets will blend right into virtual worlds,” predicts Linden Lab’s Ondrejka. “That’s when the line between the real world and its virtual representations will start blurring.”I asked David Gelernter why we’d need the Metaverse or even mirror worlds, with all the added complications of navigating in three dimensions, when the time-tested format of the flat page has brought us so far on the Web. “That’s exactly like asking why we need Web browsers when we already have, or why we need Fortran when assembly language works perfectly well,” he replied.The current Web might be capable of presenting all the real-time spatial data expected to flow into the Metaverse, Gelernter elaborates, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
And it would keep us locked into a painfully mixed and inaccurate metaphor for our information environment–with “pages” that we “mark up” and collect into “sites” that we “go to” by means of a “locator” (the L in URL)–when a much more natural one is available. “The perception of the Web as geography is meaningless–it’s a random graph,” Gelernter says.
“But I know my physical surroundings. I have a general feel for the world. This is what humans are built for, and this is the way they will want to deal with their computers.”Judging by the growing market for location-aware technologies like GPS cell phones, the popularity of map-based storytelling and neogeography mashups like Platial, and the blistering pace of Google Earth downloads, Gelernter may be right. Google Earth is now so well known that it has been and is becoming a forum for. Second Life, meanwhile, is gaining roughly 25,000 members a day, sometimes stretching Linden Lab’s ability to keep its simulations running smoothly.But for a true Metaverse to emerge, programmers must begin to weave together the technologies of social virtual worlds and mirror worlds. That would be a simpler task if Google and Linden Labs would release the source code behind their respective platforms, or at least provide application programming interfaces (APIs) so that outside developers could tap into their deeper functions.
In late 2006, Google released an interface that allowed outside programmers to control some aspects of Google Earth’s behavior, but it wasn’t a full API, and there’s been no sign of one since. This January, Linden Lab released the source code for the Second Life viewer (the program that residents use on their PCs to connect to Second Life). Ondrejka says the code for the core Second Life simulation software will follow. First, he says, the company needs to get that software working better–and figure out how to make money in a world where it may no longer control the expansion of the Second Life ecosystem.The real progress toward a fusion of Second Life and Google Earth is going on outside their home companies.
Last year, Andrew “Roo” Reynolds, a “Metaverse evangelist” at IBM’s Hursley laboratory in England, hacked together an that turns Collada 3-D models into prim-based objects in Second Life. And while it may be impractical to make Second Life into a walkable Google Earth, a company in Birmingham, England, is bringing Google Earth into Second Life.
The result isn’t exactly a globe, however. It’s a virtual virtual-reality chamber where the Google Earth continents are displayed as if pasted to the inside of a giant sphere, with the user’s avatar at the center. Clickable “hot spots” bring up real-time earthquake data and news feeds from CNN, the BBC, and the Indian Times ; read the sign and click the button marked “TP”. No one knows yet how to bring Second Life-like avatars directly into Google Earth, but researchers at Intel have demonstrated one possible approach. In late 2006, they created a primitive video game, called, that challenges Google Earth users to search out and destroy Martian invaders using clues to the locations of their spaceships.
The core of the game is a KML layer with special scripts that communicate with both the usual Google Earth content servers and a separate game server that controls elements such as the clues, cockpit graphics, and explosions. Using the same technique, it might be possible to superimpose avatars on the Google Earth environment without having to change anything about the program itself.Avatars of a sort can already travel through Google Earth thanks to, a mashup using the free voice-over-IP program Skype. Developed by New York software consultant Murat Aktihanoglu, Unype helps geography hounds logged in to Skype synchronize their copies of Google Earth so that they’re viewing the same locations and layers. Unype can insert crude, nonanimated avatars, which the users can build themselves in the Collada format.“I don’t think it’s the ultimate realization of the Metaverse vision,” says Google’s Hanke.
“It’s interesting to see people trying to bring these threads together.”From these threads, indeed, an entire tapestry of 3-D services is faintly taking shape. The mature Metaverse won’t have a single killer app, say Gelernter and other observers, any more than the Web does.Certainly, it will enable new kinds of data analysis and remote collaboration, with potentially life-saving results. “As soon as you look at the NOAA weather map in Second Life, you say, ‘Okay, what if we did the same thing using flu pandemic data?’” says Ondrejka. “You could get together the CDC and the country’s 50 leading epidemiologists, and they could have their huge supercomputer-driven infection model running. They’d get insights they couldn’t get just by reading reports.” It’s not an outlandish scenario: epidemiology has already come to Google Earth, courtesy of systems-biology graduate student Andrew Hill and colleagues at the University of Colorado, who published a KML file in April with a grim animated time line showing how the most virulent strains of avian flu jumped from species to species and country to country between 1996 and 2006.Virtual tourism is another application whose audience seems certain to expand.
Already, the National Geographic and Discovery networks offer Google Earth layers pegging multimedia files to exotic locations such as the Gombe forest in Tanzania, where researchers at the Jane Goodall Institute continue to study colonies of chimpanzees. More is possible. “What I want to do one day is represent the Grand Canyon or a national park with such fidelity that you could essentially go there and plan your whole trip,” says Michael Wilson, CEO of, the company that operates the virtual world There. “Or what if you could model a Europe where the sea level is 10 feet higher than it is today, or walk around the Alaskan north and see the glaciers and the Bering Strait the way they were 10 years ago? Then perceptions around global warming might change.”Such possibilities are uplifting, to be sure, but the hardnosed truth is that we don’t need a Stephensonian Metaverse to make them happen. Remote collaboration, virtual tourism, shopping, education, training, and the like are already common on the Web, a vast resource that grows faster than we can figure out how to use it.
Digital globes are gaining in fidelity, as cities are filled out with 3-D models and old satellite imagery is gradually replaced by newer high-resolution shots. And today’s island virtual worlds will only get better, with more-realistic avatars and settings and stronger connections to outside reality. A fully articulated Metaverse, whether it’s more like Snow Crash or Second Life, would undeniably be overkill.
Hello,Before we proceed I would require some more information to assist you better.Does the issue only occur with Office 2013 applications or also with Windows applications?It would be best if you provide the Event Viewer logs which will display the application name which is causing the problem. To access event viewer on Windows 8 go to Control Panel, System and Security, Administrative Tools,and then double-click Event Viewer.Make sure your computer is updated till date and have all the available updates installed for Office 2013.You may disable any Add-ins/Plugins in Office 2013 applications and check. To do that, do the following:1. Click on File and then click on options.2. In the Options Window click on Add-ins.3. Select Com Add-ins in the Manage list in the Add-ins section and click Go.
Now uncheck the all the add-ins and click Ok.You may also restart the computer in Windows 8 Clean Boot and then check how it works there.Refer the link below to know on how to start the computer in clean boot:Note: Ensure to restart the computer to normal mode (Step 3 in the above link)after troubleshooting.Follow the steps and let us know if that helps. If the issue persists, reply with the results and we will be happy to help you.Thank you. Girish,Thanks for your help. At present this only happens with Office applications. (I used to have a separate issue where IE would crash about every 30 minutes, but it seemed to be unconnected to power events and seems to have been fixed with a recent update sinceI don't see it much anymore).My software is up to date.I'll try running with Office plug-ins disabled (the only plug-ins currently running are the ones in the default install, I haven't added nor removed anything).I'll attach the event logs separately (since they're too long to fit the character-count limit for this post and I don't see a way to attach a file).-Jon. Surprised there is no follow up.I had a similar issue in Win7 64bits with Office2013 32bits.
I found this article that might be useful:would be related to the HW acceleration for graphics. One should go to the OptionsAdvanced and check the radio 'Do not use HW acceleration'. Note that there was a remark that moving from an aero to a non aero profile and back will unlock the applications.That might be useful in order not to lose the data you were working on.Regards!
Actually; now that I think about it, from a user perspective I also really dislike the App Store.I used to love it, I would check weekly for new things, maybe there was some new shiny (often beautiful) program to do something really well. The experience was on the 'better than passable' side, nobodies favourite interface maybe, but certainly not terrible.But I actually avoid the App Store these days, both on MacOS and my iPhone. I never really noticed but I just slowly stopped installing new applications from there (unless sent there by a company website in the case of iOS); this was around the time that Apple Music was being foisted down my throat. I'm not sure if there's a correlation there.I always suspected there were dark patterns at play in the App Store though. Although every program is reviewed, probably only 2% or less of them become popular, and if you are popular, boy, are you popular. The design paradigm is self-fulfilling.
('most popular'/'highest grossing'). I also really dislike the App Store. I used to love it, I would check weekly for new thingsI used to do this too, and like you, I've now grown to really dislike it. My reason is different, though: the App Store app has plummeted in quality. It's now so hard to use, I don't bother using it.1.
The UI is all over the place. Some UI controls cause pages to swipe up from the bottom. Some cause pages to swipe in from the right. Some cause modals. Whenever I click something, I have no idea what it's going to do. Here are some examples:2.
It's full of bugs. I have witnessed the App Store lose track of whether an app is bought or not, downloaded or not, or installing or not. Another example:3.
It makes the rest of my system worse. Every week or so, I get a message like 'Fantastical cannot be updated because it is open'. I didn't set it to update. I had no idea it was even updating. I just get an obnoxious dialog interrupting my work.The App Store used to be like a shopping mall — I'd browse the shelves, see what was new, and maybe buy a small app I liked the look of once in a while. But now it's become so hard to browse, I don't bother paying.
Everyone loses out. I used the OSX App Store for the first time in years a few days ago. For the life of me I could not figure out how to download a simple free app. I had to ask my SO, who usually comes to me for tech questions, how to use it. Keep in mind I've been using computers for decades and have an above average understanding of UI design.1. Upon clicking the App Store icon and entering my apple ID and password I get a 500 error.
No amount of restarting can fix it. After a quick search, one of the top 5 search results led to a cryptic command I had to enter at the Terminal to fix it. This actually happened with a previous MBP and I just never used the app store (pretty much a factory install of OSX on both machines).2. Clicking the icon to download the app ('GET' I believe) started a loading spinner with no progress indicator. Given it was only a 38MB app, I waited around for a while. Then I took a shower and came back. Still the same loading spinner.
Decided to reboot the machine and try again.3. I searched for the same application clicked GET again and then it turned into a cloud icon. Clicking the cloud icon seemed to do absolutely nothing. At this point I asked my wife who told me I had already downloaded the app to my account and now I need to download it to my machine.
EDIT: I just remembered I was seriously confused at this point. I clicked the cloud icon several times and given there was zero feedback I opened both Launchpad and the Applications directory in case it magically already installed.4.
The above explanation made no sense to me. I'm familiar with the concept given I've used every version of Android and I understand I can download previously downloaded things from my account (that I installed on old devices). But that's not how the series of events unfolded. Anyway, I clicked the cloud icon a second (or third?) time and it turned into an install icon and all was good.
I searched for the same application clicked GET again and then it turned into a cloud icon. Clicking the cloud icon seemed to do absolutely nothing. At this point I asked my wife who told me I had already downloaded the app to my account and now I need to download it to my machine.
EDIT: I just remembered I was seriously confused at this point. I clicked the cloud icon several times and given there was zero feedback I opened both Launchpad and the Applications directory in case it magically already installed.I did this exact same thing last week after upgrading to Catalina and getting the 1-2 app store apps I needed. I kept getting the cloud, I have no idea what the cloud means but it wasn't the down facing arrow I usually saw. So I kept clicking it.
Turns out it HAD installed the app but never gave me an Open button. I stay far away from the app store if I can. How it should work is that you search for an app, press GET, and it appears on your machine.
I’m not sure what issue #1 and #2 are caused by (they’re certainly not common on a factory install with a normal iCloud account). I’m also not sure why the cloud icon appeared instead of downloading it straight to your machine. That’s also definitely a bug.For #3, here’s how I’d explain it to someone who hasn’t used it before (you may know this already): your Apple ID is tied to the “purchases” you make across the App Store, iTunes Store, Books, etc., so that you can access what you’ve bought on a different machine. If you buy a paid app, it gets added to your Purchases list so that you can download it on another Mac without buying it again. This ties into Family Sharing so that up to five other people living in your household can use it too.
Free apps also get added to the purchases for syncing purposes across all your devices. The cloud icon indicates that you’ve purchased an app and are eligible to download it for free.TL;DR: you got a strange series of bugs that probably haven’t been seen by anyone else all together.
I’ve also stopped “checking weekly for new things”, but that’s because I don’t need any new things! Do you?I don’t have Instagram but I imagine it’s a bit like the App Store. I’m waiting somewhere. I know, I’ll check for a shiny thing. Oh, no shiny thing. That was disappointing.To compare, do you go to the internet regularly and check for new things? I don’t think this is the App Store’s fault.
It’s not on Apple to constantly put new shiny useful software in the App Store — it’s on developers. And I’m not blaming developers. Making new shiny software is hard. There’s already a whole bunch of software.
If you have a problem, chances are it’s already been addressed.Constantly shiny + new a good App Store.( Not necessarily equal to. Did I just invent that?). You just described why Apple has dragged their feet as slowly as possible developing Safari. 'Add to Home Screen' is now completely hidden away and unlike on Android, progressive web app functionality is delayed as long as they possibly can.I imagine there would be so much innovation and interesting content if these companies didn't have such a tight grip on their walled gardens. Politically sensitive, erotic content or just innovative apps that operate outside of the Apple curators is just never going to be available for users of this expensive hardware. I believe it should at the very least be optional like sideloading is on Android. I have about 500 apps on my various iDevices.
I stopped buying apps years ago - when Apple removed the ability to do so on MacOS.Its just so cumbersome to manage apps on the iDevices themselves. So I just stopped. I've got enough apps for everything I need (music-making, mostly). Sure, if someone recommends something amazing, I'll check it out - but for the most part I have reached the saturation point, and I really abhor going to the App Store, for any reason whatsoever.I still have a much, much better user experience on my Ubuntu workstation, and now even on Windows with chocolatey. It feels so backwards and quaint to have to rely on Apple to review an app - much better to just have an open public repo and let the community deal with quality review. I'm yet to be bitten by a repo - I can't count the number of times I've had my life quality reduced to smithereens because I've had to pass multiple App Store reviews to get my apps out there, or found that an App I needed in order to do my work was no longer available because Apple changed something and broke it.Repositories are simply a far superior technology.
I completely stopped installing apps when I realized how screwed up the whole app market is.Nice apps I liked were bought and monetized in EXTREMELY UNETHICAL ways.For one example, I had an app called gas cubby, which let me locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could enter detailed information about each car such as year, make, model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remind you of upcoming maintenance.One day, the app was updated and all my local data was uploaded to the cloud.Another app, camscanner plus purchased by tencent basically did the same thing.Apple gives you no control over what the apps do. You can argue the finer points, but:- you cannot determine what apps are doing.are they intercepting URLs browsed in safari, mail or imessage?
(deep linking)- you cannot determine when they are active.are they waking up using some 'backdoor' method such as notifications- you can not prevent them from accessing the network.this is the big one. You can't find out who they are talking to or prevent it.Really it's a shame because one rule of economics is: with trust trade becomes unrestricted. I always suspected there were dark patterns at play in the App Store though.Here's one I found: you can't install a lot of applications unless you're on the latest-and-greatest OS version. This punishes people who are more conservative with upgrades, and don't want to jump to an OS before it's fully cooked. You'd think they could just offer to let you install the latest compatible version.I can't install XCode from the App Store because I'm stuck on High Sierra, because my Macbook as a highly disruptive freeze-on-wake bug that manifests on every version of Mojave I've tried.
I've never been able to figure it out, and Apple apparently only supports its laptops if they have no software installed on them. I'm not too familiar with the App Store, but a big issue with all of these stores is that they have limited screen estate for promoting apps from their catalog. So you get a ridiculously tiny subset of apps that is featured on the storefront itself and thus gets the attention and sales.If you have a product for sale through such a store front, the best way is to not play the game of getting to the front pages or at least to not rely on it. Instead, you get attempts to drive sales through product web pages that link to the stores. They kind of bury the lead here. They can't have their app on the appstore because:' While we still updated our applications in time, Apple did not review them for the AppStore, and instead rejected them first for a crash (sigh!), and later for requiring UI changes, including showing a Save As panel for each generated file.
Now this may not sound like much, this is a serious issue for a document scan application which easily generates hundreds of files in an hour, and thousands of files a day, with file names automatically generated, either thru counters, or advanced auto-id features, such as barcodes.' Even if Apple later took back the rejection I bet this was the last straw. In context though it is still Apple's issue: After releasing the Catalina Golden Master build to developers on October the 3rd, we immediately finished fixing any new crash and issue we could find over the weekend. In our opinion, leaving developer just four (4!) days over a weekend with a public release on October the 7th is not very professional. While we still updated our applications in time, Apple did not review them for the AppStore, and instead rejected them first for a crash (sigh!),. Okay, but you left out the rest of that sentence. and later for requiring UI changes, including showing a Save As panel for each generated file.So, Apple found a crash, and instead of completing the review (this assumes they could have, and benefit of the doubt here, they could have), they didn't.
They found and issue, flagged it, and sent it back. This means the developer had to do work, resubmit, and then have another issue found. Rather than work through everything, the reviewer found one thing, dinged the app, and moved on.As a user, that means Apple is delaying apps longer than need be. Sure, fixing the crash is good, but I can't imagine they couldn't have reviewed the other parts of the app and said, 'Fix the crash and this other two areas and you are good to go.'
That would mean a shorter turn around time, and as a user, I get a better product sooner. As a user, I am pretty happy about most of the negative points listed in this article. Yes, manual reviews are my firewall against too much scamming. I dont want app providers to notify me about their upcoming company party. It is already fishy enough that some app providers use their own notification system to push ads. And dont get me started on paying for updates!
What comes next, paying for firmware updates for devices I already own? I think the guys behind this article really have to rethink their attitude. Paying for updates has been the standard software model for ages, and with good reason. It still takes money to update and add new features. It still takes time. To some extent new users can pay for this, but then developers have to severely limit the time spent on updates in order to nod spend too much, or they risk not even making a profit on the first version.That is why most 'big' software packages these days are either subscription based, or pay-per-update.
We've all come to expect apps to get free updates, but it's not a sustainable business model. People get hung up on apple having a 30% entrance fee, but that didn't come out of nowhere.I work in the video games industry and access to steam or other first parties (Sony/Microsoft) is 30%, no negotiations.You could argue that first parties such as sony/microsoft have subtle costs involved such as printing of disks, but that's paid for before market by the publisher.The thing you pay for is: content distribution (in the case of digital downloads such as steam), 'signing' and access to market. The amount of value steam provides on top of payment processing and distribution is immense. Valve basically single handedly created Linux gaming.
Their client is so many years ahead of everything else with the forums, workshop, broadcast streaming, streaming to your tv, gamepad support and gamepad virtualisation as well as a mountain of developer side APIs for things like inviting friends to games.Apples 30% would seem a lot more fair if it was possible to side load and install alternative app storesIn comparison apples offering is little more than 'we have a huge captive audience on a proprietary system. Pay us or miss out on half of the market'. If we find Apple extracting rent from apps unacceptable, we look no further than a mirror for the cause. We the public don’t want to pay full freight for hardware.Microsoft used to boast that they made more money from Apple systems than Apple did. Google does that to Android device makers today.If platform makers don’t extract rent, or compete with the developers they court, they will look for other sources of revenue to stay profitable.
I would be aghast if Apple hardware came loaded with the kind of Junkware I recall from the years I bought Windows hardware. Growing up everyone had a Nokia phone. The Nokia 6600 specifically (which had a multitasking, internet enabled OS with IMO the best J2ME implementation and also allowed you to install arbitrary native programs either from a PC or download them from the Internet) was a very popular device.To anyone who used this phone, smartphones were already a thing long before iPhone was introduced. Of course iPhone changed things a lot, though IMO many were for the worse (for example i really liked using the tiny joystick on my 6600 for playing games).
You're moving the goalposts massively. No one is claiming that the first gen iPhone outsold anything or anyone. More importantly, that data is for 2006, the N95, of which you claim everyone and their dog knew about, didn't become available until march 2007. Your claim that the N95 was massively popular is also wide of the mark. Nokia had around 30 SKU's available to buy at the time, with the N95 being one of the very top end devices.
All your link shows is that Nokia had the lions share of revenue and market share. No one with half a brain would argue that.TL;DR: Look at how Nokia's revenue collaspsed post September 2007. Look at how Android and Nokia's decision to go all in on Windows Mobile accelerated it. Then tell me that the iOS fanbase is trying to rewrite history. When iPhone arrived in Europe it was disappointment for people who used smartphones. It had few things going for it (better web browser than default IE Mobile on PDAs, better screen than many), and long list of 'works worse'.Starting with the basic things that everyone who invested in smartphones at the time wanted, i.e.
Email, going through hilariously high cost (the reason behind it known only to insiders - Apple was in full rent-seeking mode, and required a portion of your phone bill as payment for being able to use iPhone. Not joking, that's why there were special iPhone-only tarriffs), it lacked physical keyboard, copy&paste, and a bunch of other things. IPhone 2G was also slower at running iOS 1.0 'applications' than higher end Nokia symbian phones (that used the same webkit core in browser).Symbian devices were well known, and were more commonly considered 'smartphones', as 'palmphones' generally only got interest from people who really needed the power (a bit of chicken&egg issue). That's the one time cost for purchase outside of contract.
Not for iPhone, at least not for normal people.The reality in 2008 is that Apple forbid selling iPhone without contract, with contract requiring special extra Apple tax (we already had 'unlimited data' for years by then). So you were paying whatever the telco asked you for the phone, then paid extra to Apple as long as you used the 'iPhone tariff' (and you couldn't get it otherwise other than ebay).Since at least in Poland majority bought the phone as part of the contract, the prices were wildly different.
I can't find N95, but business oriented E51 cost me under $70. Without significant impact on monthly fees on the contract. And without paying Apple tax on my phone bill.BTW, regarding visual voicemail. Little known thing about iOS 1-2 is that the network stack was broken and it wasn't capable of redirecting to voicemail like every other phone. Required special buggy software to get any voicemail for people running iPhones, and at least at Era GSM (present day T-Mobile Poland) it took 3 months from providing iPhone on sales and any voicemail working? From the PoV of someone buying a phone, in that specific time and location, cost of phone without contract was rarely ever known. And the iPhone wasn't sold outside of network with attached plan anyway.From the PoV of someone working at the network and having the luck to talk with some pretty high up there people.
The exclusivity was only for order in which networks got the phone. As in, present-day T-Mobile Poland made a bid to be the first network to have it - but it didn't have any kind of long exclusivity and was soon followed by Orange and Plus (the other two 'main' networks).
All networks had special iPhone 'plans' and the phone wasn't available outside of them, and the only technical difference was that said plans ultimately got the very buggy Visual Voicemail server attached and probably triggered workarounds for call handling bugs.The Apple tax on the phone bill itself, and making it unavailable outside of contract, were all on Apple. (I think for some time using one outside of approved contract even required jailbreaking, but I can't be sure). This is an infuriating topic to read about because everybody seems to be varying levels of uninformed.I worked at Nokia's R&D facility in Ruoholahti briefly in 2011, so I got inducted into the inner sanctum of history regarding the phones.Symbian was designed for very anemic hardware, there were very tight constraints it's a marvel that the thing ran on what it did. I could make a phone call and browse the interest on my gen1 iPhone. I used ATT as my network. Verizon had the limitation you described, but not all carriers.Copy and paste didn’t work, but it didn’t work on any phone at the time. A few attempted it (eg, win mobile, blackberry) but it really sucked.The camera was quite good and the ability to finally save and share photos and video was revolutionary at the time.
I always thought it was funny how much it sucked at the time to try to store and send photos from my BlackJack or Blackberry. They were very slow. The important thing is they didn't feel sluggish, at all.It took Android phones many many years to even approach feeling as responsive and smooth and indicative of whether input has actually registered as the original iPhone, just scrolling through stuff and navigating around the OS.Tech at the time didn't even try on that front.Featureless yes, but it could do enough to almost right away replace my iPod, Palm, and Nokia.
One device instead of three was just too good to pass up. And no apps apart from the built-ins. No copy and paste. Just like a feature phone. Apart from the browser and music courtesy ipod, other smart phones had the remaining features and far more robust. They may not have had fancy UI, but they were more powerful at the time.Even the camera megapixel craze was being led by nokia. You're conflating the current dominance of the iphone for the past.
At the time, the best thing about it was the finger only touch screen operation. To the best of my memory, others still needed to fall back to a stylus. Finger usage was a whackamole operation with Nseries and blackerry I used then. The first iPhone lacked many features, but it was the best phone at the time for usability. It had massive hype in the press that was probably overblown. But its features were head and shoulders above others at the time.The simple act of making a call was so much easier and efficient, even though it lacked cut and paste.Comparing it to feature phones is really curious because they were completely different markets.
I don’t think it’s very useful in describing the iPhone’s success to point out individuals features that were also available in various existing phones. Your claim that steam/sony/microsoft all charge 30% no negotiations is dated if not completely inaccurate. It might have been that way the last time you were involved in negotiations (if ever) but it's questionable whether that's still true - we know for a fact Valve offers a lower cut to big studios now. There's basically no guarantee that it's not possible to negotiate anymore, and I would be shocked if the Playstation or XBox business wings were unwilling to negotiate a cut down in order to land a big, million-selling title.Is your claim that the iOS store cut is 30% because Steam was 30%?
Kind of an odd argument given that the iOS store was heavily focused on 'apps' initially, and still sort of is, even if games ended up being a big moneymaker.The 30% is now coming out of a different sort of product than it did at store launch, too. Lots and lots of F2P stuff with in-app purchases, subscriptions, etc. Even if 30% was justified for single-purchase apps, does it make sense to continue giving them an ongoing 30% of all revenue when IAPs and subscriptions are literally not using any Apple infrastructure if they're things like 'unlocking premium features in the app you already have' or 'getting premium support'? Well, I can assure you that seeing a game requires uPlay means I'm probably not going to buy it, and I'm not alone in that.
Of course, I haven't even wanted to play an Ubisoft game since. I honestly can't remember, so I guess I'm not the target audience anyway. Unless the problem is that you have to have a second launcher?That's a big part of it. I have enough crapware that insists on constantly running on my PC (a lot of it direct from MS these days, sigh).PS: Oh yeah, and it wants me to sign up for an account too. I don't have enough of accounts spread all over the goddamned place already. Valve arbitrarily pulling down all our gamesI don't have enough information to know what 'arbitrarily' means here.
From what I can tell, Valve is pretty damned reluctant to remove things from the store, which makes me really curious why they would 'arbitrarily' remove such popular AAA titles.Regardless, I can tell you that things like uPlay are hugely annoying and whatever excuses your company has for why it exists don't really change that.Frankly I don't even like having to use the Steam launcher, but seeing as they pretty much single handedly built the market they are now the defacto standard in I've reluctantly accepted it. Ubisoft's wares simply do not appeal to me enough to overcome my distaste in the same way. the largest complaint is that we have our own launcher.That sits above Steam's launcher, so I launch the game via Steam, then Uplays pop up (slowly, then updates), I dig up my contact details from an old post-it, then the game launch! I think it makes sense for Ubisoft to have their launcher, but in the case of games sold through Steam, its mandatory use detract from the game. And on Steam, games that have been pulled from the store are still in the game library of buyers, so it's not an argument. I don't have any recent criticism of Uplay, I'm pretty sure I haven't launched an Ubisoft game with Uplay since maybe 2017 (more or less) (played all the 3d PoP though).I commend you for offering to receive feedback.I also understand that Uplay is a good business idea.The issue was being forced to use it in addition to Steam and having to create an account, since apparently at the time (2015?) the account linking didn't exist.
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to have to launch two launcher just to play a game (perhaps it has changed since last time though). I won’t lose sleep over f2p apps that profit by getting whales to spend money on in app consumables.
I hope Apple Arcade cuts even more into those types of apps.As far as subscriptions, the answer is simple - don’t allow subscriptions through the App Store. Netflix, Spotify, Linux Academy, AT&T Now, Sling, etc force you to pay for subscriptions outside of the App Store. You can subscribe to Hulu in the App Store but not Hulu Live.As far as the 30%, all of the rumors are that none of the big players like Netflix (before they stopped allowing in app subscriptions), Hulu, or HBO ever paid more than 15%. 30% is high but it’s not just payment processing, it’s payment fraud insulation, download bandwidth, and marketplace amplification (people finding your app without knowing they’re looking for your app).Apple also drops subscription costs from the second year on to 15% which is coming back to reality. I personally find the subscription model way more sustainable & less user hostile than the paid versioning upgrade model, the grand majority of the industry is also in agreement there. So there’s a lot of bad smells from this developer that they just want to run a shoddy business and not that there’s a big problem with Apple.
That's basically like saying you prefer to live under a totalitarian regime than a democracy because: security. Humans gladly trade their freedom for security as your comment implies, you are comfortable with that.The web is, or at least was in part, a democracy.
Apple is clearly a dictatorship.Trust doesn't really come into it. You trust your user data to 3rd parties every single day using apps that very publicly compromise you like FB, Google etc. Native instruments b4 ii serial mac. So to say that you trust your relationship with Apple doesn't mean squat.
Sure Apple is good at preventing people from breaking into your iPhones, but it's not good at stopping Facebook from selling your data to 3rd parties which you talk about. Your security is already compromised.In the days even before the web we had many programs from independent 3rd parties that have now turned into household names today.I refuse to believe that Apple's incredibly convoluted App store is the way forward. I ultimately believe Apple will fail here and have to make major changes, indeed I hope it does. That's a simplistic view. Apple can impose their political views upon you that you didn't agree with when you bought the device (see the current HK Map debacle). Their leadership could change. They can and will ban Apps that are not a threat at all.You stance also implies that there's no way Apple could allow sideloading in a safe way (real sideloading not their 7 day and/or paid cert crap).
I already need to contact Apples servers to unlock my phone, I would be fine if I had to unlock my device with Apple to allow sideloading. And since this is becoming more of a free market and free speech issue, I hope lawmakers will fix this problem.