VR implanted in your eyes 👁, Microsoft to integrate ChatGPT into Bing 🤖, and more!
Hi and welcome to the first Augmented Rarity email of 2023! Hope the new year is treating you well ✨
Let’s get started with this week’s curation 👇
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft takes on Google with ChatGPT integration! In a bid to challenge the search giant's monopoly, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is bringing on ChatGPT in March 🤝. Not hyped yet? ‘AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows,’ says Microsoft’s Windows boss at CES 2023. Will this be the game-changer Bing needs to steal market share from Google? Meanwhile here’s an unofficial Google Chrome extension of ChatGPT that i’ve been using for some time now 🤓.
Get ready for a healthier Google search 🩺. Google has recently announced a partnership with DeepMind, an Alphabet company, to improve the accuracy and helpfulness of medical information provided through search results. The project, called MedPaLM, aims to reduce the time it takes to make a diagnosis and improve the accuracy of medical diagnoses.
Apple just launched AI audiobooks 📚 so small authors can create audiobooks cheaper, which is of course eliminating the need for human narrators 😑. At the moment it's only available for romance and fiction and in English. Apple had intended to launch the service in November, but the launch was delayed due to Elon Musk's controversy on Twitter and layoffs at Meta. Would you be able to listen to a whole book narrated by a robot?
We’ll be soon be able to upscale old, blurry web videos to the equivalent of 4K 📼 quality thanks to Nvidia’s latest AI tech. It will be available next month on Chrome and Edge, allowing a much larger audience to benefit from it.
🥽 Extended Reality
VR implanted in your eyeballs? 👁 Possible in a near future. Neuralink's competitor Science Corp, is working on an advanced ocular implant that could provide all of that, along with restoring vision, of course (they all have a non villain motive to get investment…). Fun fact: the founder, Max Hodak, was also a co-founder of Neuralink 🫢
A reality check no one saw coming for VR: the total sales of VR headsets for 2022 are only expected to bring in what Facebook's advertising business generates in just 3 days 🫠. Possible factors that affected it: the overall economy, the recent price increase for the Meta Quest 2 and that there’s no revolutionary shiny and affordable product yet. Will Apple finally release its first MR device this year? Rumours say it will also mimic your facial expressions 🍏
A new trend in China: Businesses are "hiring" virtual people for around $14k a year. They are created using machine learning and it’s getting especially popular in the customer service industry. Why? Because they are searching for scandal-free icons.
Shiftall, a Panasonic company, has launched an affordable body tracker that enables you to have fully controllable torso and legs in the virtual space 👯
Pickings colors and textures from the real world and taking them to the digital one will be finally possible thanks to Apple’s new patent 🎨
🦄 Miscellaneous
Project Leonardo: Sony's customizable controller for disabled gamers 🕹. The controller allows users to adjust the shape and size of stick caps and buttons, as well as the positioning of each stick on the controller.
CES, started yesterday 🎉. Most random findings so far:
🗃 Resources
Read, watch, listen
To try/download
⚙️ A tool that interprets your age and personality from your profile pics
⚙️ The unofficial Google Chrome extension of ChatGPT that i’ve mentioned above
💼 Job board
New temporary section 🤓:
🎨 OpenAI is hiring a Product Designer!!! In San Francisco 🫠. If you are located or willing to move to the bay area, here’s the link to the job description! Good luck 🍀
💻 Shader, the first no-code AR creation tool is hiring an iOS Software Engineer. Here’s the link to the opening 🍀
If you feel lazy, you could apply assisted by ChatGPT like many are doing already. Buuuut be careful, schools and universities are banning students from using it already, so soon hiring managers might detect it too lol.
Thanks for reading 👽
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As always, see you next Friday!
Best,
Martina
Love your Augmented Rarity articles! I feel updated and safe that I didn't miss anything important from the VR/AR/MR world 😇