Podcast Recorded on February 2nd, 2024 (Groundhog Day)

HOSTS

AB – Andrew Ballard
Spatial AI Specialist at Leidos.
Robotics & AI defence research.
Creator of SPAITIAL

Helena Merschdorf
Marketing/branding at Tales Consulting.
Undertaking her PhD in Geoinformatics & GIScience.
 

Mirek Burkon
CEO at Phantom Cybernetics.
Creator of Augmented Robotality AR-OS.
 

Violet Whitney
Adj. Prof. at U.Mich
Spatial AI insights on Medium.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.

William Martin
Director of AI at Consensys
Adj. Prof. at Columbia.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.

FAST FIVE – Spatial AI News of the Week

From Violet:

What’s Amazing (and Potentially Terrible) About Apple’s Vision Pro

Apple’s Vision Pro is a technological marvel and marks a significant moment for our industry, bringing mixed and augmented reality into many more people’s hands and enabling developers to build high-fidelity apps that turn our world into an interactive computing surface.

It’s like living in the future – experiencing today what we’ll achieve with less cumbersome devices in the near future.

That’s what makes it important and amazing.

https://nianticlabs.com/news/living-in-the-future

From Mirek:

Report: Apple to Produce Fewer Than 100K Vision Pro Headsets at Launch

If you were wondering how Apple plans to mass market its upcoming Vision Pro mixed reality headset, leading Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports that the company is actually looking to make the headset a pretty scarce item from the get-go.

“Apple will produce 60,000 to 80,000 units of Vision Pro for the February 2 release,” Kuo  writes in a recent X post. “Since the shipment is not large, I believe that Vision Pro will sell out soon after the release.”

Provided Kuo’s analysis is true, this would make for one of Apple’s most ‘artisanal’ products at launch. Granted, at that price it’s likely only hardcore Apple acolytes and would-be software developers will jump on board, the latter of which no doubt will be looking to create apps for what hopes to be a new ongoing hardware platform for the company, and not just a ‘flash in the pan’ experiment.

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-apple-vision-pro-below-100k

From AB:

visionOS – The magic of the extended software and hardware symbiosis

Sure, the Vision Pro hardware is impressive – take a look at just how far ahead of the pack Apple is compared to the complete history of VR/AR Headsets here on our new Timeline – but Fabian shows how it’s actually Apple’s entire ecosystem that is there superpower.

If every product in Apple’s lineup has the potential to merge into a user’s spatial experience, then what does this bode for the future of work, the future of entertainment? Watching Alicia Keys as if you were up on stage with her is only the beginning…

https://fabiankreuzer.de/en/visionos

From William:

ImageFX and MusicFX from Google Labs

NOT Vision Pro, specifically, but noting an adjacent major announcement about Google’s ImageGen 2 model, that’s been packaged into a product called “ImageFX” plus the SynthID watermarking tech.

https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-labs-imagefx-textfx-generative-ai/

_{To absent friends.}