Welcome to What We’re Reading, Marxent’s weekly series featuring staff members highlighting the best articles, videos, music and more they saw over the prior 7 days. This week, those finds included stories from CNET, TechCrunch, the New York Times, and many more. Up first, it’s …
The Best Thing We Read This Week:
We’re still months away from the start of the NFL season, but training camp begins in just a few weeks and several teams are looking to Virtual Reality to give them an edge on the gridiron. TechCrunch’s Mark Lelinwalla takes an in depth look at how teams are using VR tech in his piece, “Virtual Reality Training Ramps up for the 2016 NFL Season,” pointing out that the 2016 season will most likely see a majority of teams using VR for training — up from exactly zero just a few years ago.
The Best Book We Read This week:
In preparation for the upcoming Starz! adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” Marxent Marketing Creative Director Joe Johnson has been re-reading the source material. “There are a lot of things to be said for ‘American Gods,’ but anything I could say would be wholly insufficient — I’ll let the New York Times Review of Books do it instead: ‘Neil Gaiman’s new book is a noirish sci-fi road trip novel in which the melting pot of the United States extends not merely to mortals but to a motley assortment of disgruntled gods and deities.’”
Best Deep Thinking We Did This Week:
Graphic Designer Gabbi Hardin shared this article on innovation. “I think this really applies to what we do at Marxent,” she explains. “We solve problems, we don’t just come up with iterations on what’s already out there.”
At Marxent, we do a lot of development work on Unity, and the team is always reading up on the platform to sharpen existing skills and learn new ones. Unity has put together this tutorial for one of their recent demos, “The Courtyard,” which Product Manager Vince Kilian calls, “required reading for any Unity developer or 3D artist who contributes content to our Unity-powered apps.”
Nick Kizirnis, Marxent’s Lead, Product Management & UX Strategy highlighted, “Five Ways Customer Journey Can Transform Your Business,” by Steve Offsey. “Really good article on designing customer journeys to incorporate different aspects of your research,” Nick explains. “We’ve recently started using Customer Journey Maps, and so this article arrived just in time to both validate and inspire that work.”
Marxent Sales Director Marcus Athari was scanning his Twitter feed recently when he came across, “Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance.” “It’s a Harvard Business Review piece on ‘Primal Leadership,’ which is presumably the latest logical evolution of the Emotional Intelligence Theory.”
But Wait, There’s More …
Virtual Reality tour of beautiful, scenic Norway? There’s an app for that.
Hungry? Perhaps CNET can get your stomach rumbling with this headline: “Virtual Reality: It’s what’s for dinner — The latest aspect of our lives to undergo a high-tech overhaul is the way we eat food.” Ok, so we’re not going to be eating 3D models of food anytime soon, but this is still a creative and amusing application for VR.
Remember the game “Second Life?” It’s coming back … this time in Virtual Reality.
Lenovo is telling CNBC that, Bendy phones that wrap around wrists could be reality in 5 years. Flexibility is a plus, after all.
Want to monitor a disaster area in Virtual Reality? DARPA does, and it’s developed a virtual eye that uses two cameras to capture a VR view in real time.
And Finally …
Nintendo has taken the plunge into Augmented Reality gaming with Pokemon Go, and it seems the launch is not going as smoothly as the Big N would have hoped. We hope that the early descriptions of the release as “a complete disaster” (that was Forbes, by the way), prove to be momentary growing pains, as the game looks cool. Some of us are now playing it, and we’ll get back to you with our impressions soon.
