Surveillance or Law Enforcement

In the modern day, surveillance is everywhere. You are being recorded at all times. Whether it is an actual surveillance camera or public onlookers, you are being watched and recorded by many people and places. Here at Southern Arkansas University, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. At Penny Arcade Expos, you are being recorded by media, attendees, companies, and so much more. You can't really get away from surveillance.

Interesting things have happened from such surveillance footage. Websites have sprung up from such. You can also find Youtube videos and more from surveillance and other customers at your favorite stores and restaurants. One such website is People of Walmart. 

People of Walmart shows off what should be embarrassing photos of people at Walmart. You can find everything from weird clothing, to vehicles, to pets, to whatever you can think of. The sad part of this is that although most of these pictures should be embarrassing, it seems the people in them were not embarrassed when they were in them.



Moving on to a different topic of surveillance, we need to watch our devices. Back in 2013, there were many issues with the NSA spying on civilians. A whole scandal came out of it after Edward Snowden leaked government secrets. This led to big issues between the customers and the companies who complied with the NSA. This also led to issues with certain products out on the market at the time. One such product that had issues due to this scandal was the Xbox One.

The Xbox One came packaged with the Kinect 2.0. The Kinect 2.0 had a large number of camera and sensors such as a depth sensor, IR sensor, tracking sensing, and could even read your heart rate. As you may understand not very many people liked the idea of this as the NSA scandal had just happened. What made it worse was that Xbox originally announced it as a necessary accessory which had to be plugged in and online at all times. People were worried about Microsoft gathering your information and recording everything you do through your Xbox. They did not want that to happen or for the government to get ahold of information on what you do.

Here in the US we have a right to privacy, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." So it makes sense that people would worry about such issues. The government should not be able to infringe upon your rights. 

I do recommend you do your best to make sure your home devices are not watching you. Covering webcams and turning off smart devices can help with this. Also, however, do not be too worried about this or feel like everything is watching you. You should not be paranoid about it all. Just be careful and intelligent, and remember you are always being watched.

Advertising analysis

When it comes to something like an advertising analysis, it can be hard for me to decide what to talk about. On one hand, I want to talk about things such as the new ways of advertising online, but on the other, I want to discuss things such as the failed advertising campaign of Microsoft's Xbox One. Due to such an issue, I will briefly discuss each. Both of these can be important as a media member.

First I would like to discuss ads. They are annoying. As Americans, as humans we hate ads, but we need them. Ads help make sites free to use. The best way then to have advertisements would be with the correct placement and ad-vironment. You don't want to be showing off denture ads on Crunchyroll, a popular anime streaming website. Most websites understand the placement when it comes down to things such as demographic, however, get things wrong in ad placement. If I am scrolling through news articles, I do not want an ad starting to play at the top of the article interrupting my experience. That kind of ad usually makes me want to switch news sites. Likewise, any kind of pop-up ad that might clutter up my phone screen drives me away. As a website you don't want that because more often than not you are not selling content you are selling ads. Thankfully companies are getting better at the placement of ads and how ads appear. Outstream Video ads are one such solution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUiivGevsaQ 

Outstream allows advertisers to place ads within the content of a page but also for the video to know when someone is or is not watching and thus when to keep playing. It is a smart ad made to better engage with those interested and not waste the time of those ads could regularly drive away.

Second I want to discuss Microsoft's Xbox brand and the issues they have had. The main issue is that their advertising has not been strong enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfS5Rp2Lr9I

The Xbox One was mismanaged and mismarketed since the beginning. The issues started with the announcements, then went to ads, and coverage. This is important to note as Xbox just released the Xbox One X, previously known as Project Scorpio. Quite frankly the One X should have stayed Project Scorpio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7lT2eQrNbA

The ads for the One X are OK, but they are not enough to reach past the $100 higher price point over their main competitor Sony's PlayStation and before long both might be outshined by Nintendo's Switch. Xbox has not made a good enough argument for its price point, and it has not offered enough exclusives for people to care to switch over.

You may wonder why this matters when it comes to video and video streaming. The answer to that is that consoles are heavily used to watch many streaming services. I myself watch Hulu and Netflix on my PlayStation 4 Pro.

What should Xbox do to fix this? Well, first they need to drop the price point of the One X to around $350 undercutting PlayStation. After that they need to advertise the hell out of the Xbox One X and why it is better than competitors. They should also offer some free games and Xbox Live time for switching. Finally, they need to get exclusives to help push the brand forward.

Product Review

VR

Virtual Reality has been the talk of the internet ever since the Oculus Rift was announced on Kickstarter. It was one of the most funded Kisckstarters ever. The Kickstarter itself can be found here. 

Oculus has already had multiple iterations and multiple price points. It got large enough that Facebook bought them. Oculus has been exploring not only virtual reality for gaming but also for medical and teaching purposes. 

They aren't the only companies to get into this field, however. HTC, Microsoft, Samsung, and many other technology companies have started to try their hand at virtual reality. HTC has arguably been in the actual virtual reality field for longer than these other companies. The release of the HTC Vive was a huge thing. It has arguably been considered better than the Oculus Rift. 

Microsoft started off in augmented reality with the Microsoft Hololens.

Currently, they are getting into virtual reality, having designed a form of virtual reality headset with controllers. These are being made by companies like Acer, Dell, HP, and more. They are all labeled as Windows Mixed Reality headsets. "Mixed reality" however is not what these mostly do, although they may in the future. Mixed reality is between augmented reality and virtual reality. These are also some of the cheapest options for entering into virtual reality. 

Samsung has their Gear VR powered by Oculus and a Windows Mixed Reality Headset. They have been in the market but only through other companies, though I would expect to see them in the market on their own soon.

I chose to review the HP Mixed Reality headset. Part of this decision had to do with the price point and the other part had to so with the reviews on Amazon. It has overall been well received and some people have claimed the Windows headsets, which are virtually all the same except the Samsung one, are better in their opinion than the Oculus and the Vive.

Personally, I have really enjoyed my headset. The inside-out tracking works great, except for sometimes when you have your arms outside of sight of the headset. The resolution is good, and I don't really notice the screen door effect most of the time. WMR has some great apps and it has been a lot of fun. the controllers track well and control well. Most things are very intuitive and work well. If you are interested in VR I highly recommend it to you, especially if you are on a budget.