Cars that won't drive if you are drunk 🍻, cool and affordable AR glasses 👓, meet Tesla's new humanoid robot 🤖, and more! ✨
Hi and welcome to another week of XR and AI news! Let’s begin 👽
Extended Reality 🥽
If you live in the US and want a pair of AR glasses for under $400, Nreal made it! 👓. And they are available on Amazon, so yeah, they ship internationally. For UK interested buyers, you can get them here.
Ok so I actually like the design and yes the city is not yet prepared to give you AR experiences all over, but these glasses feel pretty comfy for when you are watching YouTube (remember my channel? 👀) and you just want to lay down or you are cleaning or whatever and they even have noise & echo cancellation for immersive sound, but I’m reading that many people will still be using use headphones.
What I like from these AR glasses is that you can choose between seeing the environment or not, so your level of immersion depends on you. They don’t have a battery and you have to connect them to your phone, so they are not autonomous yet, but tbh, it’s not like we are ready to get rid of our phones just yet, so this works as a smooth transition to bring the screens closer to our sight. Here’s a review I liked, in case you are curious 📺 and here’s the link to the landing, very Apple inspired, so it’s a good one and I’m already convinced I want them like any time I visit Apple’s website.If you want a use case that’s more realistic and with deeper meaning that just entertainment, Lenovo launched its new enterprise solution for VR, the ThinkReality VRX 🥽, an easy-to-use autonomic VR ecosystem. Of course the pricing goes way higher, way over a thousand 💸, hence they are an enterprise device and not a consumer one. Lenovo claims that businesses that use VR for training are experiencing "up to 4X faster training on soft skills compared to classroom training and 275% more confidence in applying skills", and that "VR training can reduce the risk of injury at the workplace by up to 43%".
Machine Learning 🤖
In a near future, cars won’t drive if you are drunk 🍻. Yes, this definitely feels right for many, but so wrong for others.
First, the explanation: "Our research shows that by simply observing where the driver is looking and how often and for how long their eyes are closed, we can tell a lot about the state of the driver". My first thought was ok this would definitely save many lives, but then I remember how automation is still not working how we expect (hi Tesla), so I imagined myself not being drunk and not being able to drive just because my car’s prediction malfunctioned and this it is protecting me but it’s not. Let’s discuss it on the comments!
Of course we are talking about a tech that you decided to buy, so that your car gets its will depend on your will (and money), otherwise we would be getting into a Black Mirror dystopia, and I will stop writing about this now otherwise the newsletter will become the script for a dystopian movie 🤓.Let’s keep up with the movie theme but of how AI can bring memorable voices back to life as an AI clone voice 🎤 to be layered over another actor. They are now doing cloning Darth Vader’s voice using Respeecher, and yes before you think that this is not ethic, apparently as part of his agreement with Disney, James Earl Jones agreed to allow future films to use his Darth Vader voice.
And remember that AI day is super close! In 2 days. And that Elon has something to show us, his new humanoid robot, Optimus, and that this time it’s going to be a humanoid robot, not an actor wearing a humanoid suit 🥸. Musk mentioned how everyone would be blown away by this, so let’s see if this time it will be since Optimus has been prioritised over other Tesla products 😇. You’ll be able to watch it on stream on Tesla’s YouTube channel on September 30th at 5PM PT ✌️ (which is 2am CEST time… so yeah I’m not going to watch the stream but I’ll watch it the next day).
Thank you so much for reading, will be back next Wednesday as usual 💚
Best,
Martina