The US President, Mr. Barack Obama, has been touring Europe over the past week, visiting countries like the UK and Germany. In the UK last week on an invitation from the country’s Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, he spoke out against the ‘BREXIT’ campaign that has been advocating for Britain’s exit from the European Union. Once that part of his European sojourn was taken care of, the President hopped over to Germany over the weekend, where alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel, he defended and advanced the cause of the proposed TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) free trade deal between the EU and the US, even in the face of stiff opposition to the trade agreement both at home and in Europe, especially in his host country.
Meanwhile, even as the President was talking larger economic issues, he found some time for a technology trade show in the city of Hannover, where he got to try out a VR headset from German tech company, PMD Technologies AG, which is known mostly as a developer of CMOS semiconductor components. The VR headset was paired up with a Samsung Galaxy S7 and hooked up to an external 3D camera. This was apparently the very first time that President Obama had experienced VR, and by all accounts, was suitably pleased at what he saw. However, the President reportedly did not get the opportunity to try out the interesting stuff like games or other sophisticated applications, but looked at his own hands through the 3D camera with the headset on, “experiencing a program that identifies individual fingers and marks them with color highlights”.
Of course, virtual reality is already one of the most interesting sectors of consumer technology these days, and is expected to be the next big thing now that the global smartphone market is reaching its saturation point and the wearables industry, in general, is yet to take off the way stakeholders would have wanted it to. Interestingly though, even basic VR devices like the Google Cardboard are slowly but surely transcending consumer-related applications and are being increasingly used in medical and commercial fields. Meanwhile, even though this was said to be President Obama’s first tryst with VR, it is unlikely to be his last. Mr. Obama has always been a vocal supporter of technology, and now that his term as the US President is set to expire next February, he’s likely to have more time on his hands to try out fun stuff like VR that has come up during his time at the White House.
