Lifeboat Foundation

Two tech titans are now duking it out in the headset wars. Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quests offer different price points, different specs, and most importantly, different visions of the future of virtual reality. And both have big hurdles to clear. This week on TechCheck, why the headset battle is Apple’s to lose.

Chapters:
0:00 – Who will win the headset wars?
0:42 – The case for Apple.
5:35 – The case for Meta.
7:56 – The case for both… or neither.

Continue reading “The headset wars: Why it’s Apple’s to lose” »

Psychologists from Edith Cowan University (ECU) have used virtual reality (VR) technology in a new study that aims to better understand criminals and how they respond when questioned. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“You will often hear police say, to catch a criminal, you have to think like a criminal—well that is effectively what we are trying to do here,” said Dr. Shane Rogers, who led the project alongside ECU Ph.D. candidate Isabella Branson.

The forensic psychology research project involved 101 participants, who role-played committing a burglary in two similar virtual mock–crime scenarios.

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

Experts created robotic arms to conduct essential medical triage in perilous situations like humanitarian disasters and conflict zones.

Developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield, this revolutionary technology has the potential to be a life-saving intervention in high-risk places.

Examining victims within 20 minutes

Continue reading “Experts craft life-saving ‘robot medics’ for triage in high-risk places” »

Generative AI provoked a lot of discussion last year around images, text and video, but it may soon affect the gaming industry as well. Square Enix said it plans to be “aggressively applying” AI and other cutting-edge tech in 2024 to “create new forms of content,” according to president Takashi Kiryu’s New Year’s letter.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications had for some time largely been subjects of academic debate,” he said. “However, the introduction of ChatGPT, which allows anyone to easily produce writing or translations or to engage in text-based dialogue, sparked the rapid spread of generative AIs. I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.”

The company will start by using it to improve productivity in development and assist in marketing. “In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities,” Kiryu added. Square Enix also plans to build more immersive AR and VR experiences, including “new forms of content that fuse the real world and virtual worlds.”

A new patent granted to Apple details how the company is thinking of using the Vision Pro’s external display to show what the wearer is looking at inside the device.

The patent, which includes Jony Ive as an inventor, details ways an outside screen on a generic head-mounted display could be used to indicate what the wearer is seeing to people around them. While the patent isn’t specifically about the Vision Pro and its “EyeSight” display feature, it’s clear that some of the ideas here informed the features in the final headset.

For example, Apple has talked publicly about how the outer screen on the Vision Pro can let outsiders see the eyes of the person wearing the headset or display a colorful pattern that indicates the wearer is fully immersed in VR. But pictures in the patent detail how an external display could be used for a few sillier-looking applications, like displaying the weather, sunglasses on your face, a DO NOT DISTURB sign, or even replacing the wearer’s eyes with Zoom icons.

Researchers from Cornell and Brown University have developed a souped-up telepresence robot that responds automatically and in real-time to a remote user’s movements and gestures made in virtual reality.

The robotic system, called VRoxy, allows a remote user in a small space, like an office, to collaborate via VR with teammates in a much larger space. VRoxy represents the latest in remote, robotic embodiment from researchers in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

LEDs and their organic counterparts are getting truly tiny. This could be the moment AR and VR companies have been waiting for.

Despite the company’s commitment to making its founder’s dream come true, the virtual reality market is contracting.

Sales of VR headsets and augmented reality glasses in the U.S. plummeted nearly 40% to $664 million in 2023, as of Nov. 25, according to data shared with CNBC by research firm Circana. That’s a much steeper drop than last year, when sales of AR and VR devices slid 2% to $1.1 billion.

The two-year decline underscores Meta’s continuing challenge in bringing the immersive technology out of a niche gaming corner and into the mainstream. While Zuckerberg said, in announcing Facebook’s pivot to Meta in late 2021, that it would likely take a decade to reach a billion users, he may need to start showing more optimistic data to appease a shareholder base that’s been critical of the company’s hefty and risky investments.