Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 5

• Augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: Understand the Difference: The Battle Is Real: Although virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have existed in some form for decades, only recently have they garnered mainstream attention. VR is blowing up right now, and its content and hardware advances have been exciting to watch. In a short amount of time, content creators have made some mind-blowing advances in storytelling with this new technology. Brands, movie studios, gaming companies and news organizations are all tinkering with this tool and channel. VR will gain ascendancy throughout 2016, but my money’s on AR becoming the dominant technology in our daily lives. The New York Times recently distributed more than one million Google cardboards to its digital-edition subscribers. YouTube and Facebook are enabling VR online through digital video players. Everything is aligning to have VR hit critical mass next year. VR is the only medium that guarantees the user’s complete focus on the content. There is no looking away, no checking email or text messages and no updating social-media statuses. VR is the most immersive way to tell a story because what happens inside that headset makes you feel something in your head, heart and gut. But VR’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. The immersive nature of VR hinders users from interacting with their surroundings. It takes them out of the moment. They can’t walk around and see what is right next to them, look people in the eye or read someone’s body language. VR is a powerful way to experience content, but is not practical for interacting in the real world. And therein lies the major problem with VR. Content is king, no doubt, and providing immersive experiences is the holy grail in advertising. But VR will never become an innocuous part of our daily lives. AR adds contextual layers of information to our experiences in real time. We have seen this future foretold in Hollywood films, such as Avatar, Minority Report, Iron Man and Wall-E, among others. Soon these depictions will become real. However, AR has issues with execution, which tends to feel gimmicky. Remember pointing your smartphone to a print ad to get some poorly made content? Google Glass showed some innovative AR applications, but they were ultimately a failure because the hardware and technology were too broad and lacked focus on the consumer problem they were trying to solve. These examples have shown the promise of AR, but have failed to deliver on contextual utility. Still, the future is bright for AR with several tech companies working on their AR offerings. Microsoft is working on HoloLens AR headset glasses. Developer kits are scheduled to hit the market in early 2016. Google invested in a company called Magic Leap, whose technology beams lasers into the viewer’s iris to activate AR. That future will become a reality in another year’s time. Both VR and AR tinker with our reality — but AR enhances it, while VR diverts us from it, which is why the latter will come to the fore in 2017, with its promise of contextual data for marketers and utility for consumers.

• Oculus to take preorders for Virtual Reality headset Rift from Wednesday:  Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook Inc, said on Monday it would take preorders for its much-awaited virtual reality headset, Rift, from Wednesday. The Rift would come bundled with the game, Lucky's Tale, and a multiplayer space combat game, EVE: Valkyrie, Oculus said in a blog post. The blog post did not contain any further information such as pricing of the headset. Rift "remains on schedule to ship in Q1," Oculus had said in a blog post last week. However, the touch controller, a pair of motion controllers, would be delayed and shipped only in the second half of 2016, the company had said. In September, Oculus and Samsung unveiled a new version of Gear VR virtual reality headset for $99.

• G.M., Expecting Rapid Change, Invests $500 Million in Lyft: The founders of Lyft, the ride-hailing service, have long imagined that the future of transportation would involve fewer cars on the road. Now General Motors is helping the start-up reach that goal. Lyft announced on Monday that G.M. had invested $500 million in the company, or half of its latest $1 billion venture financing round. The funding, which recently closed, values Lyft at $4.5 billion, not including the new capital. G.M.’s $500 million interest in Lyft is the single largest direct investment by an auto manufacturer into a ride-hailing company in the United States, according to data from PitchBook, an alliance that pairs an auto stalwart with the kind of start-up trying to disrupt it. The investment reflects how much consumer automotive habits have been changed by technology over the last decade. With the rise of ride-sharing companies, car manufacturers have raced to adapt to how people can now use each other’s vehicles for rides, which could potentially lead to a decline in car ownership.

• Toyota Snubs Tech Companies With Ford Dashboard Deal: Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to use a car-phone connectivity system championed by Ford Motor Co. in a front to keep Apple Inc. and Google from dominating control of dashboards. Toyota will introduce a telematics system with Ford’s SmartDeviceLink, an open platform that the automakers are inviting their peers to adopt for in-car applications, it said in a statement. Toyota has resisted offering Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, citing safety and security concerns, while Ford is offering them as apps within its Sync connectivity system this year. The deal shows two of the world’s largest automakers remain wary about giving Apple and Google too much control over displays that IHS Automotive estimates will generate $18.6 billion in sales by 2021. For Toyota, which is involved in another system called MirrorLink that competes with the two tech giants, the collaboration with Ford suggest the company is spreading its bets on car connectivity options. Ahead of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota also said it will equip U.S. vehicles with data communication modules next year that connect cars with cellular networks. The modules will enable a system that notifies authorities when air bags deploy due to traffic accidents.

• Alibaba's Finance Arm Said to Seek at Least $1.5 Billion: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate is seeking at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in a second round of fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said. Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co., controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire chairman Jack Ma, plans to issue stock to existing and new investors, according to the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private. The firm, known as Ant Financial, is speaking to potential investors including insurers and other financial institutions, as well as private equity funds and venture capital firms, the person said. Challenging bricks-and-mortar banks, the Internet-based Ant Financial runs China’s biggest online payment service, Alipay, and controls the company which manages Yu’E Bao, the nation’s largest money-market fund with more than 600 billion yuan of assets. It also holds a stake in MYBank, a private online lender. Ant Financial was valued at about $45 billion after completing an initial round of fundraising in June 2015, the person said. The company may sell shares in an IPO as early as this year and hasn’t decided yet whether to conduct a third round of financing ahead of that, according to the person. Ant Financial may use money from the current fundraising for acquisitions, the person said, without identifying potential targets. Ant Financial has already invested in companies including India’s One97 Communications Ltd. and Postal Savings Bank of China.