Links for Thursday March 27th, 2014
A Primer on Showing Empathy in the Tech Industry: A part of the difficulty in discussing these issues is that we work in an industry full of problem solvers, but this is is a systemic industry-wide problem with no clear-cut solution. Placing the burden on minorities to speak up every time something happens is an unreasonable and unfair approach. There is no single silver bullet though. If there were a way to make an issue of this scale and depth suddenly go away, it would have been done already.
'It's On, Kids.' A Fan History of Veronica Mars.: I thought this post-mortem on the Veronica Mars kickstarter was great.
What VR could, should, and almost certainly will be within two years?: PDF slides from a talk by Michael Abrash, on the current state of virtual reality, and the near future. In short, I think it's legit this time. The smartphone revolution has made small, high-resolution displays cheaper. Smartphones plus game consoles have put more development into motion sensors. And CPUs and GPUs have gotten way more powerful. This is important in light of Facebook's big announcement from yesterday. I was pretty eager to check out the Occulus consumer VR headset, but now, we'll have to see about that.