JCL Blog

Real Meets Virtual

Yesterday we announced Retrodex, a live event in Seattle to compliment Comdex Virtual in November.  This real world and virtual world story gets more interesting every day and I find new examples regularly.  At what point does the virtual reality GPS display in the car get to be more useful than looking out the real window?  There have been bad weather days on my boat where GPS and Radar became the primary inputs of reality, and pilots have been flying IFR since the 50s.

National Geographic has a short piece running this month on augmented reality - which demonstrates the possibilities of a converged real and virtual experience.  Anyone with a camera equipped Andriod phone can put this type of capability today with Google Goggles.  I for one am looking forward to the day my phone whispers peoples names in my ear as they approach.  

Over the past two years we have virtualized all of our servers at CSG -- cutting the number of physical machines to a tenth of the prior number while increasing availability, uptime, and redundancy.  This very real example of the virtual machine skipping to a place ahead of the real machine in line is yet another example of the many layers of the real meets virtual world.

We all have the opportunity to use these new capabilities to improve our world.  Telemedicine and Distance Learning are just two examples of ways virtualization technologies can be put to practical use improving lives and the world.

We are delighted to be in the middle of this convergence.  In the event you are interested in following this story, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed of the Retrodex blog, or follow Retrodex on Twitter.