Thirsty AIs 🥵, bug-eyed MR headsets 🐞, another text-to-music AI 🎶, and more! ✨

#50

Welcome to week number 50 of Augmented Rarity! 🎉

To celebrate, the lovely people that filled my feedback survey will be getting their freebie today 💚🤫

🖼️ Today's cover: what I imagined a bug-eyed inspired headset would look like… Check out Meta’s prototype in the XR section 🥽

🍴 On the menu: many AI updates, some Meta announcements and a loooot of resources for you to reflect on how tech is shaping society.

Let’s begin! 👇

---

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

• Self-checkout kiosks are so 2010, it's time for intelligent shelves to shine and take the staff completely out of the equation 🏪. This is the proposal of the new 7-Eleven flagship, X-STORE 7, which will be entirely self-sufficient and unmanned. I'm sure Sam Altman would love it. The X has nothing to do with Elon Musk, so don't worry, he's not coming to your grocery shopping just yet. Here's a video of 5 promo that they launched 5 years ago, but that I think is still relevant:

• If going to the store is not for you, maybe driverless robots delivering your groceries is. Vilnius is the first European city to have driverless robots ready to deliver groceries 🛒. They started with 3 driverless vehicles that rolled out in the center of the capital.

  

  Image: Clevon

• But hey, AI is not ready to take all jobs. ZeroEyes uses AI and security cameras to detect guns and alert security guards 🚨, and yes, they have humans double-checking every alert to avoid false alarms.

  

  Image: ZeroEyes

• Speaking of camera recognition, NYC has been using AI to track fare evasion on the subway 🚊, for now only in 7 stations. At the moment they claim that it's just for counting motives, no facial tracking profile has been created.

• To all this, if you can’t beat the enemy, join it, like Stack Overflow just did this week launching Overflow AI 🎊

  

  Image: Stack Overflow

• Another AI launch, Meta just dropped AudioCraft, an open-source tool that can generate high quality audio and music from text prompts 🎶. To avoid any copyright issues, they made sure to train it with 20,000 hours of music from Meta and other public available sound effects.

  

  Image: Meta

But before we get to XR, one more related to the cost of AI:

• Google used 5.6 billion gallons of water as stated in its Environmental Report for 2023 🌱, that's 20 percent more than they used in 2021, probably because of their growing concern of not losing the AI race. That’s some thirsty AI 🥵

---

🥽 Extended Reality

• A MR headset inspired by bug eyes? Meta's Flamera headset prototype certainly has! Apparently, it's a technique called "light field pass-through", which uses shutters to ensure that only the light relevant to the user's vision gets through.

• Meta Connect will be a little less meta as it will be IRL, but of course it will continue to be virtual through Horizon Worlds on 27-28 September 2023. Register for free here.

  

  Image: Meta

• Wondering how the energy in the event will be as Meta keeps losing billions since it decided to invest heavily in XR: $21 billion since the beginning of last year, and to be more precise, $7.7 billion in the past 6 months. Will the $7.99 subscription launched last June help improve the numbers?

  

  Image: Road to VR

• Speaking of billions, that's what the new Apple Vision Pro will cost us, almost lol. One company tried to justify its cost and just in materials they estimate it adds up to $1500...

  

  Image: Omdia

---

Before we get to the resources section 🗃️, if you enjoyed today's curation, don't forget to share this email with your friends and help grow our community 💚

---

🗃️ Resources

Read, watch, listen

• 📃 We are entering a new age of AI-generated psychedelia // Dazed

• 📃 Authenticity in the era of the terminally online // DTS newsletter

• 📃 Seeing dollar signs: Ways to leverage computer vision in retail stores // Amazon

• 📃 Can 3D-printed tiger teeth help save our rarest animals from extinction? // The Guardian

• 📃 A wearable ultrasound scanner could detect breast cancer earlier // MIT News

• 📖 Relationships 5.0: How AI, VR, and Robots Will Reshape Our Emotional Lives // Oxford University Press

• 📖 Google’s 2023 environmental report // Google

• 🐦 Neuralink’s surgical team enhances their skills by training on realistic, patient-specific head and brain models, ensuring surgeries are tailored to each individual for safety and success (I’m still using the bird for Twitter, I don’t care it’s called X now)

⚙️ To try, download

• 🔗 ChatPDF, a tool to understand research with AI, which I thought it would be so cool to try with Google’s environmental report, buuuut it’s a paid resource for such a long pdf.

  

---

Thanks for reading 🥰, see you again next Friday! 🗞️

Best,
Martina

Remember to like, comment and share 💚