Snap, in augmented reality push, launches new Spectacles version
Spectacles 3, which will begin shipping in the fall, will cost $380, almost twice the $200 cost of the previous version.
It will have dual cameras to add depth and dimension to photos and videos. After uploading the content to the messaging app Snapchat, users can add new lighting, landscapes and three-dimensional effects to the images, Snap said.
The company added 13 million users in the second quarter, of which 7 million to 9 million were from the new AR lenses, Snap said.
Last week, Snap said it would raise $1.1 billion in debt to fund further investments in AR, content and possible acquisitions.
See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-snap-spectacles/snap-in-augmented-reality-push-launches-new-spectacles-idUSKCN1V318Q
mkt res: Has Sony Captured 30% of VR Hardware Revenues?
Sony is the market share leader for VR hardware revenues according to the latest report from Strategy Insights. Specifically, the firm pegs PSVR’s revenue share at 30 percent. That’s followed by Oculus (presumably all variants) at 25 percent and HTC (same) at 22 percent.
Collectively, the high end of the market accounts for 77 percent of revenues, compared with the receding class of mobile VR headsets. That includes Google (11 percent) Samsung (5 percent) and others (6 percent). Google saw the biggest YoY drop from 21 percent to 11 percent.
So Quest and PSVR are essentially the betting favorites for the next year of VR’s market-share horse race. PSVR has better specs but less portability. Game libraries and switching cost favor PSVR, but Quest is catching up with 50 games out of the gate and 100 by year-end.
Light Field Lab Raises $28 Million For Huge Holographic Displays
San Jose, California-based Light Field Lab will use the money to scale its display technology from prototype to product. The aim is to create holographic objects that appear to be three dimensional and float in space without head-mounted gear such as augmented reality or virtual reality goggles.
Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab, told me in an interview in November that he wants to bring real-world holographic experiences to life with up to hundreds of gigapixels of resolution, including modular video walls for live event and large-scale installations.
“The ultimate goal is to enable the things that we all think of in science fiction as the hologram,” Karafin said. “There’s a lot of things out there, but you know, they say that flying cars and holograms are the two things that science fiction hasn’t yet quite delivered. And we’re going to at least get that started.”
Light Field Lab’s technology re-creates what optical physics calls a “real image” for off-screen projected objects by generating a massive number of viewing angles that correctly change with the point of view and location just like in the real world. This is accomplished with a directly emissive, modular, and flat-panel display surface coupled with a complex series of waveguides that modulate the dense field of collimated light rays. With this implementation, a viewer sees around objects when moving in any direction such that motion parallax is maintained, reflections and refractions behave correctly, and the eyes freely focus on the items formed in mid-air. The result is that the brain says, “this is real,” without having any physical objects. In other words, Light Field Lab creates real holograms with no headgear.
The company plans to take smaller holographic image components and assemble them into very large images. Back in November, the company showed me two-inch, see-through holographic image that the company can produce as its basic core building block. There’s no head-tracking, no motion sickness, and no latency in the display. It takes place within a six-inch by four-inch space, or the core building block.
Jon Karafin said “We want to make sure that the way we roll our technologies out is starting with the really big thing, using large-scale, high-value entertainment experiences, showing something that is transformational that nobody has ever seen before.”
In addition to holographic displays, Light Field Lab’s technology includes the hardware and software platform required for content distribution.
“Verizon’s new 5G network features the higher bandwidth, low latency, and speed/throughput to deliver next generation content,” said Kristina Serafim, investment director at Verizon Ventures, in a statement. “Light Field Lab’s innovative solution will help build the 5G future for Verizon’s consumer, business, network, and media customers.”
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/light-field-lab-raises-28/
Company plans to build $7.5 billion ‘smart mini-city’ in Las Vegas
Bleutech Park, sponsored by Bleutech Park Properties, Inc., will have net-zero buildings, according to a release, which will create an insular mini-city and featuring automated multi-functional designs, renewable energy sources, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, supertrees, self-healing concrete structures and more high-tech gadgetry straight from a science-fiction movie.
The privately funded project, made possible by institutional and private equity investments, will take six years to complete, but promises to redefine the mixed-use environment with workforce housing, office and retail space, ultra-luxury residential, hotel and entertainment.
See the full story here: https://news3lv.com/news/local/company-plans-to-build-75-billion-smart-mini-city-in-las-vegas
Lucidworks raises $100M to expand in AI-powered search-as-a-service for organizations
In an interview, Hayes said that what sets Lucidworks apart is how it uses machine learning and other AI processes to personalise those results after “sorting through mountains of data”, to provide enterprise information to knowledge workers, shopping results on an e-commerce site to consumers, data to wealth managers, or whatever it is that is being sought.
Take the case of a shopping experience, he said by way of explanation. “If I’m on REI to buy hiking shoes, I don’t just want to see the highest-rated hiking shoes, or the most expensive,” he said.
The idea is that Lucidworks builds algorithms that bring in other data sources — your past shopping patterns, your location, what kind of walking you might be doing, what other people like you have purchased — to produce a more focused list of products that you are more likely to buy.
“Amazon has no taste,” he concluded, a little playfully.
Interestingly, Hayes said that while it’s come up a number of times, Lucidworks doesn’t see itself ever going head-to-head with a company like Google or Amazon in providing a first-party search platform of its own. Indeed, that may be an area that has, for the time being at least, already been played out. Or it may be that we have turned to a time when walled gardens — or at least more targeted and curated experiences — are coming into their own.
Scale AI and its 22-year-old CEO lock down $100 million to label Silicon Valley’s data
The “human insight” can help minimize labeling bias and give customers data that is more precise and more accurate, though, as with just about all AI startups, the hope is that these insights will gradually usher in a future where reliance on these humans-in-the-loop will be lessened. In the meantime, Scale sits atop an army of contractors that might hold the key to bulking up Silicon Valley’s machine learning intelligence.
“AI companies will come and go as they compete to find the most effective applications of machine learning. Scale AI will last over time because it provides core infrastructure to the most important players in the space,” Founders Fund partner and former Trump advisor Peter Thiel said in a statement.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/05/scale-ai-and-its-22-year-old-ceo-lock-down-100-million-to-help-label-silicon-valleys-data/
RIP mobile virtual reality: Samsung drops Gear VR support in Galaxy Note 10
Mobile virtual reality, meant to be the next big thing only a handful of years ago, continues to die a slow death, as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Thursday confirmed that its new Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy 10 Plus will not work with its Gear VR headset.
The Samsung Gear VR was launched with much fanfare in November 2015 with support from Oculus, the Facebook Inc.-owned virtual reality headset and software maker. The device allowed Samsung users to place supported smartphones within the headset to create a virtual reality experience without the need to purchase a dedicated headset and an expensive PC to support it.
The decline and slow death of mobile VR isn’t a Samsung story alone. Google LLC, which arguably created mobile VR with its Cardboard product, has not only dropped support for VR in its latest phones but also seemingly abandoned its Daydream VR platform as well.
The broader VR market has fared much better. As companies such as Oculus and HTC Corp. continue to launch new headsets, the most generous thing you could say about VR is that it has a devoted niche audience. It’s not even especially arguable in 2019 to say that the promises surrounding the second coming of VR in the mid-2010s — two decades after the first one — has failed to live up to its hype.
See the full story here: https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/08/rip-mobile-virtual-reality-samsung-drops-gear-vr-support-galaxy-note-10/