Hey, look! More cool stuff I can't afford!

In my general perusals of the internet, I've stumbled across a little gadget that I'm finding myself somewhat taken with.

And, if the pledges it's racking up on Kickstarter are anything to go by, I'm not the only one.

The video on it's Kickstarter site is really comprehensive. Obviously, that bit is designed to convince me it's a good thing, that it's worth backing, and so it will have some element of bias in it. But until the thing has been finished and reviewed, it's all I've got by which to judge it.

Regardless of how the actual gadget turns out, I have fallen in love with the concept at it's core.

The Light Phone, invented by a company called Light, is a credit-card sized gadget that only receives phone calls.

Which sounds a bit useless. But there is a lot more behind it.

It's not a replacement for your smartphone. It's for when you want a break from it.

It works with the phone you already have. You download the app, you leave your phone at home. You don't have to put up with notifications from Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat or whatever else you have installed on your smartphone that will inevitably buzz at just the right time to interrupt an important conversation or ruin the mood.

More importantly, your friends don't. Or colleagues or boss or interviewer or lover. Or whoever else gets irritated when your face is in a screen all the time you spend with them.

Your phone calls get redirected from your phone to your Light Phone, so that if there is something really important happening, you can still be contacted. People can still get through to you in emergencies.

But that's it.

You don't have to deal with the rest of that crap. You don't have to worry about Twitter notifying you that someone else said something that doesn't pertain to you at all, and perhaps not even interest you in the slightest. Which my Twitter has been doing recently. I don't like it.

I do like the Light Phone.

I know I'm broke right now, but I'm contemplating getting one. Even though there are a load of other Kickstarters I want to back that I could get more stuff from for less money. Even though I'm skint enough to buy basically only Morrisons own brand food.

And pretty much everyone I know except my nan (who doesn't have a smartphone, so is still good company) will be getting one for Christmas.

I'm twenty two years old. My generation is the one that suffers most severely from smartphone addication. I think I'm reasonably distanced from my gadgets. I recently went a week without a laptop and craved Blogger more than anything else. I'm happy leaving my phone at home when I go out. But I am close to a lot of people who can't handle doing those things. Who will be sitting in a room full of close friends and stare at their phones.

I want one, even if it just to ward off potentially ending up like that.

And I want other people to have one. I want to not feel like a third wheel when I'm hanging out with one friend. Ever.

I love that this thing is so close to existing. It's cute and it's cool and, if it all goes right, could be saviour of many, many relationships.

Please Don't Die, Kickstarter

Why does everything I love collapse and die?

I think Kickstarter, and its crowdfunding allies (indiegogo, Patreon, and so on), are incredible. I love that someone thought them up. I love how they're used. Mostly. I love, basically, the whole idea of crowdfunded and crowdsourced work.

Personally, I love it from an artsy perspective, because everything I learn about every creative industry makes me hate it more. Seriously, don't bother going after a creative career unless you're willing to either put in all the work yourself or compromise every artist value you have. I am getting closer and closer to a sincere belief that dealing with the established media is like making pacts with every evil entity from every religion and superstition man has ever dreamed up.

Or maybe it's not all that bad and I'm just upset. But my exaggerations come from a legitimate foundation.

Crowdfunding, to me, seemed like a way around all of that. It was a way of letting people choose what they wanted to consume, rather than being forced to drink the generic toilet-water Simon Cowell expects us to accept as 'art'.

I adored everything about it. Immediately. I followed Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter adventure religiously. I've backed loads of projects on Kickstarter - music, films, games - and even when I can only offer a few pounds, I like how much more involved backers are made to feel. For instance, creators will send regular email updates on projects that have more meaning that just to sell you more crap. They write in such informal, friendly tones that you really feel their gratitude. The distance between artist and consumer, when broadened by the industry middle man, only looks wider when you've got the communal feeling of a crowdfunded project to compare.

And then I backed a project called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a PC game based on an H. P. Lovecraft story. It was a high-profile project that get over 100,000 views in the first couple of days, not to mention shares on FaceBook and Twitter by all kinds of people. By rights, it should have done insanely well. It should have hit its goal with no trouble at all.

Instead, it got fewer than 2000 backers. Which is pitiful.

The makers of the game sent regular progress updates to everyone who pledged, thanking them for their involvement and generosity and letting them know how things were going.

On 30th October 2014, they sent their final update. It thanked everyone who had been willing to help, and regretfully informed us that the project had fallen through. It explained how they had gone about their Kickstarter campaign in huge amounts of detail - there was practically no way they could have generated more interest in their game. They tried to fathom where it had all gone wrong.

They seemed forced to conclude "Kickstarter is dying".

This is definitely something I did not want to believe, but they offered some really good statistics to back their arguments. They did everything right, but crowdfunding had failed.

And this breaks my heart.

As someone who, one day, would like to make a living doing something creative, and who thinks our arts industry is horrifically broken, I was really excited about crowdfunding.

I am well aware that it had its problems, its kinks that needed fixing. There are plenty of 'crowdfunding gone wrong' stories floating around. There are plenty of people ready to use honest crowdfunding platforms to abuse the generosity of others.

But, at its core, it is a beautiful thing.

And even the slightest suggestion that people have already given up on it disappoints the hell out of me.

The Future of Gaming is Oculus Rift!

Given the advances of gaming technology in recent years, there is little left preventing us really getting into the virtual world of our games.

Now Oculus VR has developed a virtual reality headset which is said to have the potential to hugely shift gaming as we know it a step closer to that ideal, which is especially impressive as it began life as a project on Kickstarter. It managed to raise nearly two and a half million US dollars and has been doing some pretty awesome shit with it.

Specifically, this awesome shit:

The Oculus Rift got loads of attention at its CES debut this year and was said by TechRadar.com to "easily surpass every other virtual reality headset". It is designed to make the player feel like they are actually in the virtual world, rather than looking at a flat screen or even a 3D screen. This will mean that gameplay changes will be necessary to implement the "head-tracking" technology, but that sounds nothing less than amazing and definitely not much of a sacrifice.

The technology works by providing a separate image for each eye, in the same way that eyes work in real life. The visuals that this creates have already been described as being "extremely fluid and natural" (TechRadar) and update at a pace of 60 frames per second. However, it does have the potential to cause unpleasant nausea in people who suffer from motion sickness. Oculus VR's representatives say that this is common among first-timers, but that most players get used to it.

Testing the developer kit

At the moment, a developer kit is being built so that the prototypes can be tested. For the time being, it has relatively low resolution (720p rather than 1080p) but, according to the Oculus VR website, apparently still "delivers a compelling, immersive 3D VR experience". The resolution will be improved in time for the launch of the finished product. The current prototypes work only on PC, but there are plans to expand it to mkae it compatible with Xbox, Playstation and Wii consoles in the future.

Sadly, we have missed out on being developers and the Oculus VR website advises against ordering a developer kit (unless you're a really hardcore gamer and want one just for its value as a piece of gaming history), which will be shipped out to testers in April 2013, but the consumer version is promised to "improve on almost every aspect of the developer kit".

In November 2012, it was announced that DOOM 3 BFG Edition and Hawken would be the first official Oculus-ready games. The developers hope that the technology will become popular and get integrated into other new titles and maybe have new games designed specifically for it. There is even talk, in the distant future, of improving the gear so that it can be used for other activities like watching films, although for now it is specifically for gaming.

Something that pleased me about the headset is that it is said to be surprisingly beneficial for the eyes; I have to wear glasses and I put it down to reading by moonlight and letting my eyes relax in front of close screen for many hours longer than is healthy. The Oculus Rift is designed to allow the eyes to focus as they would normally, converged in the distance at all times and able to relax without causing eye strain.

For now, Oculus VR is being somewhat vague about when the Rift will be launched to the consumer market and how much it will cost, but the website is adamant that they are "working tirelessly to make it available as soon as possible" and that it will "deliver the highest quality virtual reality experience at a price everyone can afford".

I personally think that, once this is commercially available and if it is even half as good as it is expected to be, I will retreat for a while from society and resurface some exhausting weeks later greatly dissatisfied by reality.