Hey there!
Last week we went to the mall for the first time since March. And that was the day when I used Shazam the most. In a time where our background music primarily comprises of our Discover weeklies and Daily mixes, discovering new music the good ol' way felt like a breath of fresh air.
Metaverse and other things
Back in 2014-15, Getting an Oculus Rift or even a good enough PC that powered Oculus was a distant dream. When Google announced Cardboard, I was fascinated by how accessible VR suddenly became. At that time, getting the cardboard viewer was next to impossible as it was only shared with attendees of the 2014 Google I/O event, and also it wouldn't be on sale for quite some time.
With cardboard, anyone can have a VR experience with just their phone. I waited until they released the blueprints of the viewer. As soon as they did, I downloaded them, sourced slightly thicker cardboard than the suggested one, and made rounds of calls to people to get the lenses. And boy was it fascinating. Suddenly, a two-dimensional piece of glass became a window into parallel realities one could be a part of.
I got the Oculus Go when it was released because it was one of the first standalone VR devices, and a comparatively low price point made the purchase pretty enticing. I have spent a lot of hours on it, consuming VR experiences. I still don't see myself comfortable putting it on all the time and working for hours straight, neither am I much of a gamer.
I also tried my hand building AR filters on Snap's AR studio and Spark AR as they became much more accessible to people earlier and also, they are a stepping stone towards building experiences of the Metaverse.
Why I'm sharing all of this is because to me it seems like a logical progression of where we're at to where we'll be. Tech has played a huge role in enabling us to work from anywhere, talk to our colleagues, family, and friends from miles away, while we, in some parts of the world yet continue to stay isolated. Apart from that, we already interact daily with other metaverse-y things like Snapchat and Instagram filters, as they put us in front and center of an alternate reality, and honestly, I think it's an exciting place to be in.
What are your thoughts about Metaverse as a concept? (Keeping aside all the hatred towards Zuckerburg and Facebook of course)
Let me know!
Good Reads
What is the Metaverse? A (kind of) Simple explainer.
Set up your home office, (ergonomically) the right way.
The taste map — How a consumer's taste shapes brand strategy
64 Reasons to celebrate Paul McCartney — that Beatles guy.
Interesting apps and links
Design for mobile, on mobile. Play brings native UI patterns for iOS at your fingertips, enabling you to design your app on the fly while you're waiting in a queue or lying on the bed. (S/O to Layout.fm podcast for this!)
Bring the iPhone-like experience of connecting and managing Airpods to your mac.
A small, interactive scientific investigation into how we value and compare ourselves to each other.
This small tool allows you to select a city and download its road map as a vector or a raster file. You can add colors of your choice too!
That’ll be all for this one. Hope you enjoyed reading this. Share it with someone who you think will like Hyperlink by clicking on the button below👇 . Stay safe and see you'll in the next issue!
Also, you can follow me on Instagram for Musings, Twitter for Ramblings, and Command Space for work.