I made my 150th post on Forbes this week, and it was a good one. I caught up with Meron Gribetz, former CEO and founder of Meta, Inc., which is dead, though Gribetz hinted Meta tech will be back soon. Meanwhile, it turns out AR and computer vision startup Blippar, Inc., which went into "administration," in December amidst an investor dispute about new financing, is back with a new business plan and a new name, Blippar.
A few other stories grabbed our attention:
SuperData’s Q4 2018 data is in: 2019 will be a big VR year. SuperData expects XR revenue to reach $11.5 billion this year with the Oculus Quest at the head of the VR pack. The Oculus Go sold 1 million units since its release in May 2018 and SuperData expects the Quest to sell 1.3 million units this year alone. VR popularity continues to increase both for location-based and home VR.
Find AR at the top of the Egadin St. Moritz Mountains. Visitors to the 2 time Winter Olympics slopes can experience a unique AR adventure. XR studio Apelab partnered with Steiner Sarnen Schweiz to create an AR app just for the slopes. The experience was built with Apelab’s SpatialStories tool and includes 15 AR portals located around the mountains for visitors to unlock when there.
MAD Gaze launches third generation AR glasses, Vader. I never had a chance to put these on at CES but I made a note to follow up. Running Android 7.0 with 32GB of storage the glasses do not require a tether to a smart device to operate. The display offers 45 degrees field of view and can play 3D movies. The Vader glasses use SLAM for anchoring AR content and have hand gesture control as well as facial recognition functionality.
Visual Positioning System company Scape raises $8million. A visual positioning system (VPS) could be the foundations of a future AR Cloud and the accurate anchoring of AR content. GPS is only so accurate, but a VPS could map down to individual pixels of an image Think centimeter accuracy at a city scale, because that’s what Scape is thinking.
Fable studio shows AI driven VR experience at Sundance. "Whispers in the Night" puts the audience in a room with Lucy, an AI character that asks questions and responds to the viewer's answers - and remembers them. The Fable team, let by former Oculus Story Studios' head Edward Saatchi, believe AI is the next great art form. This alone would have been a reason to go to Sundance. I've been waiting for AI characters since I played GTA (Grand Theft Auto) for the first time more than ten years ago.
Cinemark partners with SPACES to bring multi-sensory VR to San Jose, CA. On February 8, Cinemark will open its new VR experience center in its Century 20 Oakridge theatre in San Jose. SPACES uses 4D effects and face scanning to create an immersive multi-user experience. “Cinemark is excited to partner with SPACES to provide our Bay area guests with a fun, immersive, mixed-reality adventure,” said Mark Zoradi, Cinemark’s CEO. We wrote about their Terminator experience last summer.
Great AR Cloud demo at CES. Visualix blew me away with a demo of persistent geolocation and wayfinding. It's a tiny German startup with great tech and big ambitions.
"This Week in XR" is written and edited with Michael Eichenseer.
