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Welcome back to Spatial Beats. This week, Apple and Epic continue to exchange blows, Tom Brady leans into NFTs and Vuzix forms partnership with TechSee. Let’s dive in…
Apple says Epic’s Fortnite lawsuit is a marketing stunt to revive ‘flagging interest’ in the game. Apple believes this lawsuit is Epic’s “project liberty” media strategy, despite Epic’s claim regarding the App Store raising prices due to Apple’s share of profit. The trial begins next month in California.
Football legend Tom Brady launching an NFT company for autographs. It makes perfect sense, finally. What possession made of atoms needs an infallible chain of ownership – a blockchain – or NFT – more than an autograph? Perhaps the Mona Lisa? Or, as Philip Rosedale posited in this 2017 Forbes interview, a Ferrari. How would there otherwise be scarcity?
Vuzix Partners with TechSee to bring AI-powered visual assistance to the enterprise market over Vuzix’ Smart Glasses. The combined solution will support multiple industries such as manufacturing, insurance, and consumer electronics. The integration allows TechSee’s computer vision AI to be integrated into Vuzix’s hardware and will eventually be available in the App Store.
HP Reverb G2 Omnicept Launches in May for $1249. The new headset is a professional version of the recently released Reverb G2 last year. Some new additions to the headset are features such as pupil and eye tracking, heart rate, and facial tracking with an extra mounted unit.
The Unity Cube is an experiment from developer Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo to test the limits of what Oculus will allow into the App Lab program. Vitillo submitted a fully functional application which simply presents the user with a cube in a blank environment—and Oculus accepted it.
Introducing the eGlass: a hybrid classroom solution. The product is a new form of classroom delivery in which a teacher can draw on a transparent piece of glass for students in the classroom. Then, the image on the glass can be flipped in the conference call for students learning remotely. The goal of the product is to make learning more effective and engaging while we are all still remote.
Apple patents suggest AR Smartglasses will use head-worn haptics to guide user attention. The “micro-gestures” will use AR input to create controllers out of the user’s fingers if positioned a certain way. The haptics and micro-gestures hope to guide and control user attention to objects outside of their field of view.
Guess who’s number #19 on HTC Vive’s list of its Top 100 VR Influencers? That’s right, baby. Thank you.
This Week in XR is now a podcast hosted by Paramount’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz and Charlie Fink, the author of this weekly column. You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. Watch the latest episode below.
Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.
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