Figma getting AI-powered ⚡️, Apple's VisionOS SDK finally released 🥽, a final farewell to Google Glass 👋, and more!
Hi and welcome back to another week of Augmented Rarity! 👽
Been a while, hasn't it? Sorry for disappearing for over 3 months, I really appreciate you still being here. Thanks for sticking around, let's get started!
🥽 Extended Reality
Apple’s VisionOS SDK has finally been released! 👩🏻💻 I have 0 talent for coding, but I'm going to give it a try. I’ll keep you updated 🤓. There is no need to own the ultra-expensive glasses that will be released next year, because Xcode includes a simulator that lets you see what you are building.
To be honest, the trigger that got me writing this newsletter again was the release of Vision Pro 🥽. And the reason is simple: I had fallen a bit out of love with the whole XR and AI theme and this was a breath of fresh air because we all know that Apple is not a geeky pioneer like Google who launched Google Glass in 2012 🪦💔, but they carefully think about it and when they launch it, it is because it will be a hit. So yes, $3500, a lot of money, and yes, it's possible they'll make a cheaper headset and maybe even in nice colours and who knows what, so for now, we keep waiting 😮💨.
Image: Apple Speaking of Google Glass, the AR headset was discontinued in 2015 (3 years after its release), but its support has remained functional until now. Unfortunately, support for Google Glass is scheduled to end in September this year 👋.
Image: Google
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Voicebox, Meta's new AI, can do everything voice related 📢, from generating speech in multiple languages, removing noise, editing content and I guess at this point, anything?. Yes, deep fakes are getting harder to spot.
Don't like the way you look in a photo? Then you will soon be able to edit stills through point-based manipulation with Drag your GAN ↔️. This tool will allow you to rearrange object positions, human and animal poses, and more from a single image. The code will be released at some point this month, can’t wait to try it!
Figma is about to get even better with AI ⚡️! Months ago, Magician, a plugin for Figma was released that promised to let you design with magic (spoiler: AI), and it was so well received that Figma ended up buying Diagram, the company behind it. AI tools are still not implemented in Figma, but in this race of AI to colonise the world, Figma just had to announce it last Wednesday at Config.
“For example, in the discovery phase, we’re exploring how AI might help you generate and synthesize early ideas with a simple prompt. Or perhaps it can help you move faster during the design phase by tapping into your existing designs and design systems, and surfacing component recommendations for you to build upon.”
🗃 Resources
Read, watch, listen
Black Mirror’s new season on Netflix! This show was the inspiration for my art projects and for this newsletter 🤫, let’s see if this season has any episode as good as ‘15 million merits’, ‘Nosedive’ or ‘San Junipero’🤓.
If you watched WWDC23, Apple’s Keynote, you might noticed they never mention the Metaverse or Artificial Intelligence, but that they branded everything. Here’s a video on the why behind it:
This news media portal is transparently written entirely by AI (available in Spanish 🇪🇸)
To try/download
And that’s it for today! I’ll be back next Friday 🫡
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Nice article!
Welcome back.