Welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity 👽

Here’s what happened recently in the XR and AI industries, plus some Metaverse updates! 👇

Extended Reality 🥽

While we keep waiting for Meta to release its new VR headset in October at Meta Connect, Pico is releasing a new headset this week! 🚀 You can watch the event live on September 22nd on their YouTube channel (here’s the teaser 👀). Also remember that Sony is launching its new version of PSVR headset soon.
Marvel fans! Niantic partnered with Marvel to make their own version of Pokémon Go 👾 that will be available in 2023: Marvel World of Heroes. Here’s the announcement teaser 📺
NASA and Google Arts & Culture are partnering for educational purposes 🌝 to bring more than 60 3D models of planets, moons and NASA spacecraft to Google Search 🔎. An interactive space journey with augmented reality elements.

Artificial Intelligence 🤖

If someone tells you that AI art has no real world usage, tell them that The Bulwark, an American news portal, is already using MidJourney to illustrate its articles 🦾. I used to work in the news industry and I know how much time it takes to produce hundreds of images per week, so AI is definitely a great tool to speed up that process but at the cost of those companies needing less illustrators 🥹. The Economist already did it, same as Cosmopolitan, among others, so it’s just a matter of time ⏳.
AI is just getting better since DAll·E 2 finally got face editing back! 👁👄👁 This time, safely. Because yes, one of the main concerns of using AI with faces is how easy it is to use it as a tool to make deepfakes. However, OpenAI assures that the potential harm has been reduced by improving the filters to remove images containing "sexual, political and violent content".
But for real, AI is just getting better because now M1 Mac users get an app to use Stable Diffusion easily! 🖼 I mean, my youtube channel has been all about AI for the past months and I haven't even tried SD because I procrastinated on installing it, but now we've got DiffusionBee 🐝, which is touted as the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. Downloading it now, will report back 👀
Elon Musk's AI company, Tesla Bot (now renamed to Optimum Bot?) will release a new version of its humanoid robot on September 30th 🤖, for “AI day”. It's normal that people remain skeptic if you recall 2021's reveal, which was almost like a joke since there was no humanoid robot on stage but an actor.

Metaverse 🌐

Nvidia has its own version of the Metaverse, an industrial one called Omniverse Cloud. The Metaverse might not be here yet, but companies like BMW, PepsiCo, Siemens and Amazon are already using it for industrial purposes.
And speaking of the Metaverse, the European Commission has unveiled plans to ensure a safe and fair Metaverse 🌐 as part of their letter of intent for 2023. Why? Because, quoting, “We will not witness a new Wild West or new private monopolies”.
Roblox keeps “innovating” by announcing they’ll be adding 3D immersive ads next year 🛍… for audiences over 13, don’t panic yet. But it’s mainly because their revenue growth slowed. Life ✨
Meanwhile Neal Stephenson, the inventor of the term “Metaverse” in his book Snow Crash, is building his own Metaverse by founding Lamina1, the base layer for the Open Metaverse 📀, a place to build something a bit closer to Neal’s vision.

And this is it for today! 💚

Thank you so much for reading, will be back next Wednesday as usual 👩🏻‍💻

(Remember to give it a like and comment 🤓)

Best,

Martina

Augmented Rarity 👽

Face editing is back at DALL·E 👁👄👁, Nvidia…