XR Industry News - Meta updates, AR contact Lenses, and oracle’s interest in warner bros discovery.
XR Tech News to Make You Smarter
Safety Features to Look for When Selecting an Enterprise AR/VR Solution (Dauntless XR). If you don’t know why this stock image is hilariously problematic, give the linked article a skim.
Humanity is One Step Closer to Bionic XR (AR Insider). Dubai-based startup Xpanceo (no guesses on how to pronounce that) is taking a run at augmented reality contact lenses. They aren’t the first. Most recently, Mojo Vision raised $160M to make eye displays a reality. They ended up pivoting to other micro display types, but Xpanceo has more than double the funding of Mojo and 50 Ph.Ds on staff. My read of this: Xpanceo’s tech sounds more like an eye implant that will debut as a removable contact lens and evolve into something more permanent from there.
Meta Ray-Bans Display Launched. Here’s the breakdown: At $799, you get a monocular heads-up display (not augmented reality) in a pair of Ray-Bans Wayfarers. The device is a walled garden, for now. You’re limited to Meta apps and a few Meta-approved third parties, like Amazon Music. The navigation also only works in the US. The neural band you use for clicking and scrolling got generally positive reviews, but it needs to be on tight to work, which gets uncomfortable after a few hours. It supports real-time captions and live translation (slower than captions) for English, French, Italian, and Spanish. They come with Meta AI integrated, which is not perfect but more useful now that it can show you things. Go for black over sand as the onboard electronics are less visible on the black version.
Entertainment news that is actually tech news. Larry Ellison, the co-founder and CTO of Oracle - aka the company that stores all of the data used by the various AI companies - was reported to be partnering with the Saudi Public Investment Fund to buy Warner Bros Discovery. Ellison and his brother already own Paramount, and Larry was the leader in the consortium that sought to buy TikTok. Why would a founder who deals in data want a bunch of entertainment properties? No official word from Ellison or Paramount, but highly targeted social media algorithms and AI-generated media come to mind.
Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3 Launched. With this model, called SAM3, you can detect specific objects in a video stream. This looks like a competitor to Ultralytic’s YOLO model, which we covered previously. When combined with smartglasses, you can see why Meta is invested in this kind of tech - it makes the user experience so much more seamless when an AI can detect what you’re looking at without having to tell it. The most Black Mirror use case I’ve seen so far: using SAM3 to detect faces and then blur them out.
Saved on Socials
The posts, memes, job postings, and videos that caught my attention this week:
Tiffany Janzen is hiring a Research & Production Assistant to help create high-quality YouTube STEM episodes for her TiffinTech channel.
Recently Played >
Which podcasts we listened to this week:
Do you really need a co-founder anymore? (YouTube)
Why French Museums Keep Getting Robbed (Spotify)
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📸 This is a prototype, but it is a real app by Greg Madison, developed on Unity.
