I’m the Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting for Nokia, and I’ve been with the company since the glory days of Nokia mobile phone world dominance. I know first-hand what happens when a company focuses exclusively on the technology, not the humans that use it, and how quickly that can lead to disaster. One of the lessons that I see repeated continuously in the field of innovation is that a huge amount of attention gets paid to the new technology, and not nearly enough on how the technology will interact with our existing systems, beliefs, attitudes, and culture. Learning from the mistakes is the best way to make sure that the future doesn’t repeat them!
I wrote...
Interconnected Realities: How the Metaverse Will Transform Our Relationship with Technology Forever
Although Metaverse topics no longer dominate headlines, spatial computing in all of its forms (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality) is still developing rapidly. I wrote Interconnected Realities to explain why this field matters, and how these spatial computing developments will ultimately affect us all. I start with what kinds of Metaverse experiences exist today (there’s a lot more than you realize!), what problems they solve, and which technologies you should be paying attention to the most.
If you’re curious about how the interface between humans and computers is going to change over the next five years, and how this shift is will affect technology, business, and society, Interconnected Realities is the readable, relatable, and enjoyable book for you!
While the term the “Metaverse” usually makes people think of a fully digital, immersive world, my own feeling is that technologies that bring digital information and entertainment into our physical world is a much more powerful and important arena. This leads us to the transformative and still-developing world of Augmented Reality.
David Rose of the MIT Media Lab has been working with Augmented Reality for more than a decade, and Supersight is an overview of what he's seen and what he’s learned in this time.
What I love about Supersight is that while David is clearly as excited about this topic as I am, he’s also a realist, and openly discusses issues and challenges with Augmented Reality. Perhaps most valuable are the 14 Augmented Reality Design Principles that he outlines – super realistic, super useful.
After reading this, you’ll have a very grounded idea of the capabilities and potential of this truly magical new technology that is still in its infancy. And he’s got great Augmented Reality moments embedded all through the book!
For thousands of years, human vision has been largely unchanged by evolution.
We’re about to get a software update.
Today, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Snap, Samsung, and a host of startups are racing to radically change the way we see. The building blocks are already falling into place: cloud computing and 5G networks, AI computer vision algorithms, smart glasses and VR headsets, and mixed reality games like Pokémon GO. But what’s coming next is a fundamental shift in how we experience the world and interact…
If you’ve ever wondered how on Earth Mark Zuckerberg ended up betting his Facebook empire on the unproven technology of Virtual Reality (VR), this is the recent history book for you.
Blake Harris starts with Palmer Luckey, a homeschooled teenager who shrugged off the received wisdom of all of his elders, and just went ahead and built the first commercially viable VR headset. (That’s an amazing story in itself.) And then he got Mark Zuckerberg so excited about this new experience that, yes, Zuckerberg ended up buying Luckey’s company – and eventually forcing him out.
The History of the Future is about technology, business, the consequences of acting on visionary thinking, and, above all, about how technology is ultimately created and developed by human beings.
The dramatic, larger-than-life true story behind the founding of Oculus, its quest for virtual reality, and its founder's contentious battle for political freedom against Facebook, from the bestselling author of Console Wars (now a CBS All Access film).
In The History of the Future, Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that-less than two years later-would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being bought by Facebook for over $2 billion dollars.
Of all the books out there about the immersive technologies of virtual and augmented reality, Jeremy’s take on the subject is the one that looks the most closely at the security issues involved, especially when it comes to enterprise deployments.
If you’re thinking about leveraging the awesome power of these technologies in your workplace, Jeremy’s hands-on discussion of to what to look for and what to avoid is an invaluable guide.
Discover THE next big competitive advantage in business: learn how augmented and virtual reality can put your business ahead.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are part of a new wave of immersive technologies that offer huge opportunities for businesses, across industries and regardless of their size. Most people think of AR or VR as a new development in video gaming like Pokemon GO, or an expensive marketing campaign by the Nikes of the world. The truth is, businesses of any size can put these new technologies to immediate use in areas that include:
- Learning and development
-…
Stepping away from the topic of immersive technology, The Ransomware Hunting Team instead looks at the realities of cybercrime in the US, and why especially our government infrastructure has such a hard time fighting it effectively.
Like all the other books on my list, it’s an examination of what happens when the rubber meets the road with a new technology, and how we humans often just aren’t very good at adapting to change.
Part of the key problem is that hackers – including the white hat hackers that you want on your side to bring down the bad guys – tend not to be social animals, and our official organizations are far happier hiring a smiling guy in a suit than a scowling nerd who would rather work from his dark bedroom at home. (Apologies for the stereotypes, but – this really is a problem!)
This book is an absorbing cautionary tale of what happens when a new capability meets institutional inertia head-on.
Scattered across the world, an elite team of code-cracking techies is working tirelessly on your behalf to thwart the most notorious cyber scourge of our time. You've probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, especially if its cybersecurity is imperfect, chances are that you're painfully familiar with the group's sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, these ordinary people, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the shadowy networks of hackers and criminal gangs that lock computer networks and extort huge payments in return…
Adrian Hon is the founder of the truly fabulous fitness app Zombies, Run, in which you listen to a story in which you are a character as you run or walk to work out.
Yes, there was a zombie apocalypse in this story, and every so often, the zombies appear – and you have to run!! (I didn’t know about Zombies, Run before I read this book, but I have since started using it, and I love it!)
Adrian has been in the gaming world for a long time, and he is highly aware of how gaming can become coercive. He built Zombies, Run specifically to avoid coercion of any kind, but is deeply infuriated by all of the games out there that shamelessly continue to rely on coercion to generate usage and, of course, cash.
In You’ve Been Played, Adrian outlines just how nasty some techniques can be, and what good and ethical gameplay looks like. I’ve been a gamer all of my life, and this book opened my eyes – wide! – to some nefarious practices that I had been accepting without thinking. I still love games and gaming, but now I’m much more aware of my own role in enabling or rejecting coercion in my gameplay, which gives me back the personal power that some games definitely try to strip away from you.
Adrian does get a little more alarmist than I am about some topics, but I still found his viewpoint and opinion to be incredibly valuable.
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation - and what we can do about it
Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.
Points, badges and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You've Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations,…
This manual addresses the need to ensure that people are at the centre of the organisation. There has never been a timelier reminder of the need to ensure that leading, supporting and developing staff are critical aspects of creating the right organisational culture to grow and develop. Written with sensitivity, it brings together essential learning and underpinning theoretical knowledge and frameworks to promote effective practice.
This is an essential handbook for managers and leaders who want to develop the full potential of their people. It not only covers the fundamental issues of human resource management, but also highlights important topics that organisations find difficult to address, such as empowerment, stress management, mental health, equality, diversity, inclusion, and the promotion of well-being at work.
It is refreshing to come across an HR book that bridges the gap perfectly between the academic theory and the practicality of ‘how to do it'. Dr Neil Thompson takes us on a humanistic journey that genuinely captures the human dimension of people management. This is an extremely helpful manual full of important and practical information about promoting well-being to achieve the best outcome for various everyday people management issues. The easy-to-understand inclusive language of this book calls to anyone interested in people management, meaning this is a perfect book for students, HR leaders, and practitioners. I know I will…
