While video chat is no replacement for in-person interaction, sometimes it’s the best you can do. I’ve never loved chatting through tiny screens, though. It just feels so distant to hunch over a phone or laptop, staring at a considerably shrunken version of whoever I’m talking with. That’s why it’s nice to conduct video calling through your TV instead. When there’s a life-size person on the other end, it helps conversations feel more lifelike. This does
While on a surfing trip, technologist Aza Raskin sent his romantic partner, the singer-songwriter Zia Cora, a surprise gift: a complete music video for her new song “Submarines.” “He left for a surf vacation for a week, and then 48 hours later he sent me this whole music video,” she says. “I don’t think I could think of anything more surreal and poignant and beautiful.”
Raskin does have an extensive design background—he’s a former d
What a difference a year makes (notwithstanding the doldrums of a pandemic). This time last year, metaverse had the lowest possible rating for the number of searches in Google Trends. By November of 2021, it had the highest possible rating. The term has become so prominent that one of the most recognizable brands on the planet—Facebook—changed its name to Meta. While the popularity of associated technologies such as VR have ebbed and flowed for years, there is more to it now. We ar
Psychedelics, long stigmatized as risky recreational drugs, are finally finding a place in polite society. More and more research from prominent institutions such as Johns Hopkins suggests that such drugs, in the right formulations and with supervision, can bring about therapeutic breakthroughs in patients, notably in those that have proven to be resistant to other types of treatment. Venture capital firms have taken notice—pouring money into startups developing psychedelic treatment
Twenty years ago, the U.S. Army tried something that was revolutionary at the time. In the early 2000s, video games were a political hot potato. Some elected officials were pointing to them as corruptive forces on the youth of America and an industry that was in dire need of regulation. Then, a few years later, the Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (which let two characters in the game have animated sexual intercourse) found its way out into the wild and all hell truly broke loose
If corporations succeed in building the metaverse—and one organization’s real estate becomes the epicenter of Web 3.0—having LGBTQ people in the creation process could make or break inclusivity efforts in the years to come. The rollout of social media over the past 15 years has shown us queer life online can be both treacherous and essential. GLAAD made waves last year when it released its first Social Media Safety Index and gave every major platform a failing grade. B
Recently, I canceled my subscription to Disney+, the streaming service, a little less than four weeks after signing up. This was not a rash decision, but a calculated one. I only joined to watch one thing (the much-hyped Beatles documentary Get Back) and knew I would quit before getting billed for a second month. Moreover, I already knew I wasn’t so into the basics of the Disney+ catalog—because I did this same join-and-quit exercise 18 months ago, to watch Hamilton. It turns
The vivid blue color of a new brand of Dutch soda doesn’t come from food coloring: The startup making the product, called Ful, makes the drink with spirulina, a blue-green algae that gives the soda more of a nutritional punch than the standard carbonated beverage. The company wants to use the product to make algae a more popular ingredient in order to help shrink the carbon footprint of the food system. The founders, who met as students at the Singapore campus of the business school INSEA
YouTube is officially getting into the NFT game. YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan announced in a blog post on Thursday that the platform will be introducing new tools to help creators make more money from their content, including monetization features for YouTube Shorts—the platform’s short-form videos, an e-commerce function for YouTube videos, and tools that would let YouTubers sell content as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. In the post, Mohan said the NFT tools wo
Over the past 40 years, networks such as HSN and QVC have made live commerce a familiar concept: presenters gushing over the features and hard-to-beat prices of goods on live TV for consumers to buy. However, live e-commerce is still a nascent enterprise in the United States, in particular, especially when you compare any efforts in the space to the powerhouse industry that’s been created in China. Live e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024—not ba