Lifeboat Foundation

Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins is the first human being to put them on.

“After completing preclinical testing and mitigating potential safety risks, I wore Mojo Lens,” Perkins wrote in a blog post. “Much to my delight, I found I could interact with a compass to find my bearings, view images, and use an on-screen teleprompter. Seeing the future literally put me at a loss for words.”

Mojo Vision is now ready to conduct the clinical trials needed to secure FDA approval for the tech — and ultimately, give you super vision.

Sleek, light, high-performance, and not easy on the pocket like any other Apple device.

Earlier this week, Meta rolled out its Quest Pro Virtual Reality (VR) headset, priced at $1,499. Many questioned the need for a high-end VR headset when the company’s Quest 2 headset appears to be doing rather well. However, as Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his conversation with The Verge.

The official launch of Apple’s mixed reality headset was expected to happen in 2022. In the recent past, we have had Apple products being announced much earlier than their actual availability, so a 2022 launch could still be possible. To prepare you for such an event, here’s what you need to know about the Apple headset.

Continue reading “Apple’s mixed-reality headset: Here’s what you need to know” »

A while ago I spotted someone working on real time AI image generation in VR and I had to bring it to your attention because frankly, I cannot express how majestic it is to watch AI-modulated AR shifting the world before us into glorious, emergent dreamscapes.

Applying AI to augmented or virtual reality isn’t a novel concept, but there have been certain limitations in applying it—computing power being one of the major barriers to its practical usage. Stable Diffusion image generation software, however, is a boiled-down algorithm for use on consumer-level hardware and has been released on a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence. That means not only can developers use the tech to create and launch programs without renting huge amounts of server silicon, but they’re also free to profit from their creations.

Interested in learning what’s next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next. Register today.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company is working with Ray-ban on creating new augmented reality glasses.

This product is coming sometime in the future, and it’s in addition to the existing partnership that Meta and Ray-ban have on Ray-ban Stories glasses. Zuckerberg said that AR glasses will get more sophisticated over time. Rocco Basilico of Luxotica showed off a demo of the new tech. And Ray-ban Stories will get a Spotify update.

Despite the poor performance, the deal is still on.

In 2021, the U.S. Army awarded a $22 billion dollar contract to Microsoft to build HoloLens-like smart goggles for its soldiers. Over a year later, the smart goggles program has been plagued with delays as well as performance issues and failed four of six elements in a test conducted by the U.S. Army, Business Insider.

Microsoft.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s $22 billion worth smart goggles reportedly failed in US Army tests” »

Mojo Vision’s smart contact lens has finally made the leap to human testing, bringing the future of AR a major step closer.

“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is,” Cook told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate). “And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.” In other words, despite persistent reports of Apple’s interest in building all manner of AR and VR hardware, Cook isn’t ready to claim that the company is working towards any so-called “metaverse.”

Mark Zuckerberg has a different view. Earlier this year, the Meta CEO told his employees that the company is in a “very deep, philosophical competition” with Apple to build the metaverse. “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience,” Zuckerberg said, contrasting what he says is Apple’s closed approach with Meta’s more interoperable development.

As anyone who has recently tried out an augmented reality headset knows, the technology is not yet ready to be part of our everyday lives. Researchers have been working to perfect high-performing augmented reality (AR) glasses, but there are a number of challenges. One major problem with conventional AR glasses is that there is a tradeoff in terms of quality and brightness between the external scene you actually see and the contextual information you also want to visualize.

Early solutions like Google Glass used multiple bulky optical components that were partially reflective and partially transmissive to mix the real-world and contextual scenes, with the result of a dimmed and distorted vision of both scenes.

More recent AR head-mounted-display eyeglasses have been patterned with diffractive gratings (fine grooves) with wavelength-sized spacing that deflect contextual information from a miniprojector beside the glasses to the viewer’s eye. But these eyeglasses still dim and distort the external scene because real-world light passing through the glass inevitably gets scattered and dispersed by the gratings. The distortions get worse when several sets of overlapping gratings must be used to handle multiple distinct colors from the miniprojector.

The science fiction icon who coined and popularized the term “metaverse” is pausing his literary career to build his own.

As revealed by Wired, “Snow Crash” author and cyberpunk pioneer Neal Stephenson is working with a crypto bro to create an open metaverse platform that will, its creators hope, be a more decentralized version of the types of Big Tech metaverses like those run by Fortnite and Facebook.

“It’s like Neal is coming down out of the mountains like Gandalf, to restore the metaverse to an open, decentralized, and creative order,” said robotics and augmented reality entrepreneur Rony Abovitz, who is also acting as a strategic advisor to Lamina1, the company Stephenson is cofounding with Bitcoin Foundation head Peter Vessenes.