Affordable humanoid robots 🤑, Apple's CEO opinion on the Metaverse 👓, AI text-to-video waitlist 🎥, and more!
Welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity!💚
A week full of news and reflections on how the world and society are being shaped by AI and XR.
Btw we are doing a different format this time because I wanted to extend more on some topics. Let’s begin!✨
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
🔗 Humanoid robots are here! Oh wait, not really 🙄
I admire Elon, I really do. He’s a nice tech villain. Probably nicer than Zuck. However, expectations should be lowered since we expected Optimus to be a humanoid robot, not this scary sack of wire and metal that looks like a teen's evening project. Ok that was harsh. In fact, they showed one version that looked cool, it just couldn't walk yet.
It’s difficult to us to consider that a big first step since Boston Dynamics has been entertaining us years ago with their parkour robots. How come Elon, the genius behind SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and a long etcetera, hasn’t managed to build it yet? Well, let’s not judge this “thingy” because of its appearance, and let’s focus on:
How roboticists were impressed by how fast Tesla’s engineers assembled Optimus, mainly because the Tesla manufacturers are just moving from wheels to our legs, so part of the job is done (hence our high expectations).
How Elon’s goal is quite similar to his mission with SpaceX*, making humanoid robots affordable. Literally way cheaper than a Tesla, $20K. As reference, those Boston Dynamics' cool parkour robots start at $75K.
Meanwhile Optimus is still not that agile yet, Oregon State's bipedal robot sets 100 meter Guinness World Record.
You can watch the full event here and let me know if you also got a bit emotional or it’s just me 🥺💚. The FOMO is real!
*SpaceX differentiates from other rocket companies because of reusability, so instead of wasting so much money and materials, SpaceX’s rockets would be like other vehicles and that will reduce the cost of space travel in the future, meaning that future generations will be able to travel to other planets like we travel to other parts of the world for a modest price (let’s ignore the fact that our body is not biologically prepared for space travel, so less overthinking and more dreaming!).
🔗 Generating videos from text prompts is finally possible!
Brought to you by your Friendly Neighborhood, Meta. Although that doesn't make sense, it sounded good in my head.
I said possible, not available, at least not to us. So yes, Meta did what we were all expecting from Dalle or Midjourney, but unfortunately it hasn’t launched to the public yet, so for now you can fill up this form to get access in the future.
🥽 Extended Reality & Metaverse
Quick poll,
I’m asking you because since big tech corps such as Meta, Microsoft and Apple are deciding our future 😵, and for what we are seeing, many of them are referring to the Metaverse as this new reality we’ll be immersed into and that they are willing to build (Meta, Microsoft), a bit Ready Player One but less dystopian, I hope, while others (Apple, Niantic) are rejecting that concept and willing to build a more practical and realistic iteration of the internet.
So again, what’s your perspective? Let me know in the poll 👆
For more background on how Apple sees the Metaverse, Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) doesn’t dig that concept and is focusing more on how people might eventually think of AR as they do of the internet: ubiquitous and difficult to live without. Notice how we are speaking of AR here, not about “the Metaverse”. Same as John Hanke (Niantic’s CEO), who ensures that a real-world Metaverse (AR) will be more magical than VR.
🔗 Google is back in the VR game by investing $12 million into SideQuest, the indie VR app store 🛍
To be honest I thought SideQuest was dead since Meta launched App Lab last year, and apparently Meta was financing SideQuest too, so I’m a bit confused here!
But it’s now on Google’s hands, which will definitely democratise this race of who builds/owns the Metaverse. I mean, in order for the Metaverse to exist, all those big corporations need to work together on the same technology, not against them, because if we did, we'd have thousands of Metaverses, or a digital totalitarian dystopia going on... and seeing where the world's political interests are heading, that's terrifying.
🔗 Minecraft inspired clothes? Yes, and make it high couture 👑
Behold the “metaversy” clothing line by Loewe for Paris fashion week. Criticise it as much as you want, but kids (and not only kids) would wear it as they are already wearing Minecraft and other games merch 🎮.
And no, the image is not bad Photoshop but an actual Loewe hoodie. I don’t know how much that would cost, but they already have an old collection pixelated sweater for 820€ 😵. But still, more wearable (and affordable) than sprayed clothing that yes, in the end the use case is that… it’s useless? But if we had to be rational about everything we wouldn’t allow ourselves to dream and be creative, so yes, it was an art performance only allowed in a multi billion dollar industry such as the fashion one 🤑
🔗 The current state of the social Metaverse, imagined by a supermarket 🛒
And one more! This is just an hilarious opinion article by someone who entered the Walmart Metaverse for the first time… and probably the last too lol because it was a very messy experience for her… and in the end she is the reflection of many future users of it. In my opinion, this image summarises the status of the Metaverse nowadays 👇
What I want to extract from it, is that the author mentions how Walmart built this “Metaverse” to target brands to younger generations, but it appears that they had so much trouble trying to construct it (in Roblox, so the platform is already functioning, they just had to design it), that they forgot about their main marketing purposes 👀.
Oh wow that was a long email. The less I’m on social media, the more I write here 🫢. I know I’m a content creator, but read this if you are also feeling overwhelmed with your digital life.
Before I say goodbye, here’s another poll!
See you again next Wednesday!
As always, thanks for reading. Remember to share it to support it!
Have a lovely week 💚
Best,
Martina