The Vergecast - VR, Amazon Echo, and more VR

Episode Date: March 4, 2016

Nilay and Dieter are joined by senior reporter Adi Robertson to talk VR technology and fan favorite: Amazon Echo. Racked style editor Nicola Fumo operates the hype matrix once again in this week's episode of Vergecast! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, which is sponsored by Cisor Vodka, the vodka brand that I made up last week and that I intend to bring into reality through sheer force of will and repetition on the show. Cisor vodka, cut through the night. I can't wait for Cisorca of Vodka flavors. Pumpkin spice, Cizzer Vodka. No, no, no, no, yeah. Cisorac is coming. Clear, crisp. It's going to be more forward-picking than pumpkin spice.

Yeah. Red Bull vodka. It's just like premixed. That's really sad. I don't know. I think Cesar Vodka is more. Anyway, buy it. There's already a Twitter.

People have been like tweeting nonstopping me about it. Someone made a video advertisement for it. What? Did you not see that one? I didn't see that one. It's like four seconds long. Oh my God. Anyway, hi, I'm Neil I Patel.

I'm the editor-in-chief The Verge. The host of this, the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. Now, regardless of my clear intent, becoming a YouTube video property, so if you're listening to this in a car, just know that the people are against you. but I'm still with you. Anyway, Dieter's here.

Hi. I don't know, man. I've been talking all day. I just haven't warned the audience. I have literally not stopped talking since nine this morning. True. I had one break. I was telling Nicola this on the way down.

I had one break. That was when I went downstairs to order a salad. In the time I was in the elevator, I stopped talking. But then I had to go and tell the person what I wanted in the food. To me, I'm still talking. Anyway, going to be loopy. Anyway, Dieter's here. Eddie Robertson's here.

Hi. And Nicola's here. Hello. Nicola has a video monitor. I do. What's on your video monitor? This is a surprise to me. I have a videograph of my hype matrix that I invented during Dieter's hiatus because I wasn't doing a good enough job hype checking.

And now it's been turned into visuals to reward the handful of things. thousand of people who watch this on YouTube instead of... Listening, the hundreds of thousands of people. Can you guys name the device that's the drab ostentatious? Oh yeah, what is that thing? Isn't that Microsoft and Telemas Explorer? 8,000?

I saw it on your Twitter. Ostentatious drag. Oh, oh yeah, it's a vi-old. Dude, come on, it's a VIAUX. Yeah. Wow, did you name that mouse? Yeah, I know what that mouse is. Come on.

Okay, to explain the quadrants in case you're catching up here. Practical drab. Our intersection is most computer mice. He's stopped tweeting me good-looking computer mice. I haven't seen one yet. Oh, and please stop tweeting me pictures of good-looking extension cords. Yeah, absolutely.

That's, like, really happening to me a lot. Although, actually, please continue tweeting me pictures of good-looking extension cords. Ostentatious drab is something Nelai just named that is, I think it's like a computer that's also a sidekick, like it flips open. That's the Vio-U-X. Oh, I forgot.

Slack somebody to bring my Viopi-Dan. That's the Vio-U-X. So Sony for this, like, amazing minute in, like, 2010. somewhere around there, they decided that the future of PCs was something called the mobile internet device, the mid, it's great, and they would pack

full Windows PCs into tiny insane form factors. So that thing is a Windows 7 PC. It has like a regular Intel chip. It's a computer. But you can take it with you? Yeah, but it's not a laptop. It was like this big.

It was huge. Is it? It was really small, compared to a laptop, but really huge compared to any reasonable thing. And that antenna is the wireless internet antenna. And the screen slid open and revealed the keyboard. And I don't care what you, and that little rectangle on the side, on the right side, is a mouse. That's a trackpad.

I love it, personally. I mean, that thing to me, it was so expensive. It was like $3,000. It served, I could not, why would you need, what year is this? 20-10-ish? Oh, really recently. Wait, I think I was playing Hitman Blood Money. and it was in 2006 or 2007,

and he was using something very like that. Yeah, I mean, this is like one of those things where like before people thought phones are going to be phones. They were like, what will computers look like in the future? And like someone at Sony was like, wait, we own a factory. And they like made them, right? Like that's the Viya-U-X.

And they were amazing, completely useless, very slow, but beautiful, beautiful pieces. And then like Sony stopped doing that. Moving on, though. Anyway, whatever. Should I play a hit-man game? I've never played a hit-man game. I don't know.

Rich has a long defense of them. I did one mission and it felt great. Like I was discovering things and learning things. And now I'm stuck. Right. Yeah. Anyway, do you want to move on? And the last one is a bottle of champagne.

Yeah. Well, that's ostentation elegant. And then our iPhone is practical elegant. Yeah. So for those of you who, this Deeter face is so good. For those of you who are in the car, now you know. Okay. The car is is Eli's favorite place to imagine you.

That's where I imagine you. That's where you are. I also, have a hint to people in the car that Nilai is currently Loggerfelting and OG Samsung gear. Look at this thing. It's a mess. It's a rectangle. It's got a camera bump on the side. I thought it was a proper noun watch from over here. Well, no, here's what happened. I'll tell you. I'm going to

five second story. Our sales team is moving to all of Oxmi is moving to new office in the year. Sales team is moving early because it's getting bigger and they're cleaning out their existing part of the office and one of them walked over and they were like we did this campaign for Samsung for the original gear and we have it we're going to throw it away do you want it because they just they could not see the value in it so I took it and now I'm wearing an original galaxy gear and I have to tell you this is not a good product but it's hilarious yeah so I'm going to wear it for the rest of the day

anyhow big old wart in here there's news whatever it doesn't matter so much news don't you get through adie is here because the VR the VR moment is upon us a very serious way well I mean like the hardware shipping. Yes. Well, not yet. Not for a month. Very close. Yeah.

Yeah. It's close. It's upon us. But you've been living in the H.C. VEVE basically nonstop for the past week. Yes, except now I'm making everyone else live in it. I think Ben was upstairs shooting when I came down. So we set up this room.

It used to be like a video editing room. And it's a very dark room, but it's basically empty, which worked really well for VR. And every time I walk through the hall of our office, I just like see out of my Peripheral vision, somebody standing there alone in total silence flailing their arms around. And you just walk over and just watch them for like a minute. Yeah. And then you just leave. And we can't tell.

Yeah. Nobody knows. Yesterday I played a game. Chris Grant, the editor-in-chief polygon was in there doing something. And I played a game where I just tried to get my hands as close to his face as I could for a while. You didn't know. It's just a thing. But anyway, the vibe is here.

We have a vibe in the office. Eddie put up a great piece about it. Oculus shipping in about a month. Yes. So like when I say it's half shipping in a month. Yeah. Yeah, the touch controllers. Half of it is shipping.

Right. Which the controllers are really the most important part in my estimation, and those aren't shipping yet. Yes, after a year of downplaying it and saying you didn't need to actually do anything in VR, Oculus now has a thing that's very important and wonderful and it's not coming out for six months. Yeah. Anyway, but you've got the Vive. Tell us about the Vive. The Vive is amazing.

Vive is the first thing that I've been able to actually, like, feel like I'm playing games in. And like, I'm not compromising on the games. Like, Gear VAR, there are fun things, but I'm always like, why am I using this horrible track pad. So I just got out of a really amazing game called budget cuts, where you're teleporting around and it's a spy game. And so you're like crouching and also flailing and like throwing knives at robots because you pick them up and you have to have to do this. Why is it called budget cuts? Because you're in an office and stealing things. And look out of people. Well, yeah, you have knives. Have you tried any of this yet? No. Oh, man. I haven't been invited to the VR cave.

The VR cave is literally like 20 feet away from where you see. sit. I know, but no one's invited me in. We've invited the whole staff. How am I? Just going to put it on, just walk in there and put it on? There's instructions posted on the wall. Annie made them up. They're great. Yeah, just go in whenever you want. Yeah. So I have a question for you. You just said got out of.

I want to get deep into the vibe because I think it's really interesting. I think the HTC Steam, I'm sorry, Valve Collabo and the reliance on Steam is like a very fascinating thing. But you just said get out of. Are you saying the preferred vocabulary here is get in the VATO? VR and get out of the VR? I don't know. I guess so, because that's what I've been saying probably since Gear VR. Yeah.

Partly just because it like hurts and it's weird in a lot of different things. And so it feels like you're escaping from something when you get out of the Gear VR after a bad session. You get in, you get out, you don't like put it on. You don't dawn the VR. Yeah. No, it's a whole thing. Put on the headset, but no, you got out of the game.

Yeah. This is one of those things. This is like a technology and culture moment. Like, what are we, what words are we going to use? I don't know. But I think I'd say that about Fallout. I don't know. You would say I just got out of Fallout.

Yeah, maybe. I would say I stopped playing Fallout. It would be more weird and I'd be less likely to do it. But that's also because I think Fallout 4 is deeply boring. I'm sorry. I can't handle it. I'm trolling everyone again. Anyway, so the vibe.

So just if the people don't know, you don't know. I don't know. HCC was a mobile phone company. They were bad at making mobile phones. Yes. Bring me. We actually give it to Nicola. Have you seen my pink Viop?

Oh, this was that you bought last week. Yeah, it's probably, the battery's probably way dead. Is that not one of the most beautiful computers ever made? It's the best. Also, I was not aware that it's an Argentinian model, so the keyboard is insane. Oh, look at that. Yeah, it's all of it. Anyway, we'll talk about it earlier.

But the vibes, so HGC blew it in phones. Like, they were the apex of the Android market for a minute, and then... I still like the best phones. I still have an H-C phone. I'm really sad. Yeah. Yeah. Do they make the best phones?

I think the 6P is the best Android phone on market right now. I mean, maybe not anymore, but when I got the M8, it was like the thing that I wanted. It had great hardware. It was the only thing that looked as good as an iPhone. Yeah. Okay, I'll give you this. HEC made great hardware, had killer design sense,

and they just couldn't, something went wrong with HDZ. Yeah. I would say it was their strategy of putting crappy cameras in the phones? It is bad, although I also had a Nexus phone before that. Oh, yeah, you're just moving up the curve. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Valve partnered with HTC. Yes.

And the key element of all of this, and the reason Oculus is partner with Samsung is, is you can take the internals of a smartphone, the screen technology, the hardware, there's a camera on the front of the Vive, right? Yeah, but, okay, so the Vive is weird because it's basically, like, it's like the VR equivalent of Half-Life 3,

if, like, Half-Life 3 had actually come out, that just for years and years you had the fabled, like, Valve VR room, that they had been building this thing for ages. They had this incredibly sophisticated set up, that you could walk around in. Brandon of Oculus would say, no, this is the best experience, period.

It's just not a consumer experience. And then they partnered with HDC, and we're like, we can release this and mass produce it. Right. What HDC brought to the table was, we know how to build phones, and many of the components of phones and that supply and chain

are going to translate into it. I mean, it's a screen and a processor, right? Partly. Although I'm also, I don't know how much intent to actually attribute to anything Valve does, because after the steam machines, like, I don't know what they did there. That's true.

Anyway, but Valve isn't going to start a cell phone, like a manufacturing organization, right? So HGT is manufacturing this thing, but really it is an expression of valves R&D. And that product came out and nobody thought it was going to come out and beat Oculus to market. And Oculus's partner was obviously with Samsung. Yes, but not for the rift. Not for the rift.

Is Samsung making the screen? The screen's in the rift. Yeah, but that's partnered like the way that, I don't know, Apple is partnered with Samsung. That's fair. That's totally fair. But I thought the Samsung Oculus screen connection, the display connection, was much tighter. It probably is because they make the Gear VR. But the Oculus is not, the Rift is not a Samsung product the way the Gear VR is. Sure. Okay, that makes sense. Anyhow, but what is surprising about all of this, and I think that is worth exploring. Like, all of these relationships between the platform providers and the hardware makers, like, all of that is endlessly fascinating to me because it's like a new way of doing business.

but what is actually interesting is the VIV is out. And it might be, fuck. Actually, it's a Vive pre that we've got to be. I keep calling it to VEve because it just looks like VIV to me. I don't know what else to say to you. But the vibe is out. It's one of those words you only read, you rarely say. Never tell the story that I didn't know how to pronounce hors d'urves until I was like 22.

What did you say? I said it phonetically like it's spelled. Or is divorced? I'm not, yep. Yeah, seriously, me too. Well, we're all there. Well, it's yours. Do you have one?

Think on it. Anyway, but it might be better than the Oculus. And I think that is very surprising to people. I think the thing is that it's not that it's better. It's like that they have an actual marketing strategy for once, an actual release strategy for once. That Oculus had these amazing controllers and it's shipping its system half-finished. Right.

And then the Vive comes out a day, like five days later. and I don't think its controllers are as good. Really? I just, they're remotes. You hold them like remotes and the touch controllers you actually hold like you're making a fist. Right. And that fits way better with a lot of games. Like if you're holding a gun, if you're like pushing out with your finger.

Anyway, it's a matter of taste. But like the room scale thing is a really huge deal, although most people probably will not be able to take advantage of that. Yeah, what does that mean? So you can walk around a lot more due to, different technologies. With the vibe you can walk around more? So the deal with the vibe is that you just put a laser tower in the corner of each room

and you get like 15 by 15 feet. Oculus, right now I think you'd be able to move a couple steps. You can move more if you put a second camera around because it uses tracking cameras. Okay. Also, do you need one laser tower or two? We have two set up. It comes with two. Also, laser tower is the coolest phrase.

Technically they're called lighthouses, but that is less cool than laser tower. Way less cool. I mean, they look insane. They're like, they're just boxes that shoot. You can see like the red lenses of lasers and it just looks crazy to me. No. It vibrates. What?

What? What? Why? Lasers. You got to get in there, man. I got to. You got to. Have you done any VR stuff?

No. What are you doing? I know. It just doesn't intersect with my life until Sunday. Give VR. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, cardboard.

I've done. And he wrote a huge, like, how to buy VR guide. That was good. Yeah. What I want you to do is buy a gaming PC. What does a gaming PC fit on your thing? It's ostentatious. It's got to be drab ostentatious.

I mean, it's really an extra thing to own. It's a really extra purchase. Not for a lot of people. It's so extra. A gaming PC is really practical, though, because it's designed so that you can add stuff to it and fix it yourself, and you can also do Excel spreadsheets on it. Yeah, it's practical and ostentatious. At the same time.

Is it a PC that you always? in addition to other computers, though, because that, to me, seems excessive. I think a proper, full-on neon-lit, water-cooled gaming PC fits smack-dab in the center of the hype matrix. Yeah, it's everything. It's all of it. It's all of it.

It's not elegant. It's driving and elegant. It's fine. Well, ours is kind of elegant. The cables are managed very nicely. Yeah, well, ours is good. Yeah, that's true. I mean, literally ours has a light-up video card in it.

TC-builder? Yeah. Huh? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not like any move to the, right. It's more to the center and then go up to ostentation. This is great radio. Look, you're in your car. Imagine a square. And then Nicholas somewhere close.

What are we going to do when you can watch video in your car because they're self-driving? Yeah, that's what I think. Well, this is why lay TV, what's the Chinese company? Now they're called leco. Lecoe. Let go. What is it? They're like funding self-driving cars.

They're trying to help do that. It's like, why does the Netflix of China? Letko. Leco. L-E-E-E-O, E-C-O. I know, but... Let go. That's really funny.

No, it's a Chinese company. They put a ton of money in the Faraday Future, which is like a self-driving car full of screens. And their whole thing is that you'll get in the car and then you'll, like, play Netflix at you.

Right. Which, or you'll wear a VR-Het. I would wear a VR headset. If the crash is coming, I don't even want to see it in my peripheral vision. You just want to be somewhere else. I just, bam, gone.

Okay, so you can't actually... So VR headsets are really bad in cars, and it's not for the reason you'd think. it's not because you get motion sick. It's because you aren't choosing when you turn. So the way you do it with something like Faraday Future, I assume, is that you'd have it tied to, like you'd normalize it, like gravity. Right.

You'd have it tied to the motion of the car and you would tell it to correct. Right. But you can't just do it in a normal car. It really freaks out. So you wrote the, you did just write a huge buyer's guide. Yes. What would you buy? Should you spend the money on a gaming PC and an Oculus and a gaming

PC and Divive and, I mean, like, is it even the time to do it? I mean, HEC sold how many? Like 15,000 in the first second or something? 10 minutes. Yeah, ridiculous. Yeah, I don't know. The best advice is seriously, like, don't buy anything for the next three months. Like, wait until we know when PlayStation VR is coming out.

Wait until Oculus touch controllers are going to come out. Wait until we know what games there are. Wait until, you know, the prices of the PCs are only going to get cheaper. Right. Like, wait until we know how much everything is. Is it just to me are the Oculus Ready PCs Like not

Not wonderful They just seem like They meet the minimum base spec They're still pretty expensive And they'll be obsolete real fast Wait like the standard or which one The like the regular alienware And Dell

There's a third one too They just seem like not great PCs to me I don't know I mean anything with those specs Is perfectly high end as a PC Like it would be very good for a gaming PC Yeah There's ugly

the pre-built ones? Yeah, they are. That's the main thing. I just feel like you could, if you're the sort of person who's going to buy a PC to run the Oculus Rift, you are the sort of person who can spend exactly that amount of money and buy components and build a PC that's way, way better. Yes, I mean, I think that building your PC is like the absolute ideal solution, but there are people who can't. The main thing is that the people who can't normally would want to buy laptops, and that's difficult,

I think, right now. It's not hard to build, I mean. It's hard to build a laptop. It's very hard. No, it's very hard to build a laptop. I'm saying it's not hard to build a component selection is hard. You can fry it. Like if I have to put together a build, I actually do, I have like the moment of freak out like am I getting all the right components. What if I'm screwing something up? Right. We should definitely do a guide on the PC that you and TC built. TZ built that. He put it together in like a day. He said we can take it apart and put it back together and make a video. We should do that. He let me hold the processor. Yeah. Briefly. He very proudly opened the clear cover and showed me the, Water cooling you know yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. It's a closed system.

You know, you don't actually have to put water to it. Tell me something else about the Vive. Really great question. They don't have the front facing camera on yet, but when they do, it's going to be kind of crazy. Oh yeah,

this is like the big key, right? You can explain what that means. Okay, so there are like two features that are really weird about the Vive, and the first one is that there's a camera in the front. And so if you go outside your, like, lighthouse space, normally you see a grid,

and then if you step outside it with this camera, camera, you'll also just see the real world, except it's all blue. So it's like you get outlines of everything, so you can tell if you're at a chair, you could like, I don't know, set your drink down. Wow. And it's really detailed. Like it can pick up stripes on my shirt. Oh, so like you can still like play the game. They just outline the real world for you just in case you want it. Right. If you step outside the bounds of the place where you're playing the game. Right. And I think you can hit a button to just turn everything on. The other thing is funny is the phone

system, which I can't tell if that's going to be really good or really bad, that you can take phone calls from inside VR. Why? Why not? You never have to leave. Hi, mom. Yeah. I'm just jacked in the matrix.

I mean, to be fair, like not being able to get any kind of notifications in VR is kind of worrying if you're at work. Yeah. Or if you are waiting for anyone to do or something. I mean, it's literally it's addy's job to use VR. No, but like if you were like a regular person. I mean, there's a million reasons. Yeah.

If you're a designer, you could do VR paint work. There's a VR desktop program that I'm really curious to try, but they haven't sent me a build yet. Yeah. I mean, if you had like a small office and you put on the headset, you would have a big office. Like, it's like hilarious. Like there's, you have to try, like, okay, we're not doing a good job of selling this. This thing's fucking amazing, right?

Like, you put on the vibe or the VEve, if you're French, you put, like, it's, I think it's better than the Oculus. Like, I've worn the Oculus several times. I've played many Oculus games. I've had the touch controllers. It's very much, like, the Oculus to me is a demo. Everything about it is, like, demo world. This thing has, like, in operating.

system inside it. It's like basically running Windows, but like Windows is all around you. You can like play with the Steam store. And then the games like Addie is saying are real games where you can like play with them. Yesterday I just drew smiley faces and fire for like 10 minutes. I mean, it's amazing. So the thing is partly that like Oculus has a lot of those things. Like if you, have you ever tried medium in Oculus. No. It's a sculpting program that two people can be at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's that. The problem is just that it's like everything that's good requires the touch controllers. It's like we can't even talk about the Rift for another however many months.

Yeah. Honestly, I think part of it is every time I try the Oculus, it's in one of their demo booths, which are basically like huge self-contained container rooms. Yeah, those are like Supermax cells. Yeah, it's what they ship to trade shows, right? And so even at Facebook's office,

they're just sitting in the middle of the floor at the office, and they're like these huge boxes. And you go in and like, they're soundproof and there's a very kind person there. Like, why can you put this stuff on? Wait, wait. I've been in this. Why is it soundproof?

Is it because, like, people are screaming about what they're seeing in VR and you're freak other people out? To keep the trade show away from you. They're for trade shows, right? So, like, if you're at CES and, like, the speaker system company is like, we're going to shake your butt. Like, you don't want that noise. That's what you yell at.

That's what speaker system companies do. How's your butt? Is it shaking? We're going to turn? And, like, you're in VR. You're like, what's that? But anyway, yeah, but it's like, it's very, it's just very isolated. It's dystopian.

It feels very, like. you know like literally like the woman's like and now we're going to take all of your blood out of your body like it's just that kind of hushed yeah and then the vibe is like in our office the setup is kind of fucked up it's a little bit like broken the lighthouses are like on light stands laser towers

laser towers they're on like sea stands you know it's like it's real it's like in our office and it's real and you can like play with it and it works really well see that's why I'm hesitant to criticize the rift because I've like when I have one in the office, I'll do that. Yeah.

Like, it's so hard for me to compare something that I've had and am able to play with just for hours and do fun stuff on versus something that I get to see for five minutes at a time. Right. So assume that you, you know, don't live in New York and therefore you have a house or an apartment with multiple rooms. And if you have those multiple rooms, one of those rooms is what, when I was a kid, we called it the computer room. Now people just call it a study like normal humans or an office.

Um, that's where your PC is. Are people going to want to put the Rift in their living room? Or is it going in the computer room? So it has to have the computer for one thing. So you have to either bring your gaming, giant gaming PC out to the living room. Right. But it's also, but it also, you've been saying for a while that like VR seems to work best when you're sitting on a swivel chair, right?

Seated VR does. The VAR is like anything with motion controllers, actually, it's like the world's best standing desk. But for anything like the gear VR cardboard, yeah, you basically have to be at a swivel chair. Okay. The other thing that's hard about VR now for the living room is it's not like the connect where you can get a bunch of friends and play dance central or whatever.

Right. Like you have to be kind of alone and you can't have any furniture and nothing can walk in and you will fall over anything that is placed there. So you really should just have a VR room. To me it sounds like you have a sitting room upstairs, first floor. No screens. Downstairs, you have your room with, you know, the casual living room that has the television. And then in like the unfinished corner of side from the rec room, that's the VR room.

What state did you grow up in? Wisconsin. Yeah. We should have the same names for rooms that we totally don't. No. Living room. Rec room, that's a thing. Our rec room's like a recreation room.

Yeah, rec room is the basement. The rec room. Yeah. Well, this is modern recreation. Okay. Sure. And you don't need a yard anymore because you're, inside.

Right. Yeah. You just keep, the house keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you just keep filling it with the warm bodies of humans jacked in the matrix.

Wow. I mean, there's something really dystopian about all of us. I mean, I think what's going to happen is we're going to bring back Rumpus room and that's what

the VR room is going to be called. Yeah. Oh, God, it is. Or, I mean, my friend had a bonus. People, like, enormously fat people just bumping into each other.

Rumpus room. No, my friend has a bonus room. I mean, the problem is that all our starrows. The new definition of rumpice. It's like a gaggle of geese, a rumpus of that beer.

It's terrible. I don't know. So ready player won the idea was hamster balls. Right. We spun in hamster balls. It's funny that this is like our most utopian depiction of VR. It's like the most positive depiction of VR and it's still set in a horrible world where no one wants to live. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's funny because if you read the, it's particularly, actually I wanted to talk to Eddie about this a lot. Like, if you read the cyberpunk literature. of VR. Cyberpunk literature, yes. Right. Well, you know what I mean? Like, there's like the canon of,

there's like Neuromancer and so like. Like there's those books. Yeah. And it's just clear that the people making the hardware now definitely read those books. I think I heard that Ready Player One was required reading. Right. And a bunch of people, yeah, everybody read Nuromancer,

a bunch of other. But Ready Player One is like, it's very modern compared to those. It's modern, but it's also, it's aspirational. Like William G. Gibson was kind of like he was a writer. He was describing things that could exist and seeing how they could be interesting. Ernest Klein is always like he's writing a manual. Right.

Yeah, but I don't know. I read ready, I just recently read Ready Player 1. Yeah. It doesn't, it's just like deeply hold up as well as I hoped. It's good. It's a list.

It's a long list of things. Yeah. It's a list of things tailored exactly for my tastes. Yeah. Like, do you like Back to the Future? Here's a Back to the Future scene. Here's a list of things that weren't back to the future. the future.

Did you also like Knight Rider? What about a list of Knight Rider things? Like, it's just that over and it's fine because it's fun and there's like a whole little mystery story, but mostly it's like part of the mystery was solved and now another list of cool 80 shit. Yeah, a major plot point is being able to recite the entire dialogue of a film. Yeah. Of war games, I think.

Oh, God. Is it war games? Yeah. There's a lot. And you had to like act it out. Yeah. Like, it's just the weirdest thing ever. Yeah.

I don't know. The new Ghostbusters movie seems like it's probably going to be kind of like that, though. Probably. I mean, so that's the thing. So, a major plot point of Ready Player 1 is, they have a name for this kind of thing. Like, GDC is coming. Are we going to see VR games that take those concepts from those books and make them real in a way that they've never been able to be real before? It's like an honest question I have.

Like, is someone going to build a matter of real? Virtual nostalgia instantiation. So the VR arcade was, I think, loosely based on Ready Player 1, that there's just a giant room full of arcade machines. People have been trying to make these things from the very beginning. That was the first thing everybody wanted to do. Put a screen in VR? No, not the arcade. It was like, how can we make this thing from a book or maybe?

I think there's like a bunch of cyberpunk stuff. One of my favorite games, which is Darknet. The designer was like, I tried to think about what it would be. be like to be in Hollywood cyberspace. And I made that and it turned out to look really cool. I mean, we're just at this moment. I don't think there's ever been a moment where people have been imagining what the product will be like for so long and like skipping ahead of the early stage of the product.

Like I can't think of a single book that's like, here's what the first days of consumer VR were like. Everything is skipped ahead 100 years when it's like, you're a sack of meat in VR and like your body doesn't matter anymore. And like I'm just really interested to see how the VR designers how fast they accelerate to like what they think the next thing is instead of building a product for now. See, that's the thing that's really interesting about stuff like Nuromancer is that it kind of, it posits a world where this is just an everyday thing, but it's all about people going places

and travel and all of the things that people pretend that VR is going to make us stop doing. Yeah. Like everyone goes out to physical bars. And you have like you have sim stim, you have the, you have the, you have the, you know, sort of virtual experiences, but everyone still travels. Right. But, I mean, the book opens with the guy not being able to do it anymore. I mean...

Yeah. That one, to me, is, like, really interesting. But even, like, Snow Crash. Like, Snow Crash is, like, people are going everywhere all the time. Which partly is a book. It's really boring to have a story where nobody ever goes anywhere, does anything. Building a website can be tough. And even if you do know your way around coding,

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I mean, you can use a blink tag now. Okay, well, but no one would. You can use nuclear weapons now. SquareSpace ad getting dark. So yeah, I coded the whole thing myself. Yeah, but now you could presumably use Squarespace. Seriously, you can't beat the ease and simplicity of Squarespace. Squarespace gives you 24-7 online support and a beautiful, just, I mean, gorgeous, eyes bursting with happiness, gorgeous website.

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Dieter, what's on your face? I like that I trolled you in the middle of your ad by putting on the Avagant glyph. That thing, to me, looks like the revenge of Beats headphones. Yeah, I thought that's what that was. That's good. That's what they're going for. If you could do the ultimate beats commercial, it's like, I don't know.

It's just like a football player. It's like Aaron Rogers, like, wearing the beats and the reporter's like, you threw an interception and Aaron Rogers flips the thing down and starts watching TV in your face. Alternatively, the weird is, put it on his headphones and know what it looks like. They look like a giant ass pair of headphones. It beats you wear on your eyes.

And then it has little, LED lights that shine into micro mirrors that reflect the image directly into your retinas. So you just put it on and you're staring straight ahead into a 720P screen that could be in 3D if you have 3D content to put in it. And it works with anything that you could plug into it with HTML. I think they're 500 bucks. I thought that were more than that. I got a check.

They just started shipping. A bunch of people put it review. We'll have a review of it next week. But I will tell you right now, it's super nerdy $700, $700, it's super dirty, it's super expensive, you're gonna really want them, and, but if you do, you'll be into them

as long as you take the proper time to adjust them for your eyeballs because if you don't, everything just feels wrong. You gotta adjust the lenses back and forth, you gotta adjust them left and right, you gotta move the nose pad up and down. Can you get to a point where it doesn't feel like it's in danger of falling off your face?

Yes. No, right now it does not feel like it's going to fall off my face. But I think we wrote about this. James Vincent, who just looked at the LG VR headset. Do you want to play with it? It was like the big problem with the LG one that they just come out of NWC is that it shows the world around you. Well, that's the point.

They don't call this a VR headset. They're very explicit that this is like a cinema experience. You could even plug it in. It's just falling off Eddie's face. You can plug it into a computer, I guess. I mean, I've done it, you can. Although it's hard to see the corners. But they're like, this is for watching movies or playing games

or working on, you know, I don't know, spreadsheets. You don't want the person sitting next to you on the plane to see, I guess. I mean, this is because this is Virtual Boy Syndrome. That Virtual Boy would have been okay if you hadn't called it VR, you call it VR and everyone expected something that it wasn't. Right. So the thing about using this, though, I think the longest I've used it at a stretch is probably just under two hours.

But even people that have used it for like five minutes, You take it off and you forget that this thing is shooting light beams into your eyeball. And so, you know, when you, like, glance at a light bulb for a little bit too long or, like, you, like, look at the sun for a second and then you, like, see spots, your entire field of vision becomes that big rectangle of the screen you were staring at. So everything is sort of, like, behind this weird white haze. You have the feeling that we're just, like, totally building hacks that our body is not capable of receiving. You know, it's like, these are, like, iron blasters for your eyes. And, like, really the answer is just jack something directly into your brain. Like, bypass your shitty eyeballs and go straight in the optic nerve.

I mean, I've been thinking about that with VR a lot of, like, direct brain interfaces with something like the HoloLens, because the ultimate thing is just modifying your reality. Right. No, it's just crazy. It's like, these are hacks, right? Like, we're building all this sensory experience and we're going through interfaces that were meant for reality. It's, like, actually really interesting to me. Yeah.

One of my friends said to me yesterday, just put my phone in my brain already. Yeah. Because I wanted to screencap something that involved reality and also my phone. It was like, oh, I can't. It's not the thing I can do. This isn't. This isn't. This isn't.

How I need you to hide. I need you a height matrix. Did you think about taking a picture of your phone in reality? What it was is that my nail is painted the same color as the Twitter app. And so when I opened it and my thumb was hovering over the Twitter, it was like camouflage. I was like, ooh, this is cool. Wow. Okay.

Real question, though. How do you take a selfie with a brain computer? Ooh. How do you do a video call in VR? Exactly. I've been wondering about this with HoloLens for ages. Oh, right, because they're always showing Skype. Yeah.

Oh, you're just going to look like an idiot. Yep. This is why they have, but this is, they have, like, game studios. One person can see you. No, but they always do it with, like, a connect camera on the wall, and that's what it broadcasts. Is you in the HoloLens? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, there's a real...

I don't know. How do you... This is why they keep doing the demo of the Connect mapping your face under They would reconstruct your face maybe from, you'd scan your face, reconstruct it, and then project you into whatever your eyes were taking a picture of? I don't know. It'd be hard. Yeah, but there's just something there.

There's something deeply creepy and bad about that, right? Or you could just implant a camera on your arm? That's my own, like standard thing. Just stand out with your arm pointing out? Yeah. I do that. What's going to happen at GDC this year? Lots of VR, apparently.

I went through the schedule and it usually, like there are all the sort of of normal things that are going to be really fun. There's a game design challenge where you're supposed to build a game that you play over the course of 30 years. Whoa. The boyhood of games. Yes. A few years ago it was like a game, it was the last game on Earth, and there was

Jason Rohrer's game that was buried out in the desert somewhere. He didn't know the rules. So there's always that thing. That's going to be fun in GDC, but a lot of it's VR. Sony has a VR event. We're probably going to learn how much PlayStation VR costs. This is the thing that's going to make me buy a PS4. Yeah, same. Actually, I'm going to buy a PS4, or this I've decided. Because PlayStation's view is better than Sling TV.

No. And my Xbox 1 is just turned into the crash-use piece of garbage with the new dashboard. The dashboard quits behind my games. So it like errors out behind my games all the time now. And then the game starts glitching as the dashboard restarts. It's the most annoying thing. And you're like, oh, the game's screwing up. I'll just go to the dashboard and come back.

Then I push the button. The dashboard's crashed. Like, I'm going to go buy a PS4 on my way home. tonight. Because I need, I've been testing this glyph out on the Xbox and I want to get 3D on the PS4. Oh yeah. That's thing. Anyway, so PlayStation VR.

PlayStation VR. Oculus has a bunch of stuff throughout the early part of the show. So there were VR, like in VR building versions of game editors like Unreal that were announced a few months, like weeks ago, and they're going to show up at GDC. Yeah. So if you want to build

game levels inside virtual reality, by walking around inside the game levels. Hmm. Oh, that makes sense. Which, it either makes sense or it doesn't make sense. Like, that Wissywig isn't the way that everybody wants to do everything. That, like, sometimes you want to play with, like, you want to mess with numbers and you want to type things and you want to be able to do things very precisely. Yeah, but you also want to democratize the tool, right?

I mean, like, if nobody knows what the stuff is going to be, then you've got to democratize the tool on the way you're... Right, like, Wizzie Wig is like a democratizing. I'm not sure that this is ultimately democratizing. though, because it's not that much harder to look at a model in unity and spin it around with your mouse than to get in there and physically move it with a controller. Right. Like the idea is that you're supposed to be able to do things like C-scale. Yeah. Which could be useful, and I think something that just let you pop in and out would be really interesting because that's what people are doing already.

But it's hard to say whether you want to actually build a level inside VR. You know what they need is a VR headset where the screen flip. up so you can actually pop in and out with like, because it's really hard. The Gear VR has a button you can hit for a pass-through camera. Yeah, but you're not going to sit at a computer like coding a thing and then hit like through the pass-through. I did that. I can't read the screen though because the cameras.

I will say this. This is the, Addy, and I don't mean this is sound weird. This is the longest I've looked at your face in like months. And Addie sits like right across me. It's been like weeks. Weeks. I mean, she's had a VR headset on her face nonstop for weeks. But you add a non-stop for weeks.

But you add a number of weeks together to get months. Well, I have like 10 cards boards on my desk right now. Yeah, it's like, I mean, Adi is, I just say this, like, the deepest in the VR game of almost any reporter I know. And, like, just always, the other night I was in the office super late. And I was walking out and it was just Addy, just clicking around in VR. You should just playing Fruit Ninja. Yeah, for a long time. Just making some noise in there.

Just doing it. Having fun. Yeah, like you do. We got to talk about the next thing. You want to talk Phantom or Echo? Do you want to talk about five seconds about, about, Tango and your theory about Tango? Oh, so my theory about Tango is that for VR to work, you need laser towers or an external

camera to have it be really immersive, and that's called Addie told me this outside in, but that what everybody really wants is inside out where the thing on your face itself is able to map the room around you. And it turns out that there are already Android devices that do that. It's Project Tango. We tried it last year at Google I.O. there's a Lenovo phone shipping this summer that's going to have it built in. There's a Qualcomm reference phone.

And everybody knows that Google just put a guy named Clay Bavore in charge of this whole new VR division, and he's really good at his job. And so we're expecting Google to finally get into the VR game in a very real way. And it seems to me like they've already got all the pieces they need to build a VR thing that lives in between the mid-range gear VR and the hinder. end Oculus stuff. The Wall Street Journal says that they're making a standalone thing, and then there's also, like, they might make one that has the cameras on it, and then you can stick a phone in it.

So my theory is they'll make a standalone VR headset, whatever, it'll be relatively cheap, but they'll also make a slightly cheaper one, I don't know, call it $150, where it has the tango cameras in it. Yeah. And then you plug your Android phone into it, and then you get the, like, spatial movement and recognition that you get out of a high-end VR headset but without the external cameras and it'll work off of an Android phone

running the next version of Android, which is N. Yeah, Nutella. Nugget. Nugget. Nuggett. Yeah. Nuget's the name of Ornigot's cat, so I think we're all betting on Nuget. Do it make sense? It makes sense to you? Yeah, I think that's super smart. I think all in ones

are a bit of a more complicated proposition. Like, all the ones I've ever seen have been terrible. Right. And you have a phone, like, why not put it in? So if something would use any Android phone, any new one would be amazing. Well, I think they have to sell an all-on-one, because in order for this to work,

I think they need Android N, and it's going to take a while for that to get out there. So the only thing it would work with our Nexus phones for a while anyway. So they may as like, if they could like make one of these for relatively cheap. But they couldn't. It would be way more expensive.

Well, they'd pull out the cellular phone processor. They'd like, they'd make it external storage so they don't need to put a ton of storage into it so that bring the price down. They'd basically just bring the price down on like all the standard phone junk that you usually need. They could buy a cheap,

big huge battery because it's already strapped to your face. They don't need to spend a lot of engineering work to make all the components really thin. Yeah. They don't need to spend a ton of engineering work and spend all the money and make everything really small and fit compactly. I don't know. So you're talking about something that has like an external pack and then you connect it. No, I think it just all fit in there. Just like when you engineer a phone, you got to make everything tiny and small.

But when you engineer a headset, you've got like a little more room to play with. I don't know. It makes it really heavy. Yeah. I don't know. I didn't think they were going to make a standalone, but the Wall Street Journal does. So, like, I'm just guessing based on what the Wall Street Journal said. No, I think they could be, but I think it's going to, it's like more of a reference design thing.

Oh, that makes sense. It is Google I-O. Like, they got to get it out there so that developers know how to code to it. What's they've been doing already with Tango. Who knows? You could be right. I'm not sure. But you've got to get Nicola to try all these things.

I've had to try all these things. You're missing out. Yeah, come up to the vibe afterwards. Yes, afterwards, and you should write about it. You have a fish out of water, like, first experience story right here. The thing is you'll be in the water because there's an ocean experience in VR. So you'll be a fish out of water in the water. Did you see that magic leap whale thing?

Which one? There was like the demo of like people in the high school gym and they're like presumably all wearing magic leaps and like the whale like a blue whale like jumps out of the basketball court and like splashes down. Wasn't that another like early promo material when they got bought by, not bought by, uh, and tested in by Google? I just thought it was all over yesterday. It was like one of those things.

Like it was one of those things where I was just repopped up in my Facebook feed. I'm very skeptical of magic leap. They do make a lot of insane promises. Yeah. Yeah. That's about it. All right. We've got to talk about Amazon.

Then I'm going to read that and then we've got a lightning around. Then we're going to wrap this up. Amazon. Amazon. Two products that they announced today. One is called the Amazon TAP, which is a Bluetooth speaker, portable Bluetooth speaker. But it's basically an echo that you can pick up and walk around with. It's $130.

And you can't just bark at it from across the room. You've got to push the button to make it work. And nobody seems that excited about it compared to the other thing I announced. I don't care about one because I need a new Bluetooth speaker because my jambox is just falling, just not, doesn't make noises anymore. It's battery lasts about 30 seconds. Yeah.

So I just need a Bluetooth speaker. And the thing that sold me on the Amazon tap, I kid you not, is it comes with a little circular dock. So instead of like plugging in a USB thing, I can just like set it on the dock. Yeah. And then anytime you go anywhere and you want to charge it, you got to take your little circle.

No, it also has a USB plug. Oh. Yeah. So. Bezos. Right? But it also does all the echo stuff. So as long as it has Wi-Fi, you can pick it up.

So, like, imagine having a Bluetooth speaker. That's nice to have. It's nice to, like, carry out to your deck or, like, into a room where you don't have a speaker or whatever. But instead of, like, pairing your phone to it and then getting your music that way, you just pick it up until it's place of Spotify. What's the reasoning behind not being able to yell at it? Yeah. Oh, because it was battery life. In order to, like, have the omnidirectional six microphone array and, like, have them listening all the time.

Like, that is not cheap in power-wise. Yeah. So they didn't want to, like, have. it kill the battery. So that's why you got a push button. If you want to be LDL this thing from across the room, they also release the echo dot, which is an Amazon Echo, but like lop off the top of it and just keep that. Yeah.

And then you can plug it into a speaker. It also has a tiny little speaker on its own if you, like want to like hear something like it. For an alarm clock. And that is really cool, except Amazon made it. So you can only buy it. No, you can buy it online. People have been tweeting me. Well, you did.

There's a hack. Yeah, there's ways to jump through. Their intention was you're only supposed to be able to buy it if you already have an echo or a fire TV. I'm going to go out and buy one just because I have an echo. But why? I don't know. I mean, I buy everything.

I am furious because today is the day that I ate in the morning I bought an echo. Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding you. You bought an echo literally an hour before they announced new echoes. It was like, and then I came here. No, you bought the right echo. You definitely bought the right one. You don't want the fucking dot.

You don't want the Bluetooth secret where you've got to push the button is stupid. No, but the dot seems like for me. Do you have a speaker to plug it into? Yeah. It's on all the time. No. There you go. Okay, good.

Because the thing is that the regular echo is on back order. And I was like, oh, it's only one place you can get it. This is so weird. I can't get the thing I want. Yeah. You could buy one on eBay, I'm sure. That's true. I can't get the thing I want.

I can't get the thing I want. And yeah, so I bought it this morning and then I came in and found this out. I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. No, it's the dot is a fascinating product. Product. I was going to say problem, a fascinating problem. What no one knows the answer to is if they all talk to each other.

Because the thing that you want is to buy like 50 dots and put them all over your house and have Jarvis, right? Where you're just talking and stuff's listening to you all. But it's not clear to me that, like, New York City apartment, it's like not huge. But presumably I could put a dot in a bedroom and have the regular echo in the kitchen. How far away can you yell at it from? So I can talk to the Alexa in my kitchen. If the door is open and I'm like, I talk loudly, it can hear me. Yeah.

Right. But like how far is that? About as far as you can talk to like a person that's like mildly hard of you. Like as far away as you can talk to me basically. So if I was being ready in the bathroom. I could hear you. I could like fuck my head out and be like, hey, what's the weather? Yeah.

It's like a really good thing. Like that multi-directional microphone array is very good. I know exactly. The other thing that you can do, actually, you can talk to it really far away. If you host a podcast and you yell, Alexa, buy a dot. Then across the country, somebody who's listening to it on a speaker, is scrambling to cancel the order I just made for them. I'm sorry. But here's what I don't know.

And I'm still trying to figure it out. Yeah. Let's hear it. If you have two of them and they can both hear you, which one? Do they both just start answering? Do they both just start independently playing random? Spotify playlist? Why don't we just take the review unit Echo we have home, set them next to each other and see?

Well, no, because those didn't talk to each other, but if you release more particularly the dot, which is designed to be small, like that's how you get an ecosystem of things. It's just no one no one knows the answer to this question. And Amazon has apparently been if they make you own an Echo to buy an Echo dot, they have to figure that out. Which is an insane thing because you're asking the older robot for the newer robot

because you're going to get rid of the older robot. You're not going to get, no, because the new robot doesn't have a speaker. It's so mean. It's like asking it to have a friend. I think they just have limited supply and they're doing something clever. Yeah, that's the... It's a gimmick, right? And everyone's going to do it.

They're going to say, Alexa, buy a dot. Someone sent me the dot thing today and I was like, oh, great. This is great, I'll just cancel the other one. And I kept scrolling all down the whole page. I was like, all right, I got this video. Okay, scroll and I was like, where's the buying button? I don't get it. I like how only Dieter got the troll that I just deeply

trolled everybody with. I got it. No one else, I just said it again. Wait, the dot, by a dot. Yeah. Hey, I didn't, no, I didn't say, I didn't say Alexa. I didn't say something it says. We're so bad.

What? Okay, Google. Sorry. Okay, Google. Play Hotel California. Wow. That is mean. That's not mean.

That's just what you expect from this show now is the Eagles will play us out. So we've been talking about Alexa on the show. A bunch. A lot lately. Lauren just put up a really great piece about it. So what's your, is this, do they just accident into this? Yes. This is actually an ecosystem for them?

It will be. Or is Apple just going to put out one of these things and kill them? They could, except Apple is never going to be as open and friendly to third-party developers for Siri as Amazon has had to be with Alexa. The headline for Lauren's story is like. Their smartphone flop was the best thing that happened to Alexa. Their smartphone failed completely. They had this assistant they wanted to do something with. They made the echo, and they needed it to kind of work.

They needed people to buy it and be interested in it. So they had no choice but to make it super easy and super popular for anybody to make it do stuff, to add those skills to it. So they added if this and that. They made it popular with nerds. Nobody was expecting it to do anything. And so the fact that it was successful at all meant that it looked like a huge thing. success. Like if they had sold as many fire phones as they have sold Amazon Echoes, we would all be making fun of it. Right. Right. We'd be like, oh, this thing that's got like 0.5% market share,

it's a failure. But this doesn't have to compete with phones. This just has to compete with literally nothing. And so it ends up being a success. And so now they've got like a good storyline to build on. They've got good like warm feelings from consumers and developers. And so they can continue to build out this ecosystem and like make these things interoperate. Like the other. The other thing that came out today is Nest is like, yeah, sure, whatever. Go ahead, Alexa, you can control my Nest, I don't care. We're not going to wait for Google to figure

it out, our parent company. But that's not Googly to keep anything locked away. But I will say, so I know what you're talking about, because there's a really great Mark Bergen piece recode. Yes. Where he was like Nest just said fine, and Amazon can be the intermediary

before. Because Nest is a smart home company. They're supposed to be the ones building this stuff. Yep. And there's this really great. It's anonymous, but I trust Mark, it's well sourced. Quote where it's like, having a Google device in your house that is always listening to you would be too creepy. So Google

is like, we need to separate ourselves from the Nest product. Would you like let a Google speaker that listen to you all the time into your home? Like I think people like... Yeah, it freaks people out. Well, yeah. You have your phone, but yeah. Well, yeah.

The phone isn't always listening in the way that Alexa is like really deep like Alexa is creepy Always listening shit So does Google Okay Google Play out of talk huh Hey Siri

Yeah Hey Siri never works That shit just doesn't work Hey Siri Wow It just doesn't work Yeah On the 6P

Okay Google doesn't work either Yeah But I think that's actually a thing Like And that's why I think This Echo Bluetooth speaker Kind of gets it wrong Right

Because if you're gonna press a button, you might as well press the button on your phone. Yeah, I don't know. Like the secret to the echo is that it demands nothing of you. You plug it in and it's just there. But this is why I like the Bluetooth speaker version of it, the tap, is the thing that I hate, one of the reasons I don't listen to music is I'm not in the room where my good speaker is.

And I don't want to pull up my phone, open up Bluetooth, pair it to the thing, make sure the thing is on and ready to be paired to and fully charged, then go open to Spotify and then pick my music. If I could just pick up a speaker and say, play me some music and set the damn thing down, I'm going to listen to music all the time. What? I just got to just figure it out that that's the use case for it. Oh. Yeah, it's a music stick. It's a, like, it's a thing you can pick up and command to play Spotify at you. But can't you do that with your phone? Yeah, but this is a louder speaker. Yeah. And like, I'm going to, I'm going to keep it in my room. I'm going to pick it up. I'm going to, like, carry it into the bathroom. I take a shower. I'm going to have a

play NPR in the morning and then I'll set it back on its little dock I don't have to re-plug it back in to make sure it's charged I'm telling you this is the better one but don't you have a regular echo so yeah but I'm not gonna put the regular echo in the bathroom I'm not a monster no but like you pick up the thing you're like walking out of wherever it's charging you push the button you're like play some NPR and the regular echo hears you yeah and then everything starts like like they need to know maybe all the echoes like whichever whichever echo hears it loudest oh they only do Oh, right?

Yes. So one, right now you can call one Amazon. They have like multiple names for them. You can say, you can use Echo. Yep. You can use Amazon. I don't think you can use Echo. You can use Echo.

You can use Echo now? Yeah. So that's three. But you need more names. What we need is like luxurious names for a voice activated products. I'm calling mine Horatio. Yeah. Right?

Like you need to be able to specify name. No, wait. I'm calling mine Yorick. This is the new baby name. No way. I'm called my Cortros. 2016, the new baby name. Only names from Hamlet.

Wait, why can't you name your echo? Why can't you pick the name out? I mean, you should be able to literally set any repeatable noise. Mine is Jared. I don't know why. I have no idea. I think that the reason is that they have to really test what the computer is able to understand in multiple situations. So apparently when Google was choosing its phrase, they went through a bunch of ideas before they landed on OK Google because OK Google is really easy for a computer to recognize from far.

Because a lot of phones just recognize that shit. Hey Siri, still doesn't work. Hey Siri, does not. Do you have it on? Of course I have it on. Hey, Siri. Anyway, are you going to buy one of these, Addy? Why?

I've just been, like, the past 20 minutes. No, I don't have a speaker system. I can shout to anything to anything in my apartment, and there are only interesting things in one room of my apartment. Right. Like, I guess I could have something for my kitchen, because that's the only thing that's really separated. That's where I keep mine.

But why wouldn't I just use headphones? Oh, it wants me to reset up. Hey, Siri. Well, we're clearly not doing this here. Is that hair on your face, Dieter? Yes, it is. You should shave it off. I will.

How will I do that? Using Harry's Razor. Guys, everybody knows good things come in sets of three. What does this have to do with anything? Here's some words that explain that. Get this, March is the third month of the year. And it also happens to be our friends over at Harry's third anniversary. And today is March 3rd.

If you're new to Harry's, I've got a special deal for you. Try three. They're expertly crafted five blade German razors. Should have cut it down to three for this promotion. No, but you want five. If you buy, okay, never mind. Look, whatever. You sign up for Harry's.

You get three five blade German razors. You get a handle. You get shaving cream. Costs $10. Deeter. Although I've seen Dieter without a beard. I'm not sure that I... Look, I got rid of the...

glasses, everybody freaked out, but now no one talks about it anymore. Yeah. The next step is to shave the face. Yes, and then you're head. And then I will look 12 again, which is how I ought to look. I was, I haven't shaved my face in, like, easily five years. But when I did, it was a Harry's man. Oh, yeah.

That was five years ago. They only turned three. We just said it. No, but there was a time when, like, I regularly shaved, and that was a Harry's man. I really like the Harry's, I like their face scrub, personally. Right, and you think people should sign up for Harry's and buy the face scrub? Yeah, add it to your cart. I don't know.

Anyway, it was a good shave. Like, they actually make great razors. You should try the products. You should just get into it. Harry's is the only shaving company that has both amazing quality and low prices. They're German engineered, five-way cartridges. You get a close, comfortable shave. There's no cuts or burns.

There's a face scrub that is fucking excellent from what I can tell. And the quality is guaranteed. And there's a full refund if you're not happy. And the prices are low, right? It's direct from the factory. There's no middleman. It shifts right to your door. The blades are half the price of the leading brand.

Leading brand also garbage quality, in my opinion. Over one million guys have already made the switch. Nicola, at least one lady, scrubbing her face. Yeah. And thousands of more switch every day. So, why pay $32 from an eight pack of blades when you can get up for half the price at harries.com? Harry's starter set, amazing deal.

For $15, you get a razor. You get a moisturizing shave cream. You have three razor blades. Harry's doesn't discount. The price is already low. but it's the Vergecast. There's a deal for you. You get $5 off your first order

with promo code Verge. That's V-E-R-G-E. Stop overpaying for a great shave. Go to Harries.com right now. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com. And enter. What's that offer code? V-E-R-G-E.

Verge. And buy some face grab. Get the face grab. Get in there. What, it's, you know, it's for you. You know, we get a lot of notes about the ad reads. and how they're not good.

For who? Everybody. Just like people. Literally everybody. People who wish they had ads in the podcast. People who breathe. But, I mean, people know that, I mean, whatever. But you listen to them because you want to see exactly when I'm going to drive this truck directly off the bridge. Right.

You want to know when that 18 wheeler is about to just careen off the bridge, hit the ground, explode in a million pieces, and then explode again. Harry's. The next storyline is like, do they come back? Will Harry's come back? They all come back. What was that one? on cloud services company.

They started tweeting at me. They were so happy. Anyway. Oh, cloud layer, motherfuckers. I mean, it's got a ring. Yeah. Those are free ad scenes. They're going to come back now.

You have an amazing future in advertising. I do not. No. Because of the journalism. But no, whatever. Terry's is great. Squarespace, my favorite. If you were going to start a website

about shaving, it would be a website on Squarespace. We should connect the hairiest people to scorace-based people. They should know each other. Offer code verge, everybody. Hey, Derek. Derek? Yeah.

Hey, Cortana. Derek? You just tweeted at me. Derek? No, there's a guy named Derek who's mad that we trolled Siri, we told Google, we trolled Alexa, we haven't trolled Cortana yet. Hey, Cortana. That's fair.

Derek, I hope you're happy. You're welcome. I'm going to name my Alexa Derek. Jared and Derek. That's what I want. Jared and Derek are literally the worst names for your intelligence assistants. I really avoid them. Hey, but they are best friends in their frat.

Yeah, they are. They were. They were. Don't be so mean to her? Don't you wish you look good in white jeans? Derek and Jared don't. They're guys who wear white jeans. That's on saying.

I think they have backwards baseball hats, but they're like not cool baseball hats. But they will play Spotify for you, the drop of the hat. Sorry. Anyway. Why would you give them those names? I don't know. it just came to me. You gotta go with your cut.

What would you name yours? I already told you. Horatio. Oh, my God. Addie? No, wait. No, wait.

Rosencrantz. No, wait. Guildenstern. Well, you'd have, presumably you'd have two. And they would argue. Right. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Definitely. I mean, I'd have to name mine like neuromancer then or something. Wintermute. Oh, there you go. And then they would argue. Yeah. But wouldn't one have to subsume the other at some point?

Yeah, but then only they'd form a gigantic. sort of quasi-vudu entity that would control the entire internet. It's really unclear what happens at the end of that book, isn't it? Yeah, well, try the third book. It took me like five reads to be able to half explain that plot of Mona Lisa Overdrive. All right, I'll try it. I just read seven eaves. Oh, yeah, I got through like 50 pages of that.

Oh, you gave up on it? I don't blame it. I don't blame it. I don't know. Did you finish it? Yeah, it's rough. It's real long. Yeah.

It's very long. It's very long, and then there's like an extra little tiny book that's terrible added at the very end. Yeah, but that tiny little extra book is like kind of the whole point. Yeah, I know. Like, you could cut out easily. Wait, can I skip to that book then? Yeah, no.

I mean, you really. You really could. You could read the last, you could read the first chapters. You could read the first like 200 pages and the last 50 pages. No, no, no, you got to read some middle pages. So you can read the first 20 pages. I'm not going to spoil anything. These are literally the first words of the book. The moon blew up

unexpectedly without warning. You're like, I got it. I got it. I promise you I did not spoil anything. It is, they're the first words of the book. You read through that, you read through the part where they like understand,

then you like skip way ahead to the end of that piece and then you like read the little book at the end. And then all of the... There's some good stuff in the middle. Yeah, but it's like... No, there's some stuff. You know a Game of Thrones is like

just a series of, Diner's things happening. It's just all dinners. It's my new show pitch for HBO. It's like a series of dinners interspers with murders. So here's what I'm thinking. It's a bunch of New York, hip New Yorkers. And they have dinner every so often.

But in between the dinners. In between the dinners. They eat at their desk every day. It's a fantasy. It's a bunch of hit New Yorkers eating at their desks. Every now and again, they discuss dinner, but don't know where to go, so they don't go anywhere. Every couple episodes, half of them die. That's the whole show.

Newty workers are all constantly being introduced and telling jokes until they do die. Anyway, so 7-Eaves is like, read that first part, then there's like a revelation that you should like know about. There's some like cool like space survival stuff in the middle that is a bummer to miss. But it takes, it's like 15% of the middle 800 pages is good. Can somebody just make me a guide of like which pages of 7thes I should read? But then I'd have to read it again. I read it on my Kindle and I literally thought, I'm going to wear out this button because I've turned so many pages on the Kind of. See, I think I would have actually been better with the physical book because then I could have at least felt like the physical passage of it.

Yeah, you know how on a Kindle it tells you percentage of the book in time left. Yep. It's like, oh, right, so it does. So it tells you, like it tries to guess how fast you read. But it doesn't, in 70s, it doesn't take account for skimming endless technical description. so it keeps on getting it wrong. It's like, you have two minutes left. And it's like, no, dude, I definitely just blew that.

No, the worst part of the cable stuff is like, I read books that have lots of footnotes. And so it's like, you are 30% through the book. I'm like, oh, God, this is going to be, oh, I'm done. What happened? Oh, see, I account for that. Oh, do you, like, check to see where the footnotes start? No, I read the, figure out the tone of the book, and I'm like, how many footnotes is this book going to have?

All right, we got to do lightning around, and we're going to wrap this up. Let's start with this. There was a VR fashion show. No, it hasn't happened yet. It's on Sunday. Valenciaaga has a brand new designer, and they have decided to stream their fashion show in virtual reality.

It's in Paris, so it'll be, in New York, I will be awake at 5.30 a.m. watching it on my humble Google cardboard. Why are you watching the cardboard when we have 10,000 better headsets to watch it on? I don't think you can watch it on the Vive.

We can watch it probably in a gear VR. Yeah, we could do that. Yeah. Do I have that at my house at 5.30 in the morning on Sunday? I mean, you can. Yeah. Okay. I don't watch it on.

Anyways. We got better shit now. Anyway. But it's kind of, I mean, it's obviously like a splashy move. They're like, ooh, we've got a new designer. And we're going to do this thing because no one else has streamed in VR their fashion show. But they've not done it live. They've streamed non-live.

But then it's streaming and live? Don't you have to be live? No. No, it's like streaming like Netflix. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, Daredevil is not live. Okay. I think.

That'd be amazing. All right, get in the hallway again, everybody. You're just going to... That really explains the action now. If Daredevil was live, that would 100% explain the acting. Anyway... Just like super lazy. Anyway.

Oh, Murdoch, don't hurt anybody. Oh, God. Sorry. I'm sorry, Nick. Oh. Wow. Wow. She's real mad at you. Go ahead.

This is your show. No, I'm done. Is that everything I need to say? No, you haven't, clearly. No, I'm done. All right. So we're fighting. We both drank a bucket of wine.

I drink half of my bucket. All right. Kanye's new album is called TurboGraphics 16. Sounds real net art. Yeah. But I'm into it. If there is a reason the verge exists, it's for a major rapper.

His name is console after 80s, 90s game consoles. I bet their price is just way up on eBay. Scott Belly. Scott Kelly is back from Earth. Yay. Apparently. He's taller and younger and younger.

I'm going to space. Yeah, NBA players. Like, I've got to go to space. I mean, technically it makes you weaker because it's just stretching out your spine and it comes back and you get shorter. Because I was really disappointed when I found that out. Microsoft's Astoria project put... I have so many feelings about this.

Go ahead. I don't think I can fit them all in the later. Just explain what a story is. So it was their project so that Android apps could work on Windows phone and possibly Windows 10. It was named after the neighborhood that I live in. And so, of course, it was doomed from the start. Yeah.

You know, actually, I like, I really, I really like Astoria. Also, why can nobody make Android work on desktops, except for that one company? Remix OS. Remix OS. I know. I got to say, I brought this pink VioP, and I love the hardware so much, and it tells me with joy, and Chrome OS is so slow. Well, on that thing.

Well, it's because the graphics card isn't supported. Yeah. I'm doing my old MacBook Pro 15, like, one of the, one of the ones that had the last CD drives. I'm switching it to Chrome OS. Yeah. Joanna did a black MacBook and she loves it. What else we got here?

iPad Pro 9.7. Apparently they're going to call it an iPad Pro instead of like iPad Air 3 or whatever. And that means it's going to have a pencil. Apparently it's going to have a better screen for reflection. And they're also going to call the iPhone, the new iPhone, the iPhone, the iPhone SE instead of putting a five in there. But it's still going to be small. It's a small phone. We've been over this.

Well, just do it. It's a lining around. I don't care. Strike. I mean, it's fine. But it's not for me. I love my Xbox. I can't wait.

Addie, Xbox console upgrades, which to me sounds like a very bad idea. I mean, yeah, I really don't know why you would still buy an Xbox. Wow. Yeah. You can play Oculus on it. You can play Quantum Break. We just found out more about Quantum Break.

Yeah, that's true. Oh, yeah. All right. I mean, whatever. Any thoughts on the Apple legal case, the FBI case, which to me, by the way, still the most important story. tech, but I just can't talk about it anymore than I've been talking about it already.

No, it is absolutely major, and the problem is that it's kind of like the election that I'm not sure I want to know what everyone else thinks about it. Yeah. Yo, that's real. Yeah. Yeah, here's one for you. Supercars of the Geneva Auto Show.

All the supercars were there, every single one. Bugatti Sharon's beautiful. I agree with Chris that the new Lama is like, yeah. Yeah. You should watch the snap. Well, I guess it's over, but we had great snaps from the auto show.

Phil Esposito, adorable one around supercars, super good. I don't know, I think there's a lot to be said about cars that don't all look the same and have different kinds of engines in them. And every time I think about the Apple car, it's like, they're kind of betting on the same thing as the iPhone, which is everyone will standardize around one thing. But I don't think cars are, I don't think cars are the same way. You see that, I forget the Hyundai car? You see the story about this week?

The Ionic. Yeah. It's like, you can buy it as a hybrid. You could buy it as an electric that you can replace a battery. You could buy it as this other thing. We'll do whatever. It doesn't matter. It's a real Samsung of cars.

Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. It's modular. It's like the LGG5 of cars. Yeah. It's got a camera grip. That's terrible.

Okay. That's it. Is that it? Lightning round over. Make a lightning sound. Do you have any lightning round items for us? Lightning doesn't make sound thunder does. Well, if they're related though, technically, I mean.

Lightning, it's the same thing. just one comes to you later. I'm just saying. The thunder is the sound of the light. What's the lightning sound? Thunder. Oh. I think Dieter's point was right then.

Really? No, I think what Dieter can refer to? You guys don't understand. You see the lightning and then you hear the thunder later because it's the same. Yeah, but it's not a lightning sound. It's the sound of thunder. I mean, we can all agree that my point still stands because words and concepts don't make noise, mouths and things in the world do.

Technically your mouth isn't making the noise. They're not really though. It's the vibration of the air. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the lightning itself doesn't make the noise. It's the disruption it causes to the air around it. Listen to the air, everyone.

That's it. Look, this is a Vergecast. I'm not actually speaking right now. I'm just causing the air to vibrate in your car. Yo, buddy. You just got to actually. By who? Me.

No, it's the same thing. If you like to follow us. Oh my God. Please tweet at Backline and explain to him that thunder is the sound of lightning. No, thunder is the sound of lightning. No, Thunder is the word that represents the sound of lightning. It's later. It's the same thing.

No, the word is not identical with the concept it represents. They wouldn't be separate words and things. If they were the same, then they wouldn't have separate definitions. No. No, this is just because old-timey people didn't understand that light and sound traveled at different speeds. So you see the lightning first because light travels way faster. and then you hear the sound made. How can you hear a thing that you see, Eli?

Explain that to me. I'm seeing you right now. Wish I wasn't hearing you. Sorry. That was just like... All right. It must be over. It's the same thing.

Follow us on Twitter. We're at verge, which shouldn't be a surprise to you, given how... Disasterous. ...hour and a half. We're also on Snapchat. If you miss a Geneva Auto Show, I'm very sorry, but there are more awesome snaps coming.

We are Verge there. We're also on Instagram. Also, Verge. It's pretty consistent. We're also on iTunes. It's iTunes.com slash The Verge where you'll find a ton of podcasts, including what's tech, control, Walt, delete, and Verge ESP. And there's also, Rico.

It's got a couple podcasts. You should check out, too. You can follow us on YouTube. That's cool to do. Verge. Yeah, subscribe there. I am Backlon. Neil is Reckless.

Adi is the Dextery. Is that the right way to say that? Yeah, that is. Sweet. And Nicola is Nicola Fuma with an underscore. Between my first and last names. Right in there. I'm just, it's the same.

Let's all go try the vibe. Rock and roll. We're going to put Nicola in a VR headset. Goodbye. Bye.