1) Go to Coinbase

Coinbase is the easiest & most popular place to buy Bitcoin. You can start with as little as $10, or if you use my referral link and deposit $100 or more you’ll get a $10 bonus from Coinbase (and I will as well).

2) Click sign in at the top right corner

3) Enter your name & email address and create your password

4) Confirm your email address and phone number

Go to your email account, find the email from Coinbase, and click the Verify Email Address button.

Then, check your text messages and enter the verification code sent to your phone.

5) Add your payment information using a debit or credit card

Coinbase supports deposits by bank account, wire transfer, and credit/debit card. Credit & debit cards are by far the easiest, the funds are available immediately, and the fees are reasonable (3.99%) especially for smaller dollar amounts. Wire transfers have a $10 fee, and bank accounts take 3 to 5 business days to process. I highly recommend making your first deposit with a credit or debit card.

You can deposit any amount, but if you add $100 or more using my referral link you get a $10 referral bonus (and I do as well).

6) Confirm the sample charge placed on your card

Check your card statement and confirm the amount of the two sample transactions placed on your card from Coinbase.

7) Buy your first Bitcoin

Now the hard work is done and you’re ready to buy your first Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency (Coinbase also supports Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin). Select the currency you want to buy and how much you want to purchase.

And that’s all there is to it. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

The amount you buy will be stored in your digital wallet on Coinbase, and you can then track the value of your investment on the Coinbase web site or the Coinbase app on your phone. You can also trade one cryptocurrency for another (for example, trading half of your Bitcoin purchased for an equivalent amount of Ethereum) or make additional coin purchases using your credit or debit card.

Related
Why the Bitcoin Bubble Will Burst in 2018

It’s Still Early

There are a lot of parallels between cryptocurrencies today and the dot com boom of the 1990s. And the cryptocurrency market today is much smaller than dot coms at their 1999 peak. The entire crypto market just crossed over $500 billion in valuation, and the dot coms had a value of almost $3 trillion before losing about 75% of that in the crash of 2000. And that’s before inflation. Factoring inflation, that $3 trillion turns into almost $4.5 trillion in today’s dollars, placing the crypto market at just over 10% the size of the dot com bubble at it’s peak. A big crypto correction is coming, but it won’t be in 2018.

Bitcoin is the Gateway Drug of Cryptos

Bitcoin’s valuation is 60% of the total valuation of all cryptocurrencies. Dominant market leaders don’t disappear overnight, and Bitcoin has become synonymous with cryptocurrencies like AOL was synonymous with the Internet in the mid 90s. More often than not the first big winner in a market isn’t the one who comes out on top (iPod wasn’t the first big digital music player, Facebook wasn’t the first big social network, and Tesla wasn’t the first big electric car), and 3 or 5 years from now Bitcoin may not still be on top. But they’ll still be there a year from now.

Bitcoin is the Reserve Currency of Cryptos

The US Dollar is accepted everywhere around the world, and it makes up 64% of all known central bank reserves in the world. That gives the USD a huge advantage as it’s all but guaranteed to be always in demand as a common currency for international transactions. This sustained high demand means the Dollar will always maintain its value as long as it’s still a reserve currency. And the same is true of Bitcoin, which has become the reserve currency of cryptos. It’s the most trusted, most widely accepted, and most recognized – which means it will continue to increase in value.

Internationalization is Just Beginning

As much as the USD gets advantage by being the world’s reserve currency, it’s still massively inefficient to exchange currency around the world. It’s true for individuals sending money internationally, as companies like Western Union extract fees as high as 10% for international transfers. It’s true for institutions transacting internationally, as each transfer takes valuable time & money, and many international transactions go through multiple banks (each of which extracts a fee) to reach its final destination. Consumer online services are now selling directly to customers worldwide, with firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Disney, and Fox serving customers in dozens or hundreds of countries with dozens or hundreds of currencies. Each of these would love to use a common currency for customers around the world. Each of these international use cases will increase the use of cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin at the leading edge.

Institutional Investors are Coming

All of Bitcoin’s gains so far have come from individual investments, with the first institutional  instruments coming online this week with CBOE Futures. Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) are quickly following, including one from everyone’s favorite Bitcoin billionaires the Winklevii. And just like the advent of 401(k)s in the 1980s spurred a stock run-up as the number of investors soared, the same will happen as the amount of capital available to invest in cryptocurrencies expands. This big run-up will inevitably end in a correction as the 401k boom did in 1987, but again it will likely be a few years before that happens. 2018 is nothing but up for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has no Burn Rate

My favorite comparison for cryptocurrencies is the dot com boom of the 1990s. New technology, huge potential, nobody quite knows how to use it, and huge skepticism from the “I’ll never enter my credit card number online” crowd. But the biggest difference between Bitcoin and Pets.com is Bitcoin has no burn rate. The burn rate is the rate at which a company spends money in excess of its revenue. Say Pets.com has expenses of $10mm/month and revenue of $1mm/month, so it’s burn rate is $9mm/month. The dot com boom went bust because startups had too many expenses (employees, rent, marketing, foosball tables) and too little revenue (actual paying customers). If a company has a $9mm/month burn rate and $45mm in venture capital invested, they only have 5 months or runway before they run out of money and need more investment or they go out of business. Bitcoin is a distributed currency with no employees and no expenses, so there’s no external financial shortfall that can cause it to go out of business.

Here Comes Lightning

Two of Bitcoin’s biggest problems are the slow speed of confirming transactions and the high energy consumption of the computational power needed to run the network. Lightning is a new layer that promises to run on top of Bitcoin that will address these two issues by leaving Bitcoin as the store of value but using Lightning as the means of exchange for the majority of (mostly smaller) transactions. This essentially keeps Bitcoin as the long-term savings account (which is what it’s best at) and makes Lightning the daily checking/debit card account (which is what it’s best at).

These are the primary reasons why I believe Bitcoin will surpass 100,000 in 2018. And there are just as many reasons why The Bitcoin Bubble will Burst in 2018.

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Why Bitcoin is Going to 100,000 in 2018

There’s no “There” There

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. People like to say that’s true of all currencies, but the USD is backed by the faith & trust of the US government and Bitcoin is backed by…nothing. Who’s responsible if Bitcoin gets hacked (which just happened at NiceHash)? What happens if the Bitcoin hysteria evaporates and it loses 75% of its value (as happened with dot com stocks when that bubble burst)? What happens when you go to redeem your BTC & they’re not there any more due to technical error? There’s no “there” there.

Consumer Confidence will Fall

US consumer confidence just hit its highest level in 17 years. When people feel confidence, they invest in speculative bubbles because everything’s awesome right now and of course it’s going to work out. But what happens when we have a recession, which we’re overdue for after 9 straight years of economic growth. In a recession people hunker down and get more conservative, which will be doubly bad for Bitcoin.

Transactions are Too Slow

Bitcoin has fundamental technical limitations that make it ill-suited for the high number of transactions being placed on it now – and this is only the beginning. Think of it like a road that handles traffic just fine on Sunday afternoon but is a clogged, gridlocked mess during rush hour. And now it’s rush hour every hour of every day, with even more traffic coming.

The Energy Cost is Too High

Bitcoin transactions used more energy than Ireland this year, and each Bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power a typical house for 10 days. Bitcoin used as much energy as 2.8 million US households while VISA used only as much energy as 50,000 households. And this is with Bitcoin processing only a few transactions per second, while VISA processes almost 2000 transactions per second.

The Psychological Barrier of High Price

What are the most popular company stocks? Today some of the most popular stocks include Amazon, Bank of America, GE, Alphabet (Google), Ford, Apple, AT&T, and Pfizer among many other similar brands. These are the kinds of stocks we’re used to seeing on the news and the kinds of stocks we’re used to seeing in our retirement accounts, and they all typically trade in the hundreds of dollars. They’re so committed to staying in this price range that they split their stock to bring the price back down if it gets too high, and people can therefore think about buying several units of a stock they’re interested in. On the other hand, Bitcoin is currently trading around $17,000. So someone who has $1,700 to invest could buy 10 shares of Apple stock at $170 each, or could buy 0.1 BTC. And Bitcoin’s protocol doesn’t allow it to be split, since it’s capped at a total of 21,000,000 BTC. It’s a huge psychological barrier which will keep large numbers of people away from investing.

Unlimited Supply of Alt Coins

And while there’s a limited supply of Bitcoin (only 21,000,000 can ever be created), there are an unlimited number of new cryptocurrencies that can be created, and the recent market frenzy has prompted the creation of hundreds of new cryptocurrencies. There are currently more than 1300 currencies listed on CoinMarketCap, with more coming all the time. This continuing flood of new currencies will continue to dilute the value and price of each individual currency, as always happens in conditions of virtually unlimited supply.

Corporate Cryptos Are Coming

Bitcoin promises to disrupt huge companies, put power back in the hands of the little guy, and democratize access to money. Sounds familiar, because the Internet promised the same thing in the 1990s. It delivered on part of that promise, but the steady direction of the Internet is to become more & more dominated by massive for-profit companies (think Facebook, Disney, Google, Fox, and Amazon). The same will happen to cryptocurrencies, because I’m certain the US government, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup aren’t all sitting around boo-hooing that all their prominence and profitability is going away. Look for corporate cryptocurrencies and government-regulated cryptocurrencies (CitiCoin & DollarCoin?) to come soon, which will displace most of the current upstarts. Some current upstarts will turn into the next decade’s behemoths, and Bitcoin might be one of those – but that’s what everyone used to think about AOL & MySpace too.

Bitcoin represents about 60% of the market with a market cap of $292 billion, and though there are more than 1300 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap, the top 10 currencies represent almost 90% of the market.

Related:
Bitcoin 101
Did We Miss Out on Bitcoin?
Gartner Symposium on Blockchain

Coinbase is the most popular and easiest to use place to first begin buying & trading cryptocurrencies, and their new account signups have gone through the roof this year. The runup in cryptocurrencies over the last couple months can be pretty easily explained through the lens of Coinbase, and it reveals what I think is the biggest opportunity in crypto right now.

1. A new user hears about Bitcoin and wants to invest, so they create a Coinbase account and fund it with a few hundred dollars using a credit/debit card or their bank account.
2. That new user either buys Bitcoin because it’s had the most media coverage about it’s rocketing valuation, or maybe instead of buying 0.03 units of BTC they’d like to buy a whole unit of something. Coinbase also has Ethereum & Litecoin, which last week were trading for around $400 & $100 respectively. Litecoin sounds like Bitcoin, and instead of 0.03 BTC maybe the new user buys 4 LTC. Or, a new user might buy 1 unit of Ethereum.
3. Now a week later, the people who bought Bitcoin have seen a big gain (BTC is up about 50% in the last week). And Ethereum is up 50% as well. But the people who bought Litecoin have really won, with its value more than tripling in the last week. So the Bitcoin buyer decides to diversify and sell some of their Bitcoin to buy some Ethereum & Litecoin as well, which further increases the value of ETH & LTC. All this is very easy because those currencies are all listed on Coinbase.

But what if users want to diversify further and to buy some earlier-stage cryptos that might have even more longterm upside? There’s a big barrier there, because now you have to open a new exchange account elsewhere, transfer funds to another (less trustworthy) source, and try to sort through the other 1300 currencies to decide where to invest next. Most people won’t go to those efforts.

Which means the biggest opportunity in crypto right now is to identify which are the next currencies that will be added to Coinbase. Because as soon as those are added to Coinbase, they’ll be exposed to a huge new pool of investors who are already in crypto and will no longer have a barrier to diversifying their investments.

I don’t know which those will be, but I’d love to hear predictions or thoughts in the comments.

16x growth in a year (from less than $1,000 in January to around $16,000 today) makes those thoughts understandable. And, maybe this really is Peak Bitcoin.

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I keep comparing cryptocurrencies in 2017 to dot coms in the mid to late 1990s, and I think the comparison is helpful in this case as well.

This is Amazon’s stock chart from January 1998 to January 1999.

It looks almost identical to the Bitcoin chart above. Amazon skyrocketed from around $6 at the start of 1998 to more than $90 by early 1999. Surely by then it was too late to capitalize on Amazon’s big run up, right?

This is the full Amazon stock chart from 1998 to the present. Amazon is currently trading at $1162, more than 10x where it was in 1999. The big spike above is in the first gray bar at the far left of this graph.

Who knows whether Bitcoin will go up another 10x or more like Amazon or if it will flame out entirely like Pets.com. But the game is early, and it’s definitely not too late to get involved.

So, what is Bitcoin? How does it work? And why should you care?

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

A cryptocurrency is an entirely new form of money. In all of human history there have really been two types of money. Commodity money uses tangible items (shells, beads, gemstones, precious metals, and other physical items) as money, and fiat money is paper or coins issued by a government (like the US Dollar).

These currencies are used as a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account (the three purposes of money). Here are some examples:

• A herder giving a merchant 3 shells in exchange for a goat is using commodity money as a means of exchange.
• A king keeping a vault full of gold is using commodity money as a store of value, because gold is more suited for this purpose since it’s more durable than other commodities that might decay over time.
• A business with $1,000,000 US Dollars in revenue this year is using fiat money as a unit of account.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin aren’t commodity money, because they’re electronic rather than physical. And they aren’t fiat money, because they’re not issued or controlled by any government. Instead, Bitcoin & others are called cryptocurrencies because the trust & value of the currency is protected by all the transactions being stored in encrypted ledgers replicated across thousands of computer systems. This is called the blockchain.

What is the Blockchain?

Blockchain is the method of storage for cryptocurrencies. Picture it like a giant Excel spreadsheet with two important differences.

First, it’s encrypted. This means transactions written in a blockchain ledger can’t be undone, a little like the mosquito trapped in a block of amber in Jurassic Park. Each block of encrypted transactions written to the Bitcoin ledger then have more encrypted transactions stored after them, just like all the layers of amber that protected & preserved the mosquito.

And, the Bitcoin ledger is distributed. There’s not just one copy of this ledger, there are thousands of copies on computer systems all around the world, all being compared to one another at all times to ensure they stay in sync. So if anyone tries to hack or overwrite previous transactions on one copy of the ledger, the system will block that from happening because it recognizes these transactions don’t line up with all the other valid copies of the ledger. It’s not a totally foolproof system, but by it’s design it has some real security advantages over financial systems with a single point of control (like traditional banking records that are stored & controlled by a single entity).

Are there other Cryptocurrencies?

Yes, and the number is growing all the time. Bitcoin was one of the first cryptocurrencies, and it’s the most well known. Two other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum and Litecoin, are also very well known and are growing in usage & awareness. And there are hundreds or thousands of other cryptocurrencies with huge differences in valuation & adoption. Currently there are 17 cryptocurrencies that have a market value of more than $1 billion. Here are the top ten:

How do I Buy & Use Cryptocurrencies?

The easiest way to buy a cryptocurrency is using an online exchange like Coinbase, GDAX, or Binance. Coinbase is the easiest point of entry with the simplest user interface, but it has the highest fees. GDAX is owned by Coinbase and charges lower fees, but like Coinbase it only offers three currencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin). Binance has dozens of currencies, but it’s the least user friendly.

You can start in Coinbase or GDAX by adding money to your account through your bank account, wire transfer, or credit/debit card. You can only add value to Binance through an existing cryptocurrency; for example, adding US Dollars to your Coinbase account, buying some Ethereum there, transferring some or all of that Ethereum to your Binance wallet, then using the Ethereum in your Binance wallet to buy other currencies like IOTA or Ripple.

Even though many cryptocurrencies now have values in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per coin, you can buy a fractional piece of coin for a very small investment. For example, right now $20 will buy 0.00132251 Bitcoin (since 1 BTC is currently valued at around $16,000), or $20 will buy 0.04073461 Ethereum (since 1 ETH is currently valued at around $490). And, other up & coming cryptocurrencies have much lower valuations, like IOTA ($4.45) or Lumens ($0.13).

Using cryptocurrencies is a different story, and going back to the three purposes of money is helpful in thinking about this. Cryptocurrencies aren’t a good substitute for other currency right now as a means of exchange or a unit of account due to their volatility. Imagine telling an employee a year ago you’d pay them 1 Bitcoin per week in salary. Last year that 1 Bitcoin would cost you $900 to provide their salary, but now it would cost you $16,000 to provide their weekly salary. So, the current practical use is really limited to a store of value, and like all volatile investments (like dot com stocks in the 90s or some real estate in the mid 2000s) it will swing wildly in valuation, so it’s not the right place to store your entire savings or retirement account.

What Else Should I Know?

I’ve been studying Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain pretty heavily for the last month and I still feel like I can barely talk intelligently about it. If you’re interested in learning more, just ask and I’ll be happy to share what I know as one way of repaying the others who’ve done the same for me.

The iPad Pro is much, much closer now to being a feasible laptop replacement for many users.

I love the iPad’s portability. Even though I like the size & weight of the MacBook Pro and don’t feel it’s too big or bulky in any way, there’s something great about how easy it is to carry the iPad wherever I’m going.

I don’t love the iPad’s lap instability. My least favorite user experience with any tablet or convertible computer (like Microsoft Surface) is sitting in a chair, on a couch, or in bed and trying to enter content on the keyboard with it perched on my lap. While a laptop is bottom-heavy with a thin & light display on top & therefore stable on an uneven surface, a tablet is top-heavy with a thin & light keyboard on bottom & is very unstable on uneven surfaces. I find I can’t really focus while working with the iPad on my lap, because part of my attention is always on keeping the device balanced & stable, which isn’t a problem when using my laptop.

I love the iPad’s touchscreen. It’s really inexcusable that Apple doesn’t offer a touchscreen laptop. I love using the touchscreen to scroll web pages, emails, documents, etc. I love using the touchscreen to click checkboxes and radio buttons, to select text, and to pinch to zoom in or out. It’s more intuitive and faster than using a mouse or trackpad for the same actions. Apple needs to offer a touchscreen MacBook.

I don’t love the screen angles. When the iPad is on a desk and using the Smart Keyboard, it only sits at one angle. Too often I’ve found that angle creates glare on the screen from overhead lights, so I often have to use other objects (my phone, a pad of Post-It notes, a rock) to wedge behind the screen to make the angle more upright and remove that glare.

I love the iPad’s Apple Pencil. Apple Pencil works great, and iOS apps have come a long way in the last year to much more comprehensively work with the Pencil. It’s great to open Evernote and draw or sketch notes about an idea or to annotate a PDF or Word document & send that digital file to a colleague. It’s one of my favorite uses for the iPad, and I really wish I could do it on a MacBook.

I don’t love the iPad’s app-centricity. My least favorite feature of the iPad is how my primary software experience is iOS apps instead of desktop apps & the browser. It just feels limiting. Safari on iOS doesn’t work as well with LastPass (my password manager) as it does on Mac OS, and there’s no LastPass integration with iOS apps at all as far as I can tell. Sites like LinkedIn prompt you to use the app if you access it on Safari in iOS, but in the app I could find how to do some things like write a user recommendation or change my profile background image. The Skype for Business iOS app works great for video chats, but if I switch focus to look at another app (email, Evernote, OmniFocus, etc.) during my conversation, my video feed turns off which is distracting for the person I’m talking with.

I love the iPad’s multitasking. This is the biggest enhancement in iOS 11, and I really like it. I find myself using the hover-over mode and full side-by-side apps often, and it works really well. My biggest wish list item in this area is to be able to have multiple windows from a single app in multitasking (two different web sites, emails, Word docs, etc.).

I don’t love the iPad’s file management. iOS 11 has huge improvements in file management on the iPad, in iCloud, and in 3rd party services like OneDrive for Business & DropBox (the services I use for work files and personal files). However, when creating a presentation in Keynote for iOS it seems the only file storage option is local to the iPad (and therefore not backed up) or on iCloud. When I move a Keynote file to OneDrive for Business, I then can’t open that file in Keynote; instead I have to copy it back to Keynote, then move the updated version back to OneDrive after I’m finished. It’s an unacceptably clunky & error-prone workflow.

The big iOS 11 enhancements and a huge number of small app improvements have really improved iPad’s feasibility as a laptop replacement over the last year. Previously I didn’t make it more than a couple days without hitting big roadblocks, and this time I made it three weeks (partly due to finding some workarounds to address previous frustrations, but largely due to the improvements Apple & other app providers have made in the last year).

It’s still not there yet as a full laptop replacement for me, but it’s much closer than it was a year ago.

Unfortunately for higher education, the comparison isn’t flattering. When measuring digital progress across industries, one view of the chart below is that higher education is in the middle of the pack. But when looking at the types of industries ranked it’s clear education is almost last among information industries and is only really ahead of industries dealing with physical resources like manufacturing, utilities, transportation, etc.

And, it’s easy to see why education trails those other industries: we don’t invest in digitalization.

Instead, too many in higher education prefer to just add a sprinkling of technology on top of our traditional processes rather than fundamentally rethinking how we can best serve our students with all the resources now available.

This is further evidenced by education ranking dead last in the percentage of institutions that have a digital transformation team. I’m pleased I’ve been able to start building a small team like this in my organization, but it’s only the very beginning of what needs to become a much higher and better resourced priority across the entire institution and across the industry.

There are some great examples of universities making real commitments to digitalization (Southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, and Purdue among them), but if we don’t get busy making real commitments across the industry to embrace digitalization and disrupt our own business model, the next 20 years in higher education will look like the last 20 years in the newspaper industry. Several titans will remain (The Ivies, state flagships, well endowed elite privates, and some others with well defined niches), but the vast majority of institutions will struggle, shrink in size & net revenue, and eventually close.

I want to compare a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider like Workday who uses this single platform model with a traditional software company who delivers software the traditional way, with multiple products for different market segments, and with each customer installing that software in their own environment and deciding on their own upgrade timeline. Let’s say each company invest 9 units of resource into supporting & enhancing their products every year.

Say a traditional provider has three products: product A is pretty basic, product B is more capable, and product C is the most capable (similar to Toyota making cars under the Scion, Toyota, and Lexus badges). Maybe that company originally developed product C, then they acquired a couple smaller competitors and renamed those products to product A & product B. The customers with those products were already happy on their products, so the traditional company kept the same core functionality & technology and has continued to add new features to all three products. All three products were built on different technology platforms, so all three products require a dedicated set of technical support & development people.

So the traditional company devotes 1 unit of resource to support (help desk, troubleshooting, bug fixes, etc.) each product and they devote 2 units of resource to improving each product with new features & capabilities.

The traditional company is using 9 units of resource to support & grow their products, and customers of each product get to enjoy the new features that come from 2 units of resource of new development each year.

The SaaS company also invests 9 units of resource in supporting & growing their product that runs on a single platform in the cloud.

Since they offer only one product designed to meet the needs of all their customers, they save 2 units in support that can be devoted to new development, and all the new development resources are used to maximize the capability of their one product instead of being spread across multiple legacy products. The same 9 units of resource, but now focused on a single platform and with 4x the resource focused on developing & improving their product every year.

SaaS isn’t a magic bullet, and sometimes companies need the control of dedicated software installed on their own servers. But the SaaS model is clearly more efficient and is likely the best solution for most companies most of the time.

Some of my observations:

Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft presented a session on their progress in AI, and many of their examples were about how AI can help people with disabilities communicate, learn, and contribute. One great example was helping nonverbal people communicate by using smart devices – picture an advanced version of autocomplete with a visually-driven interface so the user can select each picture/word and the interface predicts what word or picture they’ll want to choose next.

They also talked about replacing traditional “systems of record” with a tiered “system of intelligence” that has the system of record as it’s foundation, AI at the core, and “systems of engagement” for user interface in web, mobile, and chat. Much of this work is already in place at customers who are using it for customer service and other functions.

Virtual Reality

Samsung demonstrated their Gear VR headset, with three experiences to choose from. I selected one about wounded warriors participating in adaptive Winter Olympic sports. The video quality was good, and the audio in the separate headphones was as well. There wasn’t a lot of motion in the 360 degree video, but it was immersive enough that it felt unusual to look down and see someone else’s ski boots rather than the shoes I was wearing. It was mostly a passive rather than interactive experience, but the technology is clearly good and getting better. The real leap will be when there are more natural feeling headsets (ultimately contact lenses & implantable earphones) and haptic gloves that allow you to feel the objects you’re manipulating in VR. Other companies like Oculus and Sony continue to make huge strides and push VR forward.

Augmented (or Mixed) Reality

Back to Microsoft, who was demonstrating its AR headset HoloLens at their booth by having users look at a (real actual physical) car tire while the display overlayed an exploded view of each layer of the tire (sidewall, steel belt, tread, etc.). I could then “3D tap” any layer of the tire and a tire expert talked about the features in that layer.

AR has some really interesting possibilities that can make it more valuable than VR in many use cases, but I don’t think this demo did a great job of exploiting those. Maybe a demo that looked at a damaged tire and the AR could show how to repair it based on where the damage is, or a demo showing what different furniture would look like in the trade show booth (like the new Housecraft app). Further, the video quality was very poor compared to the Samsung VR headset, and the sound was almost inaudible.

AR has huge potential, and HoloLens is a really good product, but unfortunately the demo didn’t let it shine as much as I hoped. Lots of companies are pouring resources into developing AR capabilities, and the progress there is going to be interesting to watch.