Vast numbers of people who previously reported for work at an office every day are now working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s sensible, and if you’re included in that group, there was probably even a little thrill of “I get to work from home!” at first. But as those who have telecommuted […]
Digital cameras have been around long enough that people have stopped making snarky comments about how hard it is to find anything in a shoebox filled with hundreds of unorganized photos – I still have those boxes of photos and slides in Vermont. But given the tens of thousands of photos many of us now […]
A serious bug has been discovered in Apple’s Group FaceTime multi-person video chat technology. It allows someone to call you via FaceTime and then, with just a few simple steps, listen in on audio from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac while the call is ringing, before you have accepted or rejected it. To prevent the […]
Progress is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has […]
This October marks seven years since Steve Jobs passed away leaving behind a legacy of innovation and development that has undeniably changed the world we live in and how we live in it. From its early days, Apple has almost always taken the unconventional approach to creating hardware and software, tackling obstacles from an uncommon angle and often finding newer, better, more streamlined ways of doing things. This has led to groundbreaking advances and a modest list of not-so-successful ideas that failed to hit the mark or were perhaps too far ahead of their time.
It’s with this in mind, that we discuss Apple’s little-known singular foray into the world of gaming consoles, the Pippin.
The iPhone and iPad have blossomed into powerful mobile gaming platforms in recent years, and even the often joked about desktop and laptop Macs have more than enough computing power to run most modern desktop games. The Pippin, though, despite the pretense of being its home computer and/or educational platform, was a video games console through and through.
The Pippin was an ugly duckling in the highly competitive market of the mid-1990s, and unlike other machines of the time such as the Panasonic 3DO, weren’t intended as a proprietary, single console like we associate devices such as the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It was instead meant to be something that could be licensed out to many companies. Apple had designed the brains of the machines but would leave the manufacturing to other firms.
In terms of performance it did boast a few innovative features such as the fact that Mac computers of the era could play software designed for the Pippin since it shared much hardware with the Macintosh. With its educational usage in mind, rather than being solely an entertainment platform it had peripherals like a full keyboard, optional wireless controllers and even a printer.
Wanting to get in on the lucrative console business, Japanese toymaker and anime publisher Bandai decided to be first to license the tech, and in February 1995 the first Apple Bandai Pippin consoles went on sale in Japan. The machine’s US launch would take place a few months later, in September. The Japanese-market Pippin ATMARK consoles were a rather classy white, while American-market Pippin @WORLD (pronounced At-World) consoles were black. In Europe, the Katz Media Player had a different but similar black design.
Bandai may have been the first company to release a Pippin, but aside from the tiny European release by Katz, there were to be no more. Unfortunately, the machine was a complete failure.
It never caught on for reasons which had nothing to do with failure to be a good idea. It had at it’s core a PowerPC 603 RISC CPU which could have rivalled the Sony PlayStation for it’s rendering power had it been it’s utilized.
First, it was too expensive. At launch, the retail price of $600 was an unprecedented price for the time. Secondly, it launched into a market already dominated by Nintendo and Sega, and unlike other high-end consoles with the same price point such as the Neo-Geo, it had almost no software or games available.
While with Bandai’s support around 70 titles would be released in Japan, including the extremely popular Gundam franchise, that wasn’t the case in the US market. Over the console’s short lifespan, we only saw 18 games ever hit shelves. And not a single one approached the “must have” status a console needs to attract new customers despite having early internet support, the infrastructure just wasn’t there.
All in all, the Pippin would sell less than 50,000 units in its two years on sale, it’s that less than 5000 units were sold to US consumers. Bandai would cease support for the console in 1997 when it abandoned its deal with Apple and tried to align itself with Sega instead with it’s Netlink internet peripheral for the Saturn, which also didn’t work out. Katz vowed to continue support for the console but they were ultimately getting their hardware from Bandai and couldn’t maintain support beyond it’s current inventory of a few thousand units.
It wasn’t until the Sony PlayStation line finally broke into the scene that Nintendo and Sega would be dethroned as the leaders of the console market, a distinction that they have shared only with Microsoft’s XBox line of gaming consoles.
The Pippin is one example of an excellent idea that just couldn’t find footing through no direct fault of its own. It lies in repose with other valiant but failed attempts at console gaming such as the Atari Jaguar, Philips CD-i, Sega Dreamcast, Memorex VIS, Pioneer Laseractive and Panasonic 3DO among others.
In the service department we have what is called the Magic Touch. This means one having the experience of fixing an issue in a very short period of time without much effort. This can come in the form of using a quick trick we know or simply pressing the power button and seeing that everything […]
You’ve probably heard the most about virtual reality, or VR. It’s the technology that has seen big consumer releases within the last few years, in devices like the Oculus Rift, GearVR and many others. People also tend to know VR better because of the attempts to market the technology back in the 90’s when we just didn’t have the technology to make it effective yet.
In VR, you wear something on your head — currently, a “head-mounted display” or HMD that can look like a boxy set of goggles or a space helmet — that holds a screen in front of your eyes, which in turn is powered by a computer, gaming console or mobile phone. Thanks to specialized software and sensors, the experience becomes your reality, filling your vision; at the high end, this is often accompanied by 3-D audio that feels like a personal surround-sound system on your head, or controllers that let you reach out and interact with this artificial world in an intuitive way.
What distinguishes VR from adjacent technologies is the level of immersion it promises. When VR users look around — or, in more advanced setups, walk around — their view of that world adjusts the same way it would if they were looking or moving in real reality.
The main focus here is technology and content that can fool the brain into thinking it is somewhere it’s not. When you flinch at a virtual dinosaur, or don’t want to step off an imaginary ledge, that’s the effect you’re looking for.
Augmented reality, or AR, is similar to VR in that it is either delivered through a sensor-packed device that gives you a window with which to view both your actual surroundings and also the augmentations to your surroundings. Since it was first announced at WWDC, Apple’s ARKit has been open to developers to get a feel for the new platform. Now that iOS 11 is finally here, ARKit is available for anyone with an iPhone 6S or later, the iPad Pro, and the latest 9.7-inch iPad.
The key term for AR is utility. A typical augmented-reality experience will probably be a lot less exciting than meeting a dinosaur or riding a roller coaster, but analysts have argued that the potential market for AR applications is actually much larger than VR’s.
The whole point of that ugly word, augmented, is that AR takes your view of the real world and adds digital information and/or data on top of it. This might be as simple as numbers or text notifications, or as complex as a simulated TV screen. AR lets you see both synthetic objects as well as objects in the real world simultaneously.
AR makes it possible to get that sort of digital information without checking another device, leaving both of the user’s hands free for other tasks. You may see this technology in use today in the form of a heads-up display projecting your speed and direction onto the windshield of your car as you drive.
An extension of augmented reality is what is known as mixed reality. It tries to combine the best aspects of both VR and AR, wrapped up in a marketable term that sounds marginally less geeky than its cousins.
In theory, mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as “real,” at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.
![](http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5527t.jpg?1532704834")
With mixed reality, the illusion is harder to break. As you move, the virtual objects in your display may react to your surroundings by keeping position in relation to a real-world object or react in a realistic way to changes in lighting. With this sort of interaction you could see how a new living room set would look in your house or virtually try on clothes while looking into a MR mirror.
It’s only a matter of time before we’re all wearing MR-enabled contact lenses and the line between virtual space and reality is blurred forever.
