t can be fun and interesting to stay up to date on the latest trends in technology, but there are also several practical benefits.
Getting jobs
When you ask employers in fast-changing technologies what they are looking for, they typically say that they are looking for people who are excited and eager to learn about and work with new tech.
To assess this in interviews, many employers will ask questions like, “What new technology are you excited about?” or “What are you currently tinkering with or working on in your spare time?”
Since being in this industry requires you to stay up to date and constantly learn new things, it will help you get a job if you can show your employer you’re interested in the latest developments.
Advising clients
When advising clients or designing new applications, being aware of the latest trends allows you to create up-to-date and relevant products.
Future-proofing
If you’re aware of new or upcoming trends, you can make sure your designs account for them, saving you work in the long run. With knowledge of what’s on the horizon, your designs won’t immediately go out of date.
Saving you development time
If you stay up to date on the latest releases of frameworks and tools for VR development, you can save yourself a ton of work.
Imagine you spent weeks perfecting a hand controller or doing custom code for smooth teleportation. Then you see on a blog that someone released an open-source tool that does all of that for you – and implements it even more effectively than your system does. If you had been aware of these advances, you wouldn't have wasted all your time.
How do you keep up?
There are a few simple steps you can take to ensure you don’t miss any significant updates in the field: Follow a couple of great sources
If you follow at least two of the VR / XR resources listed below, you’ll be in the loop on the latest developments in the industry. Choose a couple that you like and subscribe to them.
UploadVR - VR and AR news, including reviews, guides, and analysis on the XR industry.
VRScout - VR news, projects, and videos.
The Ghost Howls - VR and AR blog by an industry expert, including interviews, reviews, news, and tutorials.
Road to VR - VR news, including the latest updates, reviews, and guides.
Reality Check by Mathew Olson — The Information - Daily newsletter on the latest developments in VR & AR.
Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) / Twitter - Interview podcast featuring the pioneers of VR looking at the future of the industry.
Train your news feed algorithms Whether it’s Twitter, Google, or Meta, clicking on any one news article will result in more articles on that topic showing up in your feed. You can also usually select articles and indicate that you are not interested in them. In doing this, you can train a news algorithm to become your personal AI-driven XR news curation machine. You might consider creating a work-specific account and have that be dedicated to XR news. Then, you can easily stay up to date by simply scrolling through your well-trained XR news feed. Keep up with your tools In addition to keeping up with XR industry news, you should try and stay current on significant updates to the tools at your disposal. For example, if you’re using the XR Interaction Toolkit – as we are in this pathway – you can occasionally check the publically available product roadmap to see what’s being worked on or the online changelog to see what’s been released.
Don’t be afraid to try new things
You may not be comfortable with it yet, but employers want to see that you’re not scared to tinker with new technology.
If a new demo, sample, or API comes out, try to download it, check it out, and play around with it. In a job interview, it tells an employer a lot if you can say, “Oh yeah, I tried that out, and it was pretty cool.”
And don’t worry if you don’t have the hardware to try it yourself. Watching someone else tinker with the technology also goes a long way.
Next steps
With just a couple of these tips and tricks, you can rid yourself of that fear of missing out on the latest trends.
Next, you will work on final improvements to your personal project.
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