AIs offering life advice 🛋️, China mass-producing humanoid robots 🤖, more controller-free XR devices 🥽, and more! ✨
#52
Hey there! Welcome back to Augmented Rarity 👽, your weekly newsletter on emerging tech and future trends.
🖼️ Today's cover: a robot physiologist giving life advice to a young woman
🍴 On the menu: The usual! Unfortunately we ran out of resources, but they'll be available next week, so we've added some space travel updates instead 🚀
Let’s begin! 👇
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Google’s AI offering life advice? 🛋️ Here's a big topic to think about, because I used to think that in terms of life advice, even psychological advice, a human should be in charge, because an AI can't decipher your real emotions yet, but even if many professionals try not to be biased, they are, so some of them give life advice based on their interests, so an AI could be more impartial... or even more biased by training it to brainwash its patients somehow, okay, that's disturbing.
China is on the verge of mass-producing humanoid robots 🤖, probably paving the way for robots to go mainstream. I feel like I need a visit to fully understand how advanced their technology adoption is, in Europe we are way behind in terms of consumer or hospitality robots.
Image: Handout Xiaomi announced the Cyberdog 2 at their recent keynote 🐶. See, consumer robots getting closer to the mainstream, I really want one, but considering the 2 year old previous version was 300k, I'll limit myself to watching youtuber reviews lol
Humanoid robots can now drive planes ✈️, which I guess is more economical than making a fully autonomous plane? a robot that can drive a human-designed transport, that makes economic sense to get to the fully autonomous transport transition.
BeFake, the AI generated social media app 🥸. Not like BeReal is that real, we all wait for that 'cooler' moment to take a late one, but the idea of having a completely fake AI generated images social media app seems completely unnecessary, but i’ll test it.
Image: BeFake
🥽 Extended Reality
Controller-free hand and eye tracking headsets are the next thing, making tech feel like magic (Magic Leap was one of the reasons that made me get into interaction design). New announcements:
Videos and specifications of Samsung's upcoming XR headset, Glasses Lite 👓, have been leaked, aaand they are expected to be released this 2023
Sony’s glove shaped VR controller, so yes, hand tracking is coming to PSVR too 🤙
Meta's new VR prototypes won 3 awards 🏆 at Siggraph: Best in Show, Audience Choice, and Official Selection for the Digital Content Association of Japan.
Image: Meta Unity has announced a beta programme for the Vision Pro 🕹️, so let the AR/VR games come to Apple! They're introducing a new technology called PolySpatial that will allow developers to bring existing IP to the Vision Pro, which could make it easier for them to create new experiences.
🛸 Space
Virgin Galactic's first space passengers 🚀, or more billionaires spending more on a trip than most of us will get in a lifetime. But hey, at least this time it's women.
I keep talking about Mars updates, but Russia, China, India and the US are on their way to The Moon 🌝?! I don't know how i've been so disconnected on this topic, we’ll follow up.
And that’s it for today!
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Those robodogs look like... robohorses? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯