Hoverboards

Do you wish that you had the hoverboards from Back to the Future? Well too bad cause we don't have that yet, but we do have a segway without handles. These "hover boards" have been popularized by Vine stars and Youtubers through out the world and now kids everywhere are begging their parents to buy them the new hip form of travel. The premise is simple where ever you lean is where the hover board will go. What's not to love right?

Except for the fact that these things could cost over 1000$, yep you read right 1000$. The saying goes that "money doesn't grow on tress" and I can verify that claim since I have no money and if I did I wouldn't be in an able position to spend that sort of money on these kinds of luxuries.

Don't forget about the fires as well. Yup fires, and no it's no some feature to keep your feet warm it's an actual malfunction of the device witch leads to fires being created under your feet. These fires are usually caused by faulty ignition switches and usually from low end "hover boards" as well. It's hard to tell witch ones are low end since these companies always buy them cheap and jack up the prices three fold. So the excuse of just buying the more expensive board is out of the picture.

So in conclusion I think that these boards a re a novelty act that will wear off pretty quickly so it wouldn't be wise to invest in one. But if you still really really want one, your best bet would be to buy from the manufacturer directly, so being the good person I am, I have put a video below that tells you a bit about the "hover board" and shows you how to get it cheap.

                                                                                                                                     -Phil

New TV Tech

TV's have been around for a while and a lot of us depend on it for daily entertainment and it's a household staple, so it would be no surprise that companies are still innovating to this day and this years CES 2016 is no exception. Introducing modular TV's as a concept product to the attendees (there seems to be a lot of concepts but never any actual products at CES).

Modulars TV mean that you take it apart and put it together in different ways and it'll still work perfectly fine which is pretty cool. Right now we don't know what resolution it is, what panel it's using or anything, it's really under wraps.Modular TV's would allow us to change our aspect ratio in a snap from a 16:9 basic ratio to a cinematic 21:9 without needing to buy another TV which sounds cool but at the current moment buying two seperate TV's would still be cheaper than buying one modular one.

Another technology that has been out for a while but it still relatively new are curved TV's, curved TV's are well, curved displays meant to take up the peripheral vision of the viewer, I think it's silly. I mean what if little Jimmy wants to watch with you? Because to get the optimal viewing experience with curved TV's you need to be at a certain angel and at a certain distance away from the TV and adding more viewers would just be adding problems. I know what you're thinking "But Phil! Some curved TV's have the ability to alternate between curved and non curved" and you're right, but if you're someone who usually has more than one person viewing the TV than you'll be wasting your money since I'm sure curved displays would be adding a premium to the price of your TV.

In conclusion, modular good, curved bad.

Mirrorless Cars

Driverless cars aren't the only car technology coming around, this CES BMW came out with a mirrorless car, BMW modded their i8 model to replace their side view mirrors with cameras instead and they added a camera on the back trunk and to view the cameras you just take a gander at the rear view mirror to view all three cameras, right now it's just a prototype and unlikely to come out soon since BMW also needs to consult law regulators since it's illegal to to have mirrorless cars. Long gone are the days where you would need to turn around to back out of a parking space you can now do it all from the comfort of your own seat.

I think that this a really cool idea and really does push the boundaries of car technology, unlike the driverless cars that I'm kinda iffy about, I fully support mirrorless cars and their full implementation into the general public. While this prototype still needs some tweaking, in LinusTechTips's video you can clearly see some lag spikes once in a while and you might think that once in a while isn't bad but when you're at the wheel a lag spike could mean the difference between life and death.

This is new technology and new technology needs to be developed well enough where the chances of failure are super duper slim and when there are barely any bugs, we haven't reached that point yet and when it becomes available for the average consumer I'll be the first to jump on the bandwagon and adopt that new technology and I think I wont be the only one either since it's really exiting tech that I think everyone will enjoy.

                                                                                                                                  -Phil

If you want more info check out this video from LinusTechTips where he goes more in depth with this tech as he reports from this years CES 2016

Virtual Reality

For years people have dreamed of going to Mount Everest or the Sahara Desert but sadly due to budget restrictions or the chance of dying they weren't able to go there, but now with the great technological advances, you can! The first real successful virtual reality  was the Oculus Rift, the company was founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, to help their invention they launched a Kickstarter on the 1st of August 2012 and in less than 24 hours they surpassed their goal.

Since then more players have come to compete in the virtual reality world such as Sony with the "Playstation VR" and HTC in collaboration with Valve to make the HTC "Vibe". Recently Oculus Rift came out with a statement saying that their product will cost 599.99 USD, now I don't know about you but I think that that's a lot of money, but it's to be expected since it's a relatively new technology.

People are exited to try out the Oculus Rift, but me personally I think I'll hang back and see how it goes before buying in the hype, because as it stands right now I believe that Virtual Reality is just a gimmick. I mean look at the Nintendo Wii when it first came out with it's revolutionary motion controls, people said it would permanently change the gaming world and look at it now it's the butt of the joke in many cases and I feel the same thing with Virtual Reality, it's way to complicated and cumbersome for it's own good. Strapping a "brick" to your face won't be comfortable and what if you have friends over for some classic couch co-op? Those are just some off my concerns, but what are your thoughts? Leave your comments down below.

                                                                                                                         -Phil

Edit: Here's a neat  video about the five challenges VR will face that is very interesting.

                       

Driverless cars

Since 1886 cars have revolutionized the world, life would never be the same, and let's be honest in this day and age none of us could live without a car and I bet it's safe to say that's it's a need rather than a want. At this years CES (consumer electronics show) 2016 car technology was the eye catcher on the floor with automated cars leading the pack. This isn't something new, Google has been working on driver less cars for a while but now it's really blowing up since we could all be depending on them in the near future (maybe even in a decade). Google claims that 94% off car accidents are caused by human error and that by introducing driver less cars that amount can be reduced dramatically.

I think it's a great technology that can really drive the world forward in new directions, but one fact that worries me is that car manufacturers are planning to not add an emergency manual override system to the cars. Now I know what you might be saying "But Phil! Technology in the future will be so good that it'll have barely any chance of malfunctioning". To that I say that yes, technology will be better in the future but there will always be a chance to have malfunction no matter what, and would you feel safer knowing that if one day your automatic car malfunctions you can take the wheel and steer it to safety. But then that leads to another point about automatic cars, it's that if we all become accustomed to them would we become worse drivers? I mean the saying goes "practice makes perfect" and if we don't practice we'll lose our ability to drive well and while driver less cars are something that is coming in the near future for first world countries, it'll take longer for the whole world to adopt this technology and let alone make it affordable for the average household. So people traveling from country to country that are used to automatic cars will feel confused when faced with the task of driving.

To sum up, I think driverless cars are cool and deserve to be utilized but I don't think they should fully faze out classic manual cars since you'll never know when you'll need to take the wheel yourself. Don't forget to leave your opinions in the comments section down below, cheers!

                                                                                                                                       -Phil


P.S. If you want to learn more about how driverless cars work than check out this cool video by Protin Pictures