When you drive along the deceptively sedate streets of Silicon Valley, there are few hints that all those nondescript office parks and low-rise buildings contain the very future of the planet, but they really do. On a recent trip to tech's epicenter, I found that out firsthand when I got to visit the offices of Meta, the startup that produced the Meta 2 augmented reality headset.
The once blurry and mysterious vision of Magic Leap's future is slowly coming into focus in the present, despite the company's obsessive attempts to keep any and all information under wraps until the next reveal is absolutely necessary. A new tidbit of information hints at an addition to the company's unfolding story that almost no one had accounted for: retail stores.
Apple likes to make their products simple. However, sometimes that simplicity leads to a confusing user-experience. Take the Apple TV, for example. How do you turn it off? Just press the power button, right? Sorry, there is no power button. Okay, so it's like an iPhone and has a nondescript button designated as a power button, right? Nope.
Oftentimes, seemingly insignificant, nondescript features have the most impact on enhancing our Android's usability. A great example is Nougat's inclusion of customizable Quick Settings tiles, which adds greatly to the user experience by letting individuals tailor their expandable status bars to suit their unique needs.
I hesitate to even post screengrabs from this piece. The storytelling by this creative team (dir. David Altobelli & DP Larkin Seiple) is so perfect that taking stills out of context doesn't do it justice. At first, I was disappointed that the automatic thumbnail Vimeo chose was so nondescript but ultimately it's for the best. Here's just a tease:
