AR Monocles 🧐, Stable Diffusion on humanoid robots 🎨, Apple's Vision Pro updates 🥽, and more!
Hi and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity! 👽 We have a lot of topics today, so let's get started 👇
🥽 Extended Reality
A new VR subscription service? 💸 Meta Quest + will cost $7.99/month, with the first month costing only $1, or $59.99/year. You'll get two VR titles per month that you can keep as long as you have an active subscription. You can cancel anytime, and the games will still be available when you come back. This isn't too bad, especially when you consider that I've spent over €60 on VR games that I no longer play.
Image: Meta Finally, there is some AR technology available for people who wear glasses like myself 🤓. Brilliant labs has created an AR monocle that can be attached to any lenses 🧐. This AR headset is affordable ($349) and lightweight (15 grams), so it won't feel heavy. Right now, you need a smartphone to use it, but it will be able to connect directly to the cloud in the future. The headset is supported by Brendan Iribe, the original CEO of Oculus, and Adam Cheyer, co-inventor of Siri. It's also open source, so you could create your own apps for it.
Image: Brilliant labs Or you could let your skin be your own smartphone with Humane Ai pin, a wearable smartphone that uses your hands as a projector 📱. A solution to end our addiction to screens? Is the future not on our face, but in our skin? that of course before the roadmap gets complete and we get it in our brains. It’ll be powered by “an advanced Snapdragon platform” in partnership with Qualcomm, and it’s coming later this year.
Image: TED We’ve got some updates on the Apple Vision Pro 🤿:
Apple is NOT making controllers for the Vision Pro, not even for gaming 🕹️
The Vision Pro is apparently so complex to build that Apple has reduced its production goals 📉 in the first year by over 50% due to manufacturing difficulties (?).
Considering the headset’s price is $3500, most of us are hoping that a more affordable device will be announced sometime next year, but unfortunately the production of a cheaper model is being pushed back 😭.
If $3500 isn’t expensive enough for you, there’s a company making an absurd $40,000 deluxe cover covered in gold 👑, which btw, is horrendous and the strap looks like a cheap copy of Gucci’s GC monogram with VR all on it, like wth.
Image: Caviar If I were to buy the Vision Pro (🙏), i’d go with the Casetify colab for sure 🛍️.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
“Seeing the World through Your Eyes” or capturing eye reflections and turning them into 3D renderings is possible now. Researchers at the University of Maryland used a specially trained AI visual rendering algorithm called NeRF to transform the captured eye reflections into coherent 3D renderings.
Stable diffusion has been integrated into Ameca, a humanoid robot, who can know draw cats, among other stuff of course, buuuut it won’t get that far for now as it's worse than expected, but still very impressive to see a robot drawing on a whiteboard.
ChatGPT pro is once again not allowing its users to browse the internet due to inappropriate content, so they have disabled it until they find a solution. And the hype is gone too, its popularity has already dropped by 10%.
The Vatican released its own AI Ethics Handbook titled ‘Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap’. Its 140 pages so of course I haven’t read it and I’m not sure I will, but if you are interested, here’s the pdf.
A robot was able to lead the National Orchestra of Korea 🤖 in South Korea with great accuracy. Nevertheless, since it was unable to process emotions like human conductors, it seems that their jobs are safe, at least for now.
Image: National Theater of Korea
🗃 Resources
Read, watch, listen
AR monocle overview
📼 Imran Chaudhri, Humane AI’s CEO, TED Talk
To try / Download
AI Art QR Code Enter your URL (or text) and an image prompt and they’ll generate an arty QR code with your artistic style and content in about 30 seconds.
Image: GOOEY.AI
And that’s it for today!
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