I've been interested in Disney MagicBands since some of the first descriptions of them came out last year, but it's interesting to see how they're actually being used in parks now that they've launched. Essentially, they're like tracking cookies for live attendees, allowing the park to customize the visitor's experience and increase revenue generation from them. As ever, Pinky and the Brain saw it coming.
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Digital Weekly: The Big Needs of Small Groups
Google has designed a contact lens that senses glucose levels in tears, which it's working on bringing to market. This certainly isn't the biggest revelation in digital this week, but it's the sort of device that I get really excited about. Mass market wearables deservedly get most of the press, but in the long run it's the ecosystem of niche apps and devices that fundamentally change lives and businesses.
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Digital Weekly: Don't Break My Heart, Oculus
After the glowing reviews of Oculus Rift's Crystal Cove prototype at CES, the company has announced that it will partner with Valve's VR project. This includes the new beta version of the Steam client and immediate implementation on some of the Steam catalog. Essentially, evidence continues to mount that Rift will be a real consumer product in the near future. I suspect that those of us who still remember the last twenty years of VR vapor, from the Lawnmower Man days up to VRML, still expect it all to fall apart. Please don't break our hearts, Oculus.
Other Good Stuff This Week:
- Even in prison, good design will out, according to The New Yorker's wonderful article about Sony's humble SRF-39FP personal radio for the incarcerated.
- Booking.com's Booking Epic ad is delightfully over the top without trying too hard. Oh, and it features the voice of Bender.
- There's something to learn about fear and storytelling from the replication patterns of creepypasta in this thoughtful Aeon essay.
- Spike Jonze's new film Her prefigures user interfaces that are embedded deeper into the fabric of real life, the opposite of Minority Report's omnipresent glass.
- There's a basic insight that keeps resurfacing in recent travel app innovations – that connectivity is unreliable abroad, just when the traveler needs it most. Though I haven't seen the perfect solution to the problem yet, crowdsource travel map company Jauntful is an interesting crack at it.
- Catlateral Damage doesn't have much in the way of gameplay yet, but surely the id-driven, hell-raising housecat simulator is a concept whose time has come.