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Welcome back to Spatial Beats. Last week, DigiLens announced $50M in Series D funding. Samsung led the round, which gives some indication of where these low-cost waveguide lenses for AR glasses might be headed. The investment values the company at $530M.
Unreal Engine 5 Could Change Games, Movies, and the Metaverse. To show off the power of the new UE5 game development platform, Epic is releasing the entire city from the Matrix demo, so that developers can build games and experiences on top of it. The world will be populated by 20,000 metahumans driving cars and walking around the city streets, with each block rendered in vivid detail, down to each leaf and brick.
Citi says the metaverse economy could be worth $13 trillion by 2030. In a report issued last week, the bank says the Metaverse represents a potential $13 trillion market opportunity by 2030, that could boast as many as 5 billion users.
Epic and Lego partner to build The Legoverse. The release did not say Legoverse, to be fair, but I just had to. The joint release from the two companies was scarce on detail but not superlatives. “The Lego Group and Epic Games will combine their extensive experience to ensure that this next iteration of the internet is designed from the outset with the well-being of kids in mind.” It’s not even clear money changed hands. Maybe Epic is just sick of the way Meta dominates the tech news every week. They are 3,741 press releases behind so this won’t put much of a nick in that.
The U.S. Army eyes thousands of IVAS systems with FY23 budget. That’s the kind way of saying the Army is slow-walking their anticipated twenty-two billion-dollar purchase of HoloLens technology. On one hand, command loves Microsoft, The HoloLens, and IVAS. They say delays are normal. On the other hand, they’ve been hobbled by Congressional budget allocations, only getting half of what was requested, which was itself way less than anticipated. As they are now talking about the next HoloLens, the XR combat use case may remain in the cockpit for longer than anticipated.
Orthomed & Osso Bringing VR Surgery Training To Animal Health Market. The simulator used to train doctors can train vetranarians, too.
Magic Leap 2 Aims to Bring AR to Businesses, With No BS This Time (Connie Guglielmo/Cnet)
How the Metaverse Could Change Work (Mark Purdy/Harvard Business Review)
Will your company embrace AR for training? (Jonny Evans/Computerworld)
The State of XR in Manufacturing and Industrial 2022 (Rory Greenier/XR Today)
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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