My son got a new phone a few weeks ago after his old one found its way into the washing machine. This time around, he decided to try a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge after using an iPhone 5 for the past four years. Included with the phone was the Samsung Gear VR Oculus headset.
You may have seen the commercials that ran over the holidays advertising the Gear VR. For those not familiar (which was me up until we bought the phone right before Christmas), the Gear VR is a virtual reality headset that works with your Samsung phone. I am not all that sure what you can do with the device yet but I started playing around with it the other day.
As a side note, from a personal finance perspective, I feel like I deserve a pass on this one as we didn’t pay for the device. It was included in the cell phone package as an incentive to upgrade your phone. And as much as I hate spending money, in that my son was using a four year-old iPhone before it was destroyed, I was as comfortable as I can be buying a new one.
Will This Change How We Watch Television?
After using the device for a few hours, I have to say, it’s actually pretty cool and better than I expected.
I will preface this by saying that the Gear VR is not a device you need. Clearly, it’s a luxury expense item. There is nothing that it does that you cannot do with your phone. And while I wouldn’t recommend running out and spending money to buy the device, if it happens to be included as an add-on, it does have entertainment value.
I used the device to watch Netflix. When you insert your phone and open the app, you are immediately transported into someone else’s house. You’re sitting on a couch watching a giant-screen television playing Netflix. You can look around the room, outside, upstairs, all around you. And it really does feel like you’re somewhere else. By the way, I wouldn’t recommend walking around while wearing the headset as it completely blocks out all ambient light and you’re likely to trip and fall over something.
For something so simple (a cellphone slipped into a viewing device), the technology is pretty amazing and it’s just the tip of what’s to come.
Is Technology Advancement Always Good?
Why I bring this up is not to convince you to go spend more money on a gadget that you don’t really need. Instead, I bring this up because this is where the world is headed and it brings up certain philosophical questions.
While experiencing the world through a device isn’t the same thing as experiencing the world in real life, it doesn’t need to be the same. It’s a different experience. A device such as this allows you to experience something completely different than sitting in your own house.
It is truly amazing to see how much technology has advanced over the past fifty years and to think about what is to come over the next fifty years. But this advancement in technology also creates new problems for society.
I remember listening to the head of my children’s school discussing the impact that technology is having on the students. The advancements in technology coupled with better and better content is making it more and more difficult for students (and adults) to pull themselves away. If you have children, you know exactly what I’m talking about as all of us deal with how to limit screen time.
Technology Is Changing Everything
The idea of binge-watching an entire season wasn’t even on people’s radar ten or twenty years ago. And now it’s completely normal and mostly preferred by many viewers.
And one of the most troubling technology trends is how it has a tendency to separate and isolate people from each other.
People now spend more time interacting online than they do in real life. Phones, email, messaging, and video are all great forms of communication but they cannot completely replace face-to-face interaction. But that seems to be where we’re headed.
Readers, how much real-life, face-to-face interaction do you still have? Are you worried that technology is pushing these interactions out and replacing them with virtual interaction?
I truly believe that mankind isn’t really moving forward with most technology. We’re just making incremental improvements to technology we already have and much of it really doesn’t add a lot of value to us as a species. When you consider the huge leaps and bounds made in inventing new things from the beginning of the 20th century up to about the 1980’s, we really haven’t progressed much further since then. So ask yourself, would the human effort spent developing VR goggles be better spend inventing something completely new that will benefit mankind for decades to come? Or is it all about making small improvements to existing technology so that these items become cheaper and more accessible to the masses? I really don’t think that electric cars, VR goggles and new, improved selfie sticks are the true measure of man’s technological progress as a species. What do you thing FS?
I agree on one hand. I don’t think you can judge technological progress by looking at the products that exist.
In fact, I think it’s difficult to judge technological progress in the current period. Because the changes are incremental, it’s easier to see the impact of the changes when looking back over a long period.
We visited Cape Caniveral a while back. Sitting in the control room and looking back at the technology we used back in the 60’s, I did gain anew respect for how far we’ve come.
But at the same time, I wonder what have we done with the advancement?
For the past twenty years or so, we seem to more bogged down in a period of self-fulfillment rather than scientific exploration.
I hope that changes with my children’s generation.
Recently, we try to have intentionally more real life interactions. Doing things together is what build friendships…
Agree. It’s funny how the technology that seeks to improve social interactions does just the opposite.