Android for AR 🥽, Wearable robotic arms 🦾, Virgin Galactic's first suborbital flight 🚀, OpenAI's new office 🇬🇧, and much more! ✨

Hello and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity! 👽 I used to call this newsletter "Black Mirronian", but this latest season makes me wonder what Black Mirror is anyway.

By the way, the 🗃️ Resources section is full today, so be sure to check it out! Let's start with this week's updates 👇

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🥽 Extended Reality

• Android for AR in the making 🥽!

  • Last week Google announced they are killing Google’s Glass support 👋,

  • this week they are notifying they are giving up on hardware for AR (project Iris has been cancelled),

  • but they are taking the lead on what would be “Android for AR” 🥳. Shortly after Apple's announcement of the release of their visionOS SDK.

  • The idea is to license it to manufacturers of Android devices, including Samsung, which is already working with Google and Qualcomm on an AR headset similar to the Meta Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro.

  • Google’s AR SDK and what’s new in Google AR linked in the resources section 👀.

Image: Google

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🤖 Artificial Intelligence

• Google's new chatbot, Gemini, is really going to beat ChatGP 🥊. Or so they say. We'll wait and see 🍿

  

  Image: DeepMind

• YouTube is working on making the translated audio tracks sound like the voice of the creator 🎥, with more expression and lip sync. I like the idea of being able to create content in my native language and have it translated into multiple languages with a few clicks. I wonder if this will affect niche audiences based on region though.

• OpenAI just opened an office in London! 🇬🇧 This is a strategic move as DeepMind already has an office in the British capital. At the moment, I only see 3 vacancies in the UK office, but many more in the San Francisco office. Take a look by yourself here.

• Speaking of OpenAI, ChatGPT can now search the web (again), but only for iOS app users via Bing Search and only available to ChatGPT Plus users.

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🤖 Robotics

• Fancy some wearable robotic arms? This Japanese research group has just unveiled a prototype that could make transhumanism a little less sci-fi. Their proposal is a system of 6 detachable robotic arms that can be worn as a backpack. You can wear 1 to 6 of them, and the total weight increase is 14kg, which is not as heavy as I imagined.

  

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🛸 Space

• Virgin Galactic’s first spatial tourism launch has been a success! You can watch the livestream here. The 90-minute flight was suborbital, which means it will reach the edge of space without going into orbit. The company has already sold 800 tickets $450,000 each 💸), so yesterday was just the beginning. Tbh after the fatal result of Titan’s, I was quite worried about this one. This article talks about that.

  

  Image: Virgin Galactic

• 4 volunteers have just entered a Martian simulation where they will live and work for a year. None of them are trained astronauts, but a researcher, an engineer, a microbiologist and a medical doctor. If you thought they'd get rich doing this, not really, it's more passion than anything else, as they're paid around $60,000 for a year of their lives in an "outdoor" environment meant to simulate the Martian surface.

  

  Image: MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

• One step closer to real space tourism 🚀. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has succeeded in producing oxygen on Mars, doubling the experiment's previous production level.

  

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🗃 Cool stuff

Read, watch, listen

• 📚 An article from Meta about the AI systems that rank the content on our Instagram feed

• 📚 The Dawn of Spatial Computing: A close look at the breakthroughs in mixed reality tech

• 🐦 Spatial Netflix: Video streaming in AR with AI generated depth map

• 🎧 Learning spatial design - 5 design principles

• 📺 What’s new in Google AR

• 📺 Introducing Geospatial Creator powered by ARCore and Google Maps Platform

To try/download

• ⚙️ PimEyes is a face search engine that scans the internet for pictures of particular faces using facial recognition technology

• ⚙️ ARCore, Google’s augmented reality SDK offering cross-platform APIs to build new immersive experiences on Android, iOS, Unity, and Web.

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And that’s it for today!

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