Okunev (2023). History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing.pdf

The Psychology of Evolving Technology How Social Media, Influencer Culture and New Technologies are Altering Society ― Rhoda Okunev The Psychology of Evolving Technology: How Social Media, Influencer Culture and New Technologies are Altering Society Rhoda Okunev Tamarac, FL, USA ISBN-13 (pbk): 978...

The Psychology of Evolving Technology How Social Media, Influencer Culture and New Technologies are Altering Society ― Rhoda Okunev The Psychology of Evolving Technology: How Social Media, Influencer Culture and New Technologies are Altering Society Rhoda Okunev Tamarac, FL, USA ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-8685-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8686-9 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-8686-9 Copyright © 2023 by Rhoda Okunev This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. 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Printed on acid-free paper CHAPTER 3 History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing This chapter reviews the different types of smart devices and reviews context awareness, autonomous computing, and connectivity. It discusses the invention of the smartphone and how it ultimately changed our world. It has allowed us to email, text, and word process all from our phones or other smart devices. We are even able to play video games and communicate with videoconferencing using our handheld devices. We no longer have to wait until we are home to get our next message; it is all in the palm of our hands and easy to access. © Rhoda Okunev 2023 R. Okunev, The Psychology of Evolving Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8686-9_3 18 Chapter 3 | History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing Smart Devices SMART stands for “self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology,” and smart technology uses advanced technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning. Smart devices have three main features: context awareness, autonomous computing, and connectivity. Context awareness is a computing style that has user-specific data or location-based technology and sensors. Autonomous computing is a computer’s ability to manage itself automatically so that it cuts down on the time required by professionals to maintain software updates and resolve system difficulties. Connectivity describes communication between hardware or software devices and other devices. Some examples of objects that have connectivity are personal computers, servers, mobile telephones, and video game consoles. Other devices like cars and appliances can also be connected to the Internet. These devices are connected to the Internet through network links. Different modes of connections are dial-up, ISDN, DSL, cable TV Internet connections, satellite Internet connections, and wireless Internet connections. Smart devices are “things” that are connected to other “things” through the Internet. Together, they make up the Internet of Things (IoT). Smart devices share and store information or data using the cloud. The IoT describes the network of physical objects that connect and exchange data with other devices or systems over the Internet with the software and sensors. Some IoT devices include wireless sensors, software, and computer devices. In other words, they are objects that are attached to operate through the Internet, enabling the transfer of data among objects or people automatically without human intervention. Types of smart devices are smartphones, smart cars, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart beds, smart refrigerators, tablets, televisions, smart home devices, and smartwatches. Also, Amazon’s Echo, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant are IoT devices powered by an Internet-connected voice assistant. Many of us are now dependent on these voice assistants. Although they are powerful tools, they will not be discussed in this book. In the 1960s, E. A. Johnson is known for inventing the first finger capacitive touchscreen. George Samuel Hurst, who attended Berea College and the University of Kentucky and graduated with a PhD in physics in 1959, invented the resistive touchscreen screen. In 1977, the companies Both these technologies are widely used today. The capacitive is mainly used on more expensive tablets and smartphones and they are more sensitive to slight touches. The resistive touchscreen is cheaper and usually requires more pressure from the hand to work. Once the technologies for a handheld device were there, companies were ready to put all these capabilities together. The Psychology of Evolving Technology The first smartphone-like device was conceived in the early 1990s by IBM engineer Frank Canova who realized that a chip and the wireless technology was small enough for a phone, so he is referred to as the inventor of the smartphone. While the first smartphones were bulky and long, they still featured several elements that have become staples to every phone today. They were equipped with standard-input screen keyboards, touchscreens with the capabilities to send and receive both emails and faxes, and a calendar, address book, and appointment scheduler. These phones did not take off because they were expensive and the battery died very fast. iPhone by Apple Inc. Apple’s Steve Jobs had a vision, and in 2007, the iPhone was released first with 4 GB and then with 8 GB. At this time, it was able to connect with the Internet but not with a network connection. In 2008, a few iPhones were developed and released with 16 GB and more advanced versions of the OS system, as well as the App Store, which supported third-party applications. Siri was released initially as an app for iOS in 2010, and a few months later Apple Inc. acquired it and integrated it into the iPhone with the voice of Susan Bennett. At this time, technologies and the motivation to input these technologies into phones were pushing the demand through the roof for the next and newest device out there. Samsung Smart TV and Phone Samsung is now the largest South Korean company, and its primary production lines are in electronics, defense, and construction. Other areas are insurance and media and entertainment. Samsung did not start out that way; in 1938 Lee Byung-chul started a grocery store selling fish, noodles, and vegetables and sold goods from around the city. When the Korean War (1950–1953) broke out, he expanded by buying other companies and then after the war added textiles and insurance. In the 1960s, Samsung, now a family-based business, expanded even more, buying even more companies and putting into production TVs, microwaves, and other consumer products through the electronic and semiconductor and telecommunications divisions. In 1987, Byung-chul died, and his son, Lee Kun-hee, became the head of Samsung Enterprise. Under his direction, the semiconductor and telecommunication division merged with chip productions to form Samsung Motors. First, Samsung came out with a digital TV. By 2011, after acquiring more and more companies, Samsung developed the Galaxy phone, which is one of the world’s most popular smartphones. Samsung has more patents approved in the United States than any other company so far. 19 20 Chapter 3 | History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing Android Smartphone In 2003, Android Inc. was founded by Andy Rubin, Nick Sears, Rich Miner, and Chris White. In 2005, Google acquired it. The Google smartphone was released in 2007, and the HTC Dream was launched in 2008 with many updates, all named after desserts. The Android uses a version of the Linux kernel and open-source software used mainly for touch-screen technologies like the touch-screen mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance, a group of developers, was sponsored by Google to create free software. Google smartphones have this software as well as other proprietary software such as Google Chrome, Google Play (which is the official store for Android apps, games, music, movies, and e-books), and Google Play services. The owner of the phone is restricted to the Amazon Appstore. There are many series of the Android out, and it remains today one of the most popular smartphones. Video Games Humans love to play games. In ancient Mesopotamia, the Royal Game of Ur was played. The game rules of this game were simple and written on a cuneiform tablet by a Babylonian astronomer in 177 BC. Irving Finkel was able to decipher the rules from this cuneiform tablet: two players compete to race for a piece from one end of the board to the other. Today the most played games are video games. While video games are fun to play, they can also lead to an addiction as well as isolation when playing the game solo. Other concerns are overeating while solitary and aggressive behavior due to many of the games’ themes of violence and guns. The growth and enthusiasm in games will never cease, though. Gaming is and will always be a part of our world and played by millions. There are many games out there, and they are constantly being created, but only a few will be reviewed in this book. In the 1950, Josef Kates created Bertie the Brain, the first video game that played Tic-Tac-Toe against artificial intelligence. It used a huge computer to play. In 1958, Tennis for Two was invented by William Higinbotham. This is a more interactive electronic game that uses a graphical display. Higinbotham was a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York and is mostly known for his work on the nuclear bomb. Later in the 1980s and early 1990s, driven by improvements, standardization, and accessibility to the personal computer, Nintendo and Sega were developed and competed for market share. Nintendo develops, produces, and markets software and hardware for TV-linked and mobile console games. The first handheld consoles in the 1990s mostly held Nintendo’s Game Boy platform. Sega is a Japanese video game company that became very popular in the 1990s. But in 1993 it lost much of its market share, but today it still makes games for all the popular consoles. The Psychology of Evolving Technology With further technological advancement in the personal computer’s optical media, with CD-ROMs, graphic cards, and computer microchips, which made possible real-time polygonal 3D graphics, gaming continued to grow and started to be incorporated into the personal computer. Nintendo, at this time, partnered with Sony to develop a new CD-ROM console and attachment for the Super Nintendo system. However, Sony’s deal with Nintendo fell through, ultimately leading to making Sony’s PlayStation even more popular. PlayStation has been a Japanese company since 1994, and it is recognized as a global leader in the interactive and digital gaming and entertainment business. Nintendo dominated the market with its handheld games during the late 1990s and early 2000s with the release in 2001 of the Game Boy Advance, which had high resolution, a full-color LCD screen, and a 32-bit processor. In 2004, the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) came out. In the early 2000s, Xbox, a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft, entered the market. Some of the consoles include Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. The game console connects to a television or other display media and provides realistic graphics. The Xbox online gaming service gave Microsoft early popularity in the online gaming market and made it a strong competitor. Another huge shift occurred when the smartphone and mobile tablet were developed in the early 2000s. With the start of the app stores that had many different games, a smartphone and smart device owner could download and buy subscriptions of games to play with others. Angry Birds and Bejeweled took the lead and became wildly popular. Angry Birds was created by Rovio Entertainment and is a Finnish action-based media franchise. The game series focuses on a flock of birds that try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. In 2001, PopCap Games published Bejeweled, and it became one of the most iconic mobile games in history. Bejeweled challenges players to swap colorful jewels to form vertical or horizontal line chains of three or more gems with the same color. Then in 2012 Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons took off. Games in the cloud became more popular around 2010 with increased bandwidth made available to consumers. Sony started to buy smaller popular games, OnLive and Gaikai, and used them in PlayStation Now cloud games. Other popular cloud games were xCloud by Microsoft, Stadia by Google, and Luna by Amazon. In 2013, Facebook purchased Oculus, which was developed by Palmer Luckey in 2010. Oculus was a virtual reality (VR) system for video games. PlayStation VR by Sony was released in 2016. Augmented reality (AR) games are when the game produces a real-time video game image with additional graphics. Pokémon Go, an AR game, was popular in 2016. 21 22 Chapter 3 | History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing Video Communication and Conferencing Video-teleconferencing, video-telephony, and videoconferencing allow people to meet each other face to face and hear each other at the same time in different locations. They can work together via audio, video, and text to give presentations in real time through the Internet. The first video conference technology in the 1870s used audio wires, and in 1927 Bell Labs invented the video phone, patenting the word video, which is the prototype of the modern-day video phone. On the first call, Bell Labs officials in Washington, DC, connected with the president of AT&T in New York City. They were connected via two-way audio and a one-way video. Before 1935, video conferencing was referred to as visual radio and sight-sounds television systems, and in the 1950s it was termed the video phone. In 1956, AT&T created the first Picture-Phone prototype and made the first-ever video calls using still images transmitted every two seconds over regular analog public switched telephone network (PSTN) telephone lines. In 1964, at the World’s Fair in New York, the Mod 1 (Model 1) was first introduced by AT&T, and it was called the Picturephone. People were able to communicate transcontinentally and see each other through video for 10 minutes at a time in from New York to California. For this black and white process to work, images were sent at 30 frames per second, and the participants at the receiving end could not move. This was the first video telephone device designed for the masses, but it was expensive, clunky, and hard to set up. In 1970, AT&T introduced the Picturephone Mod II for the home and office. It was expensive for a 30-minute call; it cost $160/month plus $.25 for each additional minute. In 2003, Skype was released by Skype Technologies. Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and created by developers Ahti Heinla, Pritit Kasealu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus. Skype has VoIP-based videoteleconferencing, voice calls, instant messaging, and file transfers and is able to work on landlines and mobile devices. It had a hybrid peer-to-peer and clientbased system. Peer-to-peer allows each computer to act as a server for the others in the network so that the computers can share files and peripherals without a central server. A client-server system is where many personal computers can communicate with shared servers on a local area network. In 2011, Sykpe was bought and became operated by Microsoft super nodes, and in 2017 it became a centralized Azure-based system and was not peer-topeer any longer. In 2004, WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum who had worked at Yahoo. They named the app to sound like “What’s up?” Korum told Acton he wanted to build an app that showed the status of each user. They found the developer Igor Solomennikov on the site RentACoder.com. WhatsApp had many technical issues, and the system kept crashing in the The Psychology of Evolving Technology beginning, but then they had a release by Apple with a push notifications add-on in 2009. This notification reminded the user when they were not using the application. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014. FaceTime is a video calling feature that was designed, developed, and distributed by Apple for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. In 2010, FaceTime was initially made available on the iPhone 4 and the 4th-generation iPod touch. Zoom Video Communication was founded and developed by Eric Yuan. Yuan was born and raised in Tai’an Shandong Province, China. This software was built on romance. In 1987, Yuan was at the Shandong University of Science and Technology, and he would travel ten hours to visit his girlfriend (now wife). At times, he was not able to see her, so he invented a way to see her without traveling. In 1997, he moved to California and worked for Webex as one of the first 20 hires where he successfully implemented an online meeting platform. In 2007, Webex was acquired by Cisco, and Yuan worked as a VP in the engineering department. Yuan reportedly pitched to Cisco the idea of a mobile video system but was turned down by Cisco; that pitch is now Zoom. Yuan left Cisco and started Zoom, which he originally called Saabee, Inc. Zoom was influenced by a children’s book called Zoom City by Thacher Hurd. Zoom is an online video telephony service through the cloud and started out able to host only 15 people. It uses peer-to-peer software for video, chat, and phone, as well as conferences and events. In 2017, Zoom was a unicorn company, meaning a private company with a net worth more than $1 billion dollars; it became profitable in 2019 when it went public. Although Zoom was a leader in web conferencing, it was not until the coronavirus pandemic that Zoom rocked the teleconferencing space with the boom in online school learning and remote working environments. Zoom is an American company based in California, but many of its developers are from China. Zoom has been criticized for security lapses, and in 2020 Latitia James, New York Attorney General, launched an investigation into the security and privacy concerns of Zoom. Although Zoom did not admit to doing anything wrong, it did agree to focus on the security concerns. There have been other lawsuits about security issues that have been settled with other companies, but Zoom remains a powerhouse. Summary The technologies discussed in this chapter have transformed our lives and the world! No longer do we have to wait for messages from a landline when we can use our smart devices held in our pockets and purses. When we are bored, we just pull out our smart device and surf the Web or video chat with friends. We may even decide to play a video game on the smart device. In Chapter 4, you will see further how we have become dependent on our smartphones to connect us with our family, friends, and, yes, even strangers on the Internet. 23 116 Bibliography Chapter 3: History of Smart Devices, Video Games, and Videoconferencing 29. Mary Bellis, “The Inventor of Touch Screen Technology,” https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-touchscreen-technology-1992535, 2018. 30. Wikipedia, iPhone (1st generation), https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_ generation)#:~:text=After%20years%20of%20 rumors%20and,Apple%20Inc, 2022. 31. Matthew Burris, LIFEWIRE’S EDITORIAL GUIDELINES, The History of Samsung (1938-Present), https://www. lifewire.com/history-of-samsung-818809, 2020. 32. The history of Android: The evolution of the biggest mobile OS in the world, John Callaham, https:// www.androidauthority.com/history-android-osname-789433/, 2022. 33. Wikipedia, Bertie the Brain, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain, 2021. 34. Wikipedia, Tennis for Two, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two, 2022. 35. Wikipedia, Game Boy, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Game_Boy#:~:text=The%20Game%20Boy%20 is%20an,in%20Europe%20in%20late%201990, 2022. 36. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “PlayStation”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Sep. 2022, https://www. britannica.com/topic/PlayStation. Accessed 18 December 2022. 37. Andy Patrizio, The history and evolution of video conferencing, https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/ feature/The-history-and-evolution-of-videoconferencing, 2021. 38. Peter High, Zoom CEO’s Promise To His Wife Helped Inspire A $1B Company, https://www.forbes.com/ sites/peterhigh/2017/03/06/zoom-ceos-promiseto-his-wife-helped-inspire-a-1-billionvalued-company/?sh=1334c85848a7, 2017.