What You Need to Look for When Choosing a Web Design Company

Website is a must these days if you are going to start a business. Therefore, there is no argument about whether or not you should have one. When you have taken the decision to have a website to help your business, you need to find a good web design company in order to get your website designed. There are certain factors to consider when you choose your web design company. It is a good idea to explore what these factors are.

1. Check if the style suits you

When they design web pages designers have their own ways. Different designers follow different kinds of techniques. Therefore, as you meet a designer the first thing you need to do is to have a look at a few sites they have designed. This will allow you to decide if you like their style. If you are not happy with the particular style, look for another web design company.

2. Look for an experienced designer

A person needs experience in any field to mature. This is also applicable to web designers. Only with experience they will learn how to use the various techniques to get the maximum out of them. Therefore, always go to an experienced web designer web design company.

3. Get a custom web design

With various easy to use web designing tools being available in the internet, even a person who hasn’t got a good knowledge on programs or codes could design a website. There are two reasons for using these tools that offer templates for web design.

· They are easy to use.

· They are cheaper

Due to these reasons many people try to use these templates and design your web site but they have certain draw backs when it comes to customization. Therefore, you must find a designer who is able to provide you with 100% customizable website. If you get such a web page built, it will stand out from the rest while the web pages built with the use of templates will look alike.

4. Communication with your Web designer

Good communication with the one who is going to design your website is essential for a good job done. One thing you must do is to prepare a comprehensive document providing details of what your website should have. This document will explain how many pages your website will have, the number of graphics in the page, whether you need a logo or not etc. Once you have the document ready, ask for the quote to create a design encapsulating all those requirements. When you have everything in writing there will not be misunderstandings later.

You also need to get the time duration for the job to complete and mention that in your contract. Finally, you need to know if your designer undertakes to do any maintenance after your website is six months or one year old.

Once these few factors are looked after, you will be able to get a good job done by your web design company. In a short time, you will have a functioning website to promote your small business.

5 Best Web Hosting Services in 2020

If we define web hosting in simple terms then it is just providing space for a website owner to establish and run their site on the online platform. These providers are “hosts” to your online property i.e. your site(s).

There are many web hosting service providers across the globe that help you to setup a website hosting. But this article will talk about the best hosting Canada and the main features of their services. You will surely want to hire them for reliable results for your online business or personal sites.

Canadian web hosting services are known for their authentic work and good results. Here are some of the best hosting Canada service providers:

HostPapa
HostPapa is the topmost service provider, based in Toronto. They are good for local services and charge you in Canadian dollars (CAD).

They provide a variety of services that are always in demand such as responsive live chats, emails, knowledgebase, video tutorials, webinars, status pages, free one-to-one video sessions, etc. In case you are interested in the dark web links, you can get them from here.

Another feature of HostPapa is that they integrate with Cloudflare for international services and audience. Hence, it comes in quite handy for both Canadian and international people just like UX design company.

Here are some of the reasons why you should go for HostPapa:

Free Cloudflare CDN on all plans
Free website migration and SSL
Local servers
30-day money-back guarantee

Web Hosting Canada
When it comes to web hosting, Web Hosting Canada is the most reliable provider which has kept its name since 2003. And there’s a cherry on the top; they also provide SEO Services and online marketing services along with hosting which makes them unique.

Here’s why you should opt for this provider:

Expertise and a reliable name since years
Local services and servers
Free Cloudflare (which is best for local speed)
Canada-based

GreenGeeks
One of the top services in 2020, this provider has 24/7 support and huge disk space to serve your needs. Their servers are powerful, with multiple data centers all over Canada. This feature makes them convenient for almost anyone seeking a reliable hosting service.

They are specifically known for their high speeds. They have introduced their propriety caching technology called Power Cacher, which is an unlimited speed enhancer!

The main features of GreenGeeks are:

Eco-friendly approach
Unlimited disk space
30-day money-back guarantee

A2 Hosting
Okay, so want better solutions for CMS? A2 Hosting is your answer! Their speeds are phenomenal and they provide optimized solutions for different content platforms like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, etc. Well, this means speed and fast loading and nothing else!

The main features of this best hosting Canada are:

Optimized solutions for various CMS
ANYTIME money-back guarantee!
100% uptime commitment
Custom-built cache for faster loading

SiteGround
Well, SiteGround is recommended by WordPress itself! It shows its credibility and the ability to handle the most complex CMS.

SiteGround is among the best hosting providers in 2020. It is based in the US but has many servers across the globe.

They have their caching plugin called SuperCacher which is known for its top speed. You can also look up for the premium WordPress plugins.

Their main features:

Cloudflare integration
SSD’s for faster loading
Custom-built caching plugin
Recommended by WordPress
Considering the individual features of all the above-mentioned top web hosts in 2020, one can rely on them blindly for authentic results! Choose any of the best hosting Canada from these and get what you want.

Key Criteria for Choosing an Interactive Marketing Agency

When it comes to marketing, it is the process of planning and implementing the idea, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services that satisfy the individual and organizational goals. Interactive marketing means conversation between customers and the organization on one-to-one basis and medium is generally online mode. In interactive marketing; marketers interact with the customers or consumers in a personal, emotional or tangible way.

Interactive marketing is very important and vital these days for the organization whether it is a small-medium organization or large. From the Forrester Research reports, they have proved that B2B interactive marketing is expected to reach $5.7 billion by 2016, with mobile marketing accounting for much of that rapid growth. So, it’s clear that interactive marketing is very significant for the positive development of company. Now the question arises – “How to choose an agency which offers suitable Interactive Marketing services?”

Firstly, we have to consider the deliverables that a good interactive marketing agency should provide –

Strategy – It is the most important criteria which helps in creating marketing strategy, demand creation or combination of both. An agency should fulfil this point first.
Creativity – Innovation and creativity is another factor which justifies one’s efforts. An agency should have creative strike in their work.
Demand creation – If there is no market need, then creating a demand or creating an influence is an ability that agency should have. There are many tactics and disciplines that an agency should have e.g. Search engine optimization (SEO), paid search management, website development and maintenance etc.
Social Media – We all know the power of social media in current situation. And everyone is claiming themselves as a social media expert. But there are very few agencies which have any considerable social media experience with longer sales cycles. Difference will be calculated on the basis of their ability to show experience in social marketing vs. simply driving engagement.
Reporting – In this, the true or perfect agency will deliver their commitment on time and the reports are present in the measurable and presentable manner. They know their job and it’s delivered on time with a proper result or great values.
Once these factors are justified and you have identified such agencies in your list, now it comes over you. Sometimes organization lacks to understand whether they need an interactive marketing agency or more than that. So, it is very important to understand your need before making any final decision:

To start with, what are the objectives and goals of your company? What are the needs and demands of your company? It can range from anything like website development, brand awareness, lead generation, and display advertising etc. you need to figure out these points first. Remember, no interactive agency is best of breed in each and every digital discipline. It’s you who needs to find out where you want to make an impact? Where you will find your potential customers? Once you have considered these measures it will be easier to locate a perfect agency for you.

At last, the above facts show that a reputable, efficient interactive agency has the power to create a solid brand recognition for your company, and targeting a specific market niche. An agency also has the ability to provide a full service type experience. These services cover everything from online marketing to web development. So, if you are planning for an interactive marketing for your company and looking for the agency consider these points at least for the proper selection.

New technique could help engineer polluted water filter human tissues

Scientists can turn proteins into never-ending patterns that look like flowers, trees or snowflakes, a technique that could help engineer a filter for tainted water and human tissues.

Their study, led by researchers at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, appears in the journal Nature Chemistry. The study also included scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Minnesota.

“Biomolecular engineers have been working on modifying the building blocks of life—proteins, DNA and lipids—to mimic nature and form interesting and useful shapes and structures,” said senior author Sagar D. Khare, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers–New Brunswick. “Our team developed a framework for engineering existing proteins into fractal shapes.”

In nature, building blocks such as protein molecules are assembled into larger structures for specific purposes. A classic example is collagen, which forms connective tissue in our bodies and is strong and flexible because of how it is organized. Tiny protein molecules assemble to form structures that are scaled up and can be as long as tendons. Assemblies of natural proteins are also dynamic, forming and dissolving in response to stimuli.

The research team developed a technique for assembling proteins into fractal, or geometric, shapes that are repeated over and over. Examples include trees, leaves and pineapples. The team used protein engineering software to design proteins that bind to each other, so they form a fractal, tree-like shape in response to a biological stimulus, such as in a cell, tissue or organism. They can also manipulate the dimensions of the shapes, so they resemble flowers, trees or snowflakes, which are visualized using special microscopy techniques.

These techniques could lead to new technologies such as a filter for bioremediation, which uses biological molecules to remove herbicides from tainted water, or synthetic matrices to help study human disease or aid tissue engineering to restore, improve or preserve damaged tissues or organs.

The next steps are to further develop the technology and expand the range of proteins that form fractal shapes as well as use different stimuli, such as chemicals and light. The scientists also want to study how fractal shapes form in greater detail, so they could gain greater control over the process and the shapes and sizes of designer biomaterials.

Fish and Bees “Talk” with Help from Robot Translators

Robots integrated into groups of zebrafish and of one-day-old honey bees allow the two species to influence each other’s behavior.

A robot interacting with young honey bees in Graz, Austria, exchanged information with a robot swimming with zebrafish in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the robots’ communication influenced the behavior of each animal group, according to a study published in Science Robotics (March 20).

“It’s the first time that people are using this kind of technology to have two different species communicate with each other,” says Simon Garnier, a complex systems biologist at New Jersey Institute of Technology who did not participate in the study. “It’s a proof of concept that you can have robots mediate interactions between distant groups.” He adds, however, that the specific applications of such a setup remain to be seen.

As robotics technology has advanced, biologists have sought to harness it, building robots that look and behave like animals. This has allowed researchers to control one side of social interactions in studies of animal behavior. Robots that successfully integrate into animal populations also provide scientists with a means to influence the groups’ behavior.

See “Send in the Bots”
“The next step, we were thinking . . . [is] adding features to the group that the animals cannot do because they don’t have the capabilities to do so,” José Halloy, a physicist at Paris Diderot University who has been working on developing robots to interact intelligently with animals for more than a decade, writes in an email. “The simple and striking thing is that robots can use telecommunication or the Internet and animals cannot do that.”

In the new work, Halloy teamed up with collaborators at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Graz in Austria, and elsewhere to have two different animal-robot societies interact via modern communications technology. The researchers worked with two very different species that wouldn’t normally interact in nature—honey bees and zebrafish—and they housed the experimental animals more than 1,000 kilometers apart. “What we did is a bit extreme,” admits coauthor and EPFL engineer Frank Bonnet.

In 30-minute trials, the teams presented the animals with a collective choice. In the case of bees, that choice was which of two heat-emitting robots they would gather around, while the zebrafish, which shared their donut-shaped tank with a fish-like robot, would decide which direction to swim. Both the robots in the bee colony and the fish robot interacted with the real animals as the experiments took place. The bee robots have infrared sensors that allow them to estimate density of nearby bees, and as more bees clustered, the robots produced more heat, enticing more bees to gather around. The fish robot detects the location of the fish and itself with a camera filming the aquarium, and responds to changes in the real fish’s direction by following the majority, which in turn influences the group’s collective decision about which way to swim.

The researchers then linked the two robots via an internet connection. As the bees gravitated toward one robot or the other, that information could be transferred to the fish robot, which interpreted the news as more fish choosing a swimming direction—clockwise or counterclockwise. Conversely, information on the swimming direction of the fish in the group could be transmitted from the fish robot to the bee robots, which interpreted the signal as more bees choosing a particular bot. “When we make the connection between the two setups, the robots act like translators,” says Bonnet.

Left to their own devices, zebrafish, while they generally swim as a group, don’t stay swimming in one direction; they frequently reverse course. But when the fish robot was receiving information from the bee robots, the fish would reach a consensus for several minutes or longer. That’s because the young honey bees, when the robots in their colony were not receiving information from the fish robot, would after about 15 minutes settle with one of the two robots.

Conversely, the fish’s indecisive swimming patterns influenced the behavior of the honey bees. If the fish robot shared information with the bee colony, the bees continued to move back and forth between the two heaters for the entire 30-minute trial. If the communication was two way, the bees settled around one of the two bots in the enclosure, but it took about five minutes longer. This then led the fish to settle on a swimming direction.

A single 30-minute run of the experiment with two-way communication between the bees and fish, sped up 10x.
SCI ROBOT, 4:EAAU7897, 2019
“It’s technically very impressive; I buy the argument that there has been some form of communication,” says Garnier. But he wonders how the technology will be used. “I’m not sure where it fits in terms of the science.”

Guy Theraulaz, who studies collective behavior at the Research Center on Animal Cognition at CNRS in Toulouse, France, agrees. “From a biological point of view, we don’t learn anything,” he notes, and from an engineering point of view, the key aspect of the experiment is the integration of the robots into animal societies, which had already been done. “They are selling something which is a little bit trivial,” he says.

The researchers argue that the proof-of-concept study points to new approaches for interrogating natural species interactions, just as robots have already been used to study within-species social behavior. “It allows us to do experiments with animals to build mathematical models of behaviors,” says Halloy. It will also prove to be beneficial owing to the fact that some of the bee species are being rapidly extinct. This technology might help to preserve them. Read about UK bumblebee Species in Decline for related information.

Nicole Abaid, an engineer at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the work, could also see this type of work providing insight into how best to develop multi-agent robotics systems, such as robotic swarm, in which many small robots are deployed in unison for applications such as precision agriculture or search and rescue. While most so-called distributed systems use many of one type of robot, engineers are starting to experiment with devices of different types—for example, a quadcopter and a ground vehicle, says Abaid. “The idea that you could have an interspecies interaction in the application of robotics is super interesting.”

Human Legacies When Robots Rule the Earth

While the raw abilities of these computers have improved at an exponential rate over many orders of magnitude, the rate at which human jobs have been displaced has remained modest and relatively constant. This is reasonably because human jobs vary enormously in the computing power required to do those jobs adequately. This suggests that the rate of future job displacement may remain mild and relatively constant even if computing power continues to improve exponentially over a great many more orders of magnitude.

Even if it takes many centuries, however, eventually robots may plausibly do pretty much all the jobs that need doing. A future world dominated by robots could in principle evolve gradually from a world dominated by humans. The basic nature, divisions, and distributions of cities, nations, industries, professions, and firms need not change greatly as machines slowly displace humans on jobs. That is, machines might fit into the social slots that humans had previously occupied.

However, there could also be much larger changes in the organization of a robot society if, as seems plausible, machines are different enough from humans in their relative costs or productivity so as to make substantially different arrangements more efficient.

Human Legacies When Robots Rule the Earth
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How might one try to influence such a robot future? One straightforward approach is to accumulate resources, and entrust them to appropriate organizations. Perhaps you dislike the overall nature or structure that a robot society would likely have in a decentralized world with only weak global coordination. In this case, you might try to promote large-scale political institutions, and encourage them to adopt sufficiently strong regulations.

The structures of a future robot society may realistically result from a gradual evolution over time from structures in the most robot-like parts of our society today. In this case, one might hope to influence future structures via our choices today of structures in computer-intensive parts of our society. And if one feared high levels of firm concentration in a particular industry of a future robot society, one might try to promote low levels of firm concentration in that industry today.

It is possible that a future world will be filled with robots similar to the kinds of robots that we have been building for many decades. However, it is also possible to fill a future with a very different kind of robot: brain emulations, also known as “uploads” or “ems”. To make a brain emulation, one takes a particular human brain, scans it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then builds a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections. Like humans, ems can learn, and have friends, lovers, bosses, and colleagues. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs.

The three technologies required to create ems (computing, scanning, and cell modelling) all seem likely to be ready within roughly a century, well before the two to four centuries estimated for ordinary robots to do almost all jobs.

Above we quickly discussed some of the main ways to try to influence a general robot future. How does this situation change for em-based robots? The most obvious difference is that since each em results from scanning a particular human, particular humans can hope to have great influence over the individual ems that result from scanning them. Another big difference is that as ems are very human-like, ems can fit much more directly and easily into the various social slots in the previous human society.

We can expect that, during the em era, em robots would continue to develop the abilities of traditional non-em-based robots. Eventually such robots might become more capable than ems in pretty much all jobs. That could possibly mark the end of the em era. It is less obvious that traditional robots would eventually displace ems than that such robots would eventually displace humans, because ems have more ways to improve over time than do humans. Even so, displacement of ems by traditional robots seems a scenario worth considering.

A transition from ems to traditional robots would possibly be less jarring and more incremental, including and continuing more elements of em minds and the larger arrangements of the em society. And since an em society would also continue more of the arrangements of the prior human society, humans today and their arrangements would face a more incremental path of future change, allowing more ways for people today to influence the future, and creating a future more like the people and institutions of today.

These technologies, including AI and 5G, have near-term business and financial opportunities, according to CompTIA

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the emerging technology offering the greatest opportunities to create new business and revenues, according to CompTIA’s second annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies report, released Monday.

The 10 technologies named in the report were ranked according to the near-term business and financial opportunities each creates for IT firms and other business technology companies, and selected by the organization’s Emerging Technology Community.

SEE: What is blockchain? Understanding the technology and the revolution (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Here are the top 10 emerging technologies in 2019, according to the report:

1. IoT
   IoT is driving business changes by providing the data needed to improve marketing, increase sales, and decrease costs, the report found.

“Everybody in the technology world, as well as many consumers, is hearing the term Internet of Things,” Frank Raimondi, a member of the CompTIA Emerging Technology Community leadership group who works in strategic channel and business development for Chargifi, said in a press release.

However, “to say it’s confusing and overwhelming is an understatement,” he added. “IoT may mean many things to many people, but it can clearly mean incremental or new business to a channel partner if they start adding relevant IoT solutions with their existing and new customers. More importantly, they don’t have to start over from scratch.”

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
   AI is already significantly impacting the way customers interact with businesses via intelligent websites and bots, and these tools are becoming increasingly commoditized and integrated into daily work, the report noted.

“The largest impacts across all industries—from retail to healthcare, hospitality to finance—are felt when AI improves data security through white box testing, decision-making speed and accuracy, and employee output and training,” Maddy Martin, community vice chair and head of growth and education for Smith.ai, said in the release. “With more capable staff, better-qualified sales leads, more efficient issue resolution, and systems that feed actual data back in for future process and product improvements, companies employing AI technologies can use resources with far greater efficiency. Best of all, as investment and competition increase in the AI realm, costs are reduced.”

3. 5G
   The rise of 5G networks is increasing our ability to move, manipulate, and analyze data across wireless platforms, according to CompTIA. As 5G rolls out more fully in the coming years, it will drive the development of more complex apps to solve problems and increase growth across industries.

“The development and deployment of 5G is going to enable business impact at a level few technologies ever have, providing wireless at the speed and latency needed for complex solutions like driverless vehicles,” Michael Haines, community chair and director of partner incentive strategy and program design for Microsoft, said in the release. “Additionally, once fully deployed geographically, 5G will help emerging markets realize the same ‘speed of business’ as their mature counterparts. Solution providers that develop 5G-based solutions for specific industry applications will have profitable, early-mover advantages.”

4. Serverless computing
   Serverless computing allows organizations to create a NoOps IT environment that is automated and abstracted from underlying infrastructure, reducing operational costs and allowing businesses to invest in developing new capabilities that add more value, the report found.

Serverless computing was new on the list this year, along with robotics, replaced quantum computing, and automation, CompTIA noted.

5. Blockchain
   More organizations are exploring and implementing blockchain to solve the increased need to secure and manage transactions across the internet.

“Blockchain came down crushing from its peak of hype cycle, and that’s probably for the best,” said Julia Moiseeva, a member of the community’s leadership group and founder of CLaaS (C-Level as a Service) Management Solutions Ltd, in the release. “Now that the luster of novelty and furor of the masses are gone, the dynamic of work around blockchain took a complete U-turn, again, for the best.”

6. Robotics
   Robotics is automating routine processes by using machines to make businesses faster, less expensive, and more efficient, the report found.
7. Biometrics
   Biometrics—including face, fingerprint, and retina scans—are becoming mainstream methods for verifying identity. These methods will form the secure foundation for solutions delivered by IT companies moving forward, CompTIA said.See here for fingerprinting as a career.
8. 3D printing

3D printing offers a solution for the low volume manufacturing of complex parts, as well as fast local production of difficult-to-find products, the report noted. As more affordable products become available, opportunities for this industry will continue to grow, it added. You can also find regular canvas printing ideas and techniques here on canvas prints in canada.

9. Virtual reality (VR)/Augmented reality (AR)
   Using VR, AR, mixed reality, AI, and sensor technologies can help organizations improve operational efficiency and individual productivity, according to the report.
10. Drones
    Drones enable robotic automation with fewer geographical restrictions, the report noted. Opportunities for development and integration are high for this market, it added.

Self-driving cars

Talk about self-driving cars has been around so long that it’s almost mundane. No one seemed to care that Waymo officially abandoned test drivers behind the wheels of its self-driving cars in Arizona back in November. That’s a huge deal. Waymo is launching a self-driving taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix. For real!

The promise of self-driving cars means more efficient commutes, more free time, fewer traffic accidents (see Money Expert for car insurance in case of accidents), big leaps in AI, and all sorts of other game-changing advancements that can prevent traditional problems – see best car scratch remover and other services.Here are the benefits for the SR-22 non owner.

As far as getting these things out to the public goes, Tesla insists that its auto-pilot feature that offers limited self-driving capabilities will be ready to drive itself from California to New York very soon. That means Tesla owners would already have a self-driving car because the company just to push out a software update. Here is the Best Auto Body Shop in St. Louis.

Don’t get too excited: This is a scary economic shift. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. That’s a big factor in the dampened excitement. Also, with all that extra free time in the commute, demanding bosses are just going to expect more productivity.Learn how to become a truck driver professionally.

Nintendo

Nintendo is good. We started the year with the gloomy death of the Wii U, an excellent console that never took off, and lots of talk about Nintendo’s shift to unimpressive mobile games. It’s hard to stress enough how much it seemed like the house that Mario built might go the way of Sega. Then the Switch happened.

The Switch did what Nintendo does best—it wasn’t too expensive, it offered a single gimmick, and it has some great games. It’s signature feature—going seamlessly from console play on the TV to mobile play—was useful and instantly made sense to millions of gamers. But what was most important is that software developers liked it. Ports of older games like Skyrim and Doom are actually fresh takes because they’re now mobile games that are almost as good as their counterparts on other consoles and PC. Indie developers are flooding the system with excellent games like Stardew Valley and SteamWorld Dig 2. And the games made by Nintendo, like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, exceeded the usual high-quality to be the best reviewed of the year.

It hasn’t even been on the market for a year and the Switch has almost sold as many units as the Wii U. The SNES Classic beat out all the other consoles on the market in sales for two months straight. And the new 2DS XL kept its huge library of games going for the foreseeable future.

While the PS4 and Xbox One are fine systems, their new iterations a virtually identical. This year they put out 4K upgrades that are powerful but don’t inspire very much excitement. Nintendo is different and we need it to keep giving the others some competition and continue being weird.

Don’t get too excited: Fuck it, be excited. Nintendo is good.

Image: Magic Leap
Image: Magic Leap
Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality

Virtual reality hasn’t really taken off in 2017 the way some had hoped. It’s far from dead, and Oculus is hoping to turn more people on to VR with a standalone headset that costs $200 next year. Still, its isolation, lack of eye-tracking, and tendency to induce nausea, are big hurdles to clear. Mixed reality is so much more interesting in that it wants to incorporate virtual objects and experiences with the real world, solving a lot of VR’s problems and offering different possibilities. 2017 brought us further progress in the field.

In the most modest development, Apple went all in on augmented reality with its new iPhones and ARkit for developers. The iPhone’s capabilities with AR aren’t going to go much further than Pokemon Go-style overlays on real-world environments for a while, but Apple’s slowly adding sensors that will improve the phones capabilities and the most important part is that developers are putting together applications. For now, we can only expect to see some rudimentary redecorating apps and small but useful tools like the AR measuring tape. But remember, the first million or so iPhone apps were just fart simulators. There are also those reports that Apple is planning to drop its AR headset in 2019.

Microsoft has continued to quietly plug away with work on HoloLens, its mixed reality headset. Developers have had their hands on the early prototypes for quite some time, and they sporadically showed off cool demos that were inspired by Super Mario, Lemmings, and Portal. Microsoft also made some baby steps with a line of inexpensive but impressive VR headsets in partnership with other companies that simulate how mixed reality might work.

And finally, Magic Leap showed off its long-delayed mixed-reality headset and promised its coming to developers in 2018. It’s not as bulky as we feared and based on reports it appears that virtual objects will have a sense of permanence and presence we’ve never encountered before.

Mixed reality wants you to blow holes in the walls of your living room with a laser gun, have a pet cartoon dog that permanently roams around your house, build virtual sculptures on the coffee table, fill your surroundings with as many monitors as you can ask for, and allow you to walk down the street in the real world alongside avatars of people who are sitting in their living rooms.

Don’t get too excited: Mixed reality has a long way to go, so don’t expect to be walking down the street with the Iron Giant anytime soon. And let’s face it, the world promised in Ready Player One sounds pretty awful, so the longer we have to think about this the better.