Reading to your children is a great shared experience, but hard to do if you’re away from home. Samsung has an alternative of sorts: VR bedtime stories.
In a video released today, Samsung showed off the basic idea. A parent and a child, in separate places, can experience a story together, with the parent reading on-screen text describing what’s happening, as Endgadget pointed out.
The video promoting the story features an actual mother and daughter, sharing an experience while in fact far apart from each other. One moment, of the two reaching for each other’s hands and finding nothing, is designed to tug at the heart strings, and show how tech can bring people together. If that’s too much subtext for you, don’t worry: at one point the child literally says she felt like mom was by her side.
It’s cute, and a good example of the way that VR can make shared experiences feel tangible in a way that voice or video calls cannot. But there are a few potential downsides here.
First of all, screens before bedtime is not a great idea for your sleep cycle, and screens a few inches from your face probably aren’t an improvement. Pity whoever is taking care of the kid after mom ends the VR call, because “I can’t sleep” is going to come up. Multiple times.
Second, anyone who grew up with siblings can only imagine the fights that will break out before bed. Who gets to wear the headset, and be with mom? That’s probably why this video features a single-child household.
Finally, the shared experience requires quite a bit of kit. The Gear retails for $100, and requires a recent Samsung phone in order to function. You’ll need at least two of these setups to share an experience, though the video depicts a cardboard penguin headset that’s not currently available. Presumably this will be cheaper than the Gear itself.
Bedtime Stories isn’t available yet, but you can experience a YouTube version right now using any compatible headset, or using your browser with click-and-drag.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.