"Pets" and "Bots"

Good morning everyone. I hope you're all staying occupied during the lockdown. I just wanted to share a few ideas rolling around in my head. I've been brooding over the differences between what virtual pets and bots are in games, VR, and internet life in general.

So, what is a pet? A classic example is Tamagotchi. A web version would be Neopets. These are digital critters that you must groom and feed and pay attention to. Most often you'll find pets in games. Bots, on the other hand, are most often a snippet of code that executes when a particular function happens. Depending on the application that you find a bot in, it either will or won't have a visual representation of itself. So here is my dilemma. I would like to run a few bots that I've been finding online. They're being offered as pets.

I know what you're saying. "But you just made two different distinctions". That's my problem. I don't want to have to "feed and groom" the things, but simpler code isn't as effective. I've always been of the opinion if it's a program, it should be able to tend to itself. If I wanted to tend to a pet, I would get myself a cat. What I'm seeing is the complexity levels of these things are starting to incorporate AI. Now if it has a rudimentary AI, it should know how to tend to itself. I guess I'm going to have to keep looking.

OS Agnostic

Sometimes I can be a dunce. Seriously, I can look at something for hours or days, or in this case, years, and not see the forest for the trees. Then when the dawn comes, it's like a great revelation from God. You'll understand this as you read along.

We're on the edge of Spacial Computing. I refer to it as eXtended Reality. you probably recognize it as plain old Augmented Reality. The whole tech has been percolating for years. There have been a few apps released over the years. Nothing mind blowing, with the possible exception of Pokemon Go. But we're reaching critical mass. The key ingredient will be an Head Mounted Device. I have been championing Vuzix for almost as long as they've been in business. But Apple is in the arena, and as usual, everyone in the industry is sizing up the elephant to see the best way to tackle the beast. Damned hard to take down an elephant.

But what is the crucial feature of ANY hardware device? It's OS. Now I'm partial to Windows. I won't belabor the virtues of Windows over iOS, nor Android over Linux, etcetera. Each is efficient in it's own manner. But I've been casually following the progress of the way Microsoft has been positioning Windows to be the gateway into it's enterprise Azure cloud. The reasoning is to eventually wean companies off of Win XP. And to maybe lock them into Software as a Service. So I let my mind wander. What if, instead of the Win 10 shell, they could use the Win XP shell? Or something even farther back, like Win 98? Or the granddaddy of them all, Win 3.1?

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: Who's to say that we couldn't use a Windows shell in an HMD? And my mind was blown.

Apple will stubbornly stick to it's proprietary iOS, of course. I expect nothing less. But think with me for a moment. All computing devices use a BIOS. Including HMDs. After that, something called the Open AR Cloud kicks in. Or your shell of choice runs in the background. The point I'm making is that regardless of your operating system, a shell is a shell. You can have Android, or windows or linux or any damn thing that can appear on the horizon.

(Edit) I thought I had published this back in October of 2019 when I wrote it. So I'm sending it off now.
(2nd edit) Now the date is showing April. And somewhere else it shows September. Ugh.

Uff Da, Have a Corona!

Yup, I'm still around. I'm weathering the lockdown just like everyone else is. I just wanted to boot up the blog, and maybe start doing weekly posts again. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, everyone stay safe!