Tear-powered AR lenses 💧, Google's AI watermark ✔️, the AI enterprise battle 💼, and much more! ✨
#54
Hey there! Welcome back to Augmented Rarity 👽, your weekly update on emerging tech and future trends 📡
🖼️ Today's cover: AR contact lenses that charge in tears, being mass produced.
Let's get started! 👇
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🤖 Artificial Intelligence
SynthID, Google’s invisible watermark for AI-generated images that you can't remove ✔️. Feel free to try it out and see if you can crack it.
Image: Google OpenAI is rolling out an enterprise version of ChatGPT 💼, which is going head-to-head with Microsoft, who now has a new enterprise rival since Google is also launching an enterprise plan 👀🍿
CLARI, a tiny shape-shifting robot 🐞 that can squeeze through narrow spaces, could be used in disaster relief, where it could crawl into confined spaces too dangerous for humans to enter.
Image: Casey Cass/CU Boulder Bumble is tightening community guidelines to combat bots, spam, and other unsolicited nudes. They’ve already blocked 8.2 million accounts this year 🦹♀️, dating apps are going to be way more reliable thanks to AI.
🥽 Extended Reality
Smart contact lenses powered by tears? 💧, this is no scifi, but also not a reality yet because they are far from being commercialised, but the concept is just great. Right now, they're as thin as a human cornea and charge up when submerged in a saline solution.
Image: NTU Singapore On the path to AR mainstream success, Apple aims to release a version of the Vision Pro priced under $1,000 🥽. The current display of the Vision Pro comes courtesy of a partnership with Sony, but they're exploring more affordable collaborations for what comes next.
Legs on Horizon still suck 🦵. I'm not sharing this because it's important, but because it's funny. Last year at Meta Connect they hyped up 'legs' as this huge feature, but it ended up being a fake demo. So now that they're bringing it back, I figured they'd make more of it, but nope. You can't even see your own legs; they only show up for people who look at you, or in a mirror, which is still pointless because the whole reason people wanted legs in VR was to feel more immersed in the virtual world…
Image: Meta
🛸 Space
Celebrities on Mars - my dissertation made real! 🏜️ Apparently there's a show called 'Stars on Mars', a reality show set in an Australian desert pretending to be on Mars. Okay, I haven't watched it yet because I'm not into realities, but it is exactly what my thesis was about, a very Black Mirror inspired critique of one of humanity's greatest advances, space travel, being brought into the mainstream by influencers who are willing to gain more fame by being visible on Mars, not for what it means to humanity, but for the likes of them. I’ve added a link to my project on the resources section down bellow.
Image: Brook Rushton / FOX
🗃 Resources
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Best,
Martina