HN Explorer

Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

27 points by ryankrage77 ↗ HN
For me it would be VR. I put on a VR headset (I think the rift S), and the accuracy of the tracking and the 3D effect had me stunned. Later I bought a Valve Index and every new experience or interaction blows me away.

64 comments

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emteycz
LASIK
andrew-dc
I (glasses on) see what you did there. YEEAAAAAAH!!!
codevark
Amiga 1000, 1985. Nothing else like it at the time.
afulton
Oculus Rift - The Climb specifically. Put my hand through a drop-ceiling.
rmb177
Same here except I have the Oculus Quest which I purchased for our family for Christmas. Just the Amazon Prime app and Netflix app were reason enough to buy it for the different viewing experience it provides during these times of spending so much time inside of the house. It really feels like getting out of the house when you watch an Amazon Prime show in a large theatre with a cinematic screen.
runjake
Nintendo NES

Mac OS (The old Classic OS, on a Mac in 1984 or 1985)

Amiga

UNIX

BBSes

VMWare

iPhone

burntoutfire
Not exactly jaw-dropping, but I thought they were pretty amazing the first time I experienced them:

Virtual Machines (precisely, VMWare).

SSDs

LCD monitor

Amiga 1200 (seeing some amazing demo on it really was mind-blowing)

Action Replay (C64 cartridge which allows you to dump the whole machine's RAM to disk and later reload it, essentially giving you machine's snapshots, e.g. save games for games which didn't have them).

Laser printer

Non-dialup internet connection at home

Torrents (a decentralized sharing network that works and truly can't be pulled down!)

Windows 2000 was super neat compared to the old clunky Win 98

shaftway
> Windows 2000 was super neat compared to the old clunky Win 98

My dad had a friend with an MSDN subscription, so we got a pre-release developer copy of Windows 95. Moving from Windows 3.11 to that was pretty jaw dropping.

But after a while we had an issue with the machine. Sectors on the hard drive were going bad, so we brought it into a shop to have someone confirm that. When we booted it up in the shop the tech's eyes went wide and I think he started drooling a little bit. He offered to swap the drives and copy all of our data from one to the other for free (I assume he thought he could make a copy of the OS for himself too). We declined and he was pretty crushed.

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psyc
The technology that made my jaw hit the floor hardest was the Super NES, running Mario World. Mine eyes did fall upon it suddenly, at a mall kiosk, when I was 14. I was so used to NES graphics, my brain could not fully process the color depth, resolution, and sprite sizes.

Runners up include iPhone, Oculus Quest 2, and Wolfenstein 3D.

apollopower
Funny to think about now with hindsight - but a prototype version of the Magic Leap One.

It was an incredibly novel feeling of seeing the room I was in get mapped out, furniture and all, to see interfaces and 3d models rendered in a way that felt interactable in real space. Moving renders of objects around to see how things could be - well, it was just a lot of fun; it felt like playing with a new video game console as a child.

Sure, the overall experience was clunky, with the motion tracking and sub-par lenses constantly reminding you that it was only a prototype, but that first interaction excites you about all the things that could be possible if it actually is refined into a final product. Perhaps this was the same experience that led many of the early investors to put so much faith in Magic Leap while there was still a long road ahead of them.

maynman
I definitely agree about VR. The first time I played "Robo Recall" on the Oculus Rift I couldn't believe how responsive and immersive it was.
suyash
Swift - most advanced programming language
bitobserver
The first time using an iPhone. It was pure astonishment seeing how much better the device was over my previous [dumb]phone.
behythoyg
A USB flash drive. I could not believe how much storage it had.
scsilver
Google earth, then google earth vr.
fetus8
OLED screens. Saw it in a Sony Store on a tiny screen back in 2009(?) and finally got my own 65in LG CX OLED last fall, and every time I use it, I am still blown away by the colors and motion.
speedgoose
Google Earth VR. I made so many people try it, almost everyone was amazed.
fiftyacorn
When I first used mosaic, also Google when it first appeared
hnburnsy
Tesla... It's not the self driving, but not having to carry a key or start/stop the car is what gave me a virtual jaw drop.