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Welcome back to Spatial Beats. Peggy Johnson is Out at Magic Leap, Replaced by Ross Rosenberg. The former Qualcomm and Microsoft executive, joined the company in 2020 to refocus it on enterprise as it launched the Magic Leap 2. Rosenberg was previously an exec at Belden, Inc. and First Solar.
It’s Big Tech Earnings week, featuring Meta, Google, and Microsoft, which was the big winner with an AI- AI-expanding cloud business. Meta’s Metaverse beatings are back. The XR division lost $3.7 billion last quarter. You gotta be making some real dough to sustain a blow like that every few months. They say Meta was rescued by AI, which is how they are now referring to the algorithms that run their newsfeeds. Despite increased revenue, with the economy booming and more interest rate increases ahead, growth stocks, and the entire tech sector in particular, took it on the chin this week.
Peter Theil Makes $68M Investment in Quantum SystemsEuro Drone Program. Drones have become the most accurate and lethal weapon in the Ukraine War, so unsurprisingly it is now a high-growth sector of the defense industry. Even more unsurprising, Theil is going to profit from it.
Threedium Secures $11 Million Series A. The platform enables users to distribute 3D assets across multiple platforms from a single interface. The round was led by Interpublic Group and Olma Partners with additional support from Mesh Consensys, Reflexive Capital, Nirvana Family Office, Lyra Ventures, Edenbase, and Kinisis Venture Fund I.
The Humane AI Pin Launches November 9th. The battle of the AI assistants, co-pilots, or chatbot is on, and the upstart, a wearable standalone microcomputer, is launching in two weeks. I’m on the waiting list.
Google announces tools to help users fact-check images. Google is announcing it will provide more contextual information about an image to prevent false information from spreading. The new set of tools includes viewing an image’s history, metadata and the context users used it with on different sites. The new image tools are available by clicking the three-dot menu on Google Images results.
ByteDance Says it’s Committed to Pico VR. No one is quite sure why. Rumors stick because they have truthiness. They play to our preconceptions, our misconceptions, and prejudices. There’s no way Bytedance can muster the kind of ad blitz you’d need to make a dent in Meta’s market share.
Unlike Rokid, TCL, and XReal, we’ve never given Nimo a try but they sound freaking great. I can’t wait to take them for a spin. I’ve been predicting the breakthrough of such a device for years. Could I finally be right? The $1299 Nimo has its own palm-sized GPU. The video above emphasizes the anchored multi-screen interface, which will produce screens that appear to be 130 inches.
Old game. New tricks. The new mixed reality mode release of “Drop Dead: The Cabin – Home Invasion” brings a zombie invasion right to your living room with Quest 3 for just $24.99. With the Quest 3’s room scanning sensors, I expect this in-home monster shooter to be a new genre. UI/UX designer Nicolas Neubert with AI technology, created this AI film with Canadian rapper JUGGER as part of his debut album PUPPET MASTER on Red Bull Records/Wonderchild Records today.
Best Augmented Reality Games for Mobile
How Meta and AI companies recruited striking actors to train AI (Eillen Guo/MIT Technology Review)
This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by Paramount’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz, Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz, 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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