Let’s say you set your UVB filter to “sexy”…
Magic Leap, a secretive, well-funded company making Augmented Reality (AR) glasses in suburban Ft. Lauderdale, has popularized their vision of hands-free, contextual, mobile computing even though it has yet to launch a product. This is a totally different kind of AR than what we’re familiar with on iOs devices, Heads Ups Display (HUD) systems, or microdisplays like the soon to be released Kopin Solos, which I wrote about last week.
Spatial computing is different because it uses precise location-awareness to anchor data to places or objects in the real world to create a ubiquitous digital data overlay on the physical world. This technology is maturing soon and thanks to tech giants and startups racing to build it, the world might soon be painted with data.
A world painted with data could easily be an unruly, noisy mess like Keiichi Matsuda’s nightmarish Hyper-Reality video, where every billboard, storefront, and product is shouting for our attention. Nevertheless, looking beyond the dystopian implications, this is a pretty exciting vision, because it represents the next logical step for computing after the mouse and multitouch screens.
Technologically speaking, enabling spatial computing needs a Universal Visual Browser (UVB) that can detect the world around it with hyper-precision, and filter contextually relevant data to be displayed to the user based on location, activity, or time of day. The UVB will interface with everything we own, everyone we know, and everywhere we go.
This trillion dollar opportunity depends on three things working seamlessly together; computer vision, AI, and the AR cloud. Not surprisingly, tech giants Amazon, Google, and Facebook, we well as startups large (Magic Leap) and small (6D.ai, Placenote) are working to address some or all of these problems.
The big dog of computer vision is Amazon Web Services (AWS) which offers Amazon Rekognition (sic) – “Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning.”
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Miesnieks describes 6D.ai as “Waze for AR”. The app would take all those rooms, all those locations, all those cities, and stitch together buildings, objects, landmarks and other camera data to create a world map, both inside and outside the home, school, office, or wherever the app is used.
In addition to the providing developers the 3D structure of the world without needing depth cameras, 6D.ai will semantically identify 3D objects to enable intelligent AR applications. Miesnieks told me in an email 6D.ai will have significant company news within the next four weeks. The company first garnered attention when Tim Cook visited Oxford in 2017 and expressly asked to see Prisacariu’s project.
Finally, just as we were wrapping up our research, we got these mind-blowing Twitter videos from Andrew Hart, founder of Dent Reality.
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Source: Forbes