Month: August 2017

Video shot/edited by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

After nearly a year of rumors, Fitbit finally announced its first smartwatch today—the Fitbit Ionic. For the past 10 years, Fitbit has been one of the biggest players in the wearables game. However, it took the company a while to embrace the smartwatch trend. Last year's Fitbit Blaze was the closest the company got to creating a smartwatch, but the Blaze wasn't advanced enough to take on the Apple Watch or any Android Wear devices. Apple's and Google's products are what many think of immediately when the word "smartwatch" comes to mind. Fitbit is clearly trying to infiltrate the mindset of those consumers with the $299 Ionic but without forgetting its fitness roots in the process.

Hardware

The photos leaked earlier this year proved to be accurate depictions of Fitbit's smartwatch. The Ionic is a marriage of Fitbit's Blaze and Surge trackers, featuring a unibody module with detachable band parts on either end. The module is made out of aerospace-grade aluminum and was created using nano-molding technology. That process molds metal and plastic together to make a unibody that's both strong and lightweight. It also allows Fitbit to make the Ionic as compact as possible by grouping together the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS antennas inside the device. While the Ionic's shape may be polarizing, it's an upgrade from the Blaze's awkward design that forces you to pop the rectangular module out of its harness whenever you need to charge it.

Enlarge / Surprise! Microsoft has its own VR controller. (credit: Microsoft)

When Microsoft first unveiled the Windows 10 Creators Update last year, a big focus was put on the virtual reality capabilities, with Redmond promising a range of VR headsets with prices starting at just $299. When the Creators Update actually arrived in March this year, however, those VR capabilities were only visible if you enabled developer mode; they were there for developers, but not for the general public. The Fall Creators Update, due to be finalized next month, will remove the developer mode restriction, opening up Microsoft's 3D platform to all.

In time for this year's holiday season, there will be $299 headsets and $399 headset-and-motion-controller bundles, using Microsoft's new motion controllers. Aside from the price, the Windows platform has a few features that make it stand out from SteamVR and the HTC Vive and Facebook's Oculus Rift. The first is substantially easier setup, as the Windows platform doesn't need fixed base stations for position tracking. Instead, it uses "inside out" tracking; it combines acceleration input from accelerometers with visual input from cameras embedded in the headsets to provide motion tracking. This means that it doesn't need base stations on the walls, nor does it need the laser-based tracking used in the HoloLens headset.

The same tracking system is used for the motion controllers; they include embedded accelerometers, and this data is combined with the camera data (since most of the time your hands will be on the edge of your field of view), and reverse kinematic models (which is to say: since you're holding the controllers, their movements are limited by human anatomy). The Microsoft controllers are more complex than those used by the HTC Vive, with more buttons and controls on them; they're also asymmetric, with a dedicated left hand and right hand controller.