Despite burying us up to our neck in hype, the virtual reality industry is off to a very slow start.

Apparently, VR hardware penetration in Australia will only reach 25.5 percent of households in 2021. Currently, about 2.3 percent of local households have some sort of VR available.

For the moment, high-tech, pricier VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are not dominant. According to consumer research company Telsyte's Australian VR & AR Market Study 2017, mobile VR headsets accounted for some 70 percent of the 216,000 VR headsets sold in Australia in 2016.

When Caitlin Kalinowski joined Oculus as the head of product design engineering in 2014, her team was sweating on a challenge: design the controllers that would be paired with the hotly anticipated Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. At the time, VR was largely uncharted territory, with little precedence for what the hardware should look or feel like. Working with designers led by Oculus's industrial design head Peter Bristol, Kalinowski’s team began to weigh various factors that would determine how the product would ultimately feel.

Some big ideas seem to appear out of nowhere, but in 2008 Chuan He deliberately went looking for one. The US National Institutes of Health had just launched grants to support high-risk, high-impact projects, and He, a chemist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, wanted to apply. But he needed a good pitch.

He had been studying a family of proteins that repair damaged DNA, and he began to suspect that these enzymes might also act on RNA. By a stroke of luck, he ran into molecular biologist Tao Pan, who had been investigating specific chemical marks, called methyl groups, that are present on RNAs.

Seven alien, Earth-sized worlds bask in the cool, red light of their parent star. The planetary menagerie exists around a star overlooked by other exoplanet hunters, although it is just 12 parsecs (39 light years) from Earth.

Astronomers have found other seven-planet systems before, but this is the first to have so many Earth-sized worlds. All of them orbit at the right distance to possibly have liquid water somewhere on their surfaces.

Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/J. de Wit An artist's illustration shows two Earth-sized planets spinning across the face of an M dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1.

You’re giving a presentation on the company’s strategic direction when one of your colleagues interrupts you. You pause, address his question, and continue with your point — until he interrupts again. Sound familiar?

All of us have known colleagues, friends, or romantic partners who seem unable to let us finish a sentence. How do you handle them effectively? There are a number of tactics. But it is important to understand when and why people interrupt others.

Top management must lead an enterprise-wide effort to find and protect critically important data, software, and systems as part of an integrated strategy to achieve digital resilience.

The idea that some assets are extraordinary—of critical importance to a company—must be at the heart of an effective strategy to protect against cyber threats. Because in an increasingly digitized world, protecting everything equally is not an option. The digital business model is, however, entirely dependent on trust. If the customer interface is not secure, the risk can become existential.

No matter how well virtual reality mimics the sights and sounds of flying, floating, or swimming, it’s impossible to feel that you’re really doing those things when your feet are planted firmly on solid ground. So Stephen Greenwood and Allan Evans are making a VR headset that you can wear underwater.

Greenwood, director of creative development at Discovery Digital Networks, and Evans, cofounder of headset maker Avegant, started working on it in December after talking about what it would be like to combine an isolation tank—where you float in a dark, silent room, alone—with virtual reality.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Here's a request: Please stop posting videos of incredible encounters with wildlife in stunning locations while we're working 9 to 5. It's just cruel.

Take Luke Taylor, who caught vision of these dolphins hanging out at Tallow Beach, near Byron Bay, Australia on Feb. 17. The creatures can be seen swimming and jumping alongside the surfers. 

SEE ALSO: Sir David Attenborough is back and 2017 is finally starting to look up

"It was so magical to see them so calm & joyful in their own habitat with all the surfers around them," Taylor wrote in the video's description. Dare to dream.

The next chapter of Snapchat's life will begin over the coming months, as parent company Snap, Inc. goes public with an initial offering that could value the firm at approximately $20 billion. Success is far from certain: The Venice Beach, Calif.-based Snap has warned in investor documents that it could lose users to competitors with “greater resources and broader global recognition" — shorthand for the Facebook-owned Instagram. Snapchat's once-meteoric growth is showing signs of slowing, with only 8 million new users over the last six months.

Steve Jobs built—and then revived—Apple by fusing technology with design. IBM has remained a top player in its industry for roughly a century by investing in research that is often a decade ahead of its time. Facebook “moves fast and maintains a stable infrastructure” (but apparently doesn’t break things anymore). Each of these companies, in its own way, is a superior innovator. But what makes Google (now officially known as Alphabet) different is that it doesn’t rely on any one strategy, but deploys a number of them to create an intricate—but powerful—innovation ecosystem that seems to roll out innovations by the dozens.

Every organisation and every leader that you talk to today, wants to build a culture of innovation and a breakthrough product as soon as possible. However, if we look closely, there are three ways to come up with an idea that has the potential to become a breakthrough innovation: Imagination Insights Challenging current assumptions Lets talk about all the three in a bit more detail.

A successful digital transformation requires making trade-off decisions. Here’s how successful CEOs guide their business’s reinvention.

Being the CEO of a large company facing digital disruption can seem like being a gambler at a roulette table. You know you need to place bets to win, but you have no idea where to put your chips.

The titans of the tech industry are known for their confidence that they can solve any problem--even, as it turns out, the one that's defeated every other attempt so far. That's why the most far-out strategies to cheat death are being tested in America's playground for the young, deep-pocketed and brilliant: Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, has given more than $330 million to research about aging and age-related diseases. Alphabet CEO and co-founder Larry Page launched Calico, a research company that targets ways to improve the human lifespan. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has also invested millions in the cause, including over $7 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit focused on life-extension therapies.

If you get queasy at sea, ever needed an airplane sickness bag, or had to roll down the window while riding in a car ... this video is for you. Here's one theory on why we experience motion sickness.

Elon Musk is undeniably the entrepreneur of the moment right now. Between Tesla and SpaceX alone, this innovative mogul has changed everything from space travel to transportation in a manner befitting a superhero. His revolutionary ideas and unparalleled drive could shape the future of industry in more ways than we can fully understand. And while you may be familiar with his self-landing rocket, his self-landing car, and his solar roof, Elon Musk isn’t even close to finished.

Adidas, The North Face, and Patagonia are among the brands jostling to become the first to launch a mass-market product made from synthetic spider silk. Adidas is racing to introduce a biodegradable running shoe made from the silk later this year. The North Face’s Moon Parka with waterproof spider silk fiber could become a must-have for eco-minded fashionistas. But don’t ditch your old nylon running shoes and jackets quite yet. Behind the scenes, manufacturers are having problems translating lab-based processes for the novel material to commercial scale. Spider silk developers Bolt Threads and Spiber—both keen on explaining how their silk will change the world—have stumbled and been forced to delay initial product rollouts.

Image: Adidas’s spider silk running shoes will be AMSilk’s largest application when they launch later this year. Credit: AMSilk

Knowledge@Wharton: Are leaders scared at times to bring creative ideas forward?

Jennifer Mueller: I would say yes and that it’s not their fault. We’re finding the reason why is because of how organizations are structured. Leaders are trained with what we have found to be a certain mindset, a certain way of believing good decision-making happens. What we’ve found is that merely putting them in that role of having the responsibility to allocate resources makes them want to make correct, accurate, good decisions. This sounds all reasonable.

From Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah, a Lebanese-born American serial inventor, to Ahmed Zewail, the 1999 Nobel laureate in chemistry, to Farouk El-Baz, a NASA and MIT scientist who helped plan the Apollo landing, to Elias A. Zerhouni, the 15th director of the National Institutes of Health, Arab immigrants have made major contributions to American science and technology.

As the Trump administration attempts to limit immigration from several Arab states, these contributions deserve extra attention. The problem is that to date there has been little work to document the extent of Arab contributions to American innovation. We recently set out to remedy that, and our analysis suggests that Arab inventors play a major role in U.S. innovation. They also contribute significantly to the success of major U.S. tech companies.

When I need to get something done in a hurry, I use three time management tactics to maximize my available time and sharpen my focus. For instance, when I returned home last year from my active duty military deployment, I had to quickly readjust to my corporate job and get up to speed with team priorities and deadlines. Meanwhile, my side hustle as a professional music producer was calling. I had limited time to record my next project, a jazz opera about the European financial crisis, or I risked having to wait several months to find a date that worked for the musicians and studio.

The idea that healthcare entrepreneurs are no longer restricted by geography and can succeed well beyond the historic startup and investment meccas of the Silicon Valley and Boston, is demonstrated more convincingly each year. A new report charts the growth of healthcare startups and investment in the Midwest over the past five years.

Last year, 375 Midwestern healthcare companies raised $1.7 billion, according to a report by BioEnterprise. The investment amount was the highest in the past two years and reflected a couple of trends, according to Aram Nerpouni, CEO of BioEnterprise. Investment size and the number of companies raising capital have more than doubled in the past five years, he said.

Image: Source: BioEnterprise’s Midwest Healthcare Growth Capital Report