Facial Recognition Tech Will Soon Be Everything

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT

In the future, your face will be your key to the world. If you look around today, you can already see this future taking shape. Facial recognition technology is popping up everywhere these days—even where you would hardly expect it. But will facial recognition bring the future we want or the future we dread?

It All Started with an iPhone

No, Apple doesn’t deserve credit for inventing facial recognition (the credit goes to Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf, Charles Bisson, and other pioneers of automated face recognition), but the company has achieved what many other companies before it have been unable to achieve: make face recognition mainstream. In 2017, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, went on stage to demonstrate Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone, the iPhone X, and showcase all of its new features. One such new feature was Face ID, a facial recognition system designed and developed by Apple exclusively for the iPhone X. It took a few tries, but Federighi eventually unlocked the iPhone X with his face and single-handedly shifted the attention of the entire tech industry to facial recognition. It has been nearly a year now since that historic demonstration, and facial recognition no longer feels new. “I think we’re seeing it ripen and fall off the tree. This seems like the moment where it’s really going to begin affecting our lives,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Indeed, companies now seem to be pitching facial recognition software as the future of everything from retail to school shootings. Let’s take a closer look at some of the more talked-about use cases of facial recognition technology to better understand where it is and where it’s going.

Shopping Revolution

A year before Apple made facial recognition mainstream with the iPhone X, Amazon surprised the world with its first Amazon Go grocery store. What sets the Amazon Go chain apart from Walmart or Tesco is the checkout experience. The customers simply enter the store, open the Amazon Go app, grab anything they want, and walk out—no cashiers, no self-serving checkout stations, no delays. The Amazon Go experience is made possible by the fusion of several cutting-edge technologies, including computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion. These technologies automate much of the purchase, check out, and payment steps associated with a retail transaction. I personally visited the Amazon Go store in Seattle this August near Amazon HQ and can attest that the experience was magic. While Amazon doesn’t use facial recognition technology in its stores (the camera in its stores are used to detect which items a customer took), it serves as an excellent example of how the future of retail could look like. Walmart, for example, has patented technology that would enable cameras to capture shoppers’ facial expressions to measure how satisfied with their shopping experience they are. Software company FaceFirst is marketing its facial recognition technology to retailers as a theft-prevention solution. According to its survey, 56 percent of shoppers are open to using facial recognition to guard against crimes such as shoplifting, which costs retailers roughly $50 billion annually. “Most large retail chains have data about known organized retail criminals that have stolen from them in the past, but natural limitations on both human memory and perception makes identifying them when they re-enter a store very difficult,” says Peter Trepp, CEO of FaceFirst. “Face recognition solves this problem by instantly identifying these individuals and alerting in-store personnel who can prevent theft or fraud from happening. That alone decreases theft and justifies having the technology on site.” By 2022, technology-enabled checkouts are expected to account for $78 billion a year in the US, up from just about $9 billion today, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Big Brother Is Watching

Some schools in the United States have implemented facial recognition technology to prevent gun attacks. Officials at the Lockport school district in New York spent most of its $4 million state “Smart School” grant on a surveillance system known as Aegis. “We always have to be on our guard. We can’t let our guard down,” Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley told the Buffalo News. “If we had a student who committed some type of offense against the code of conduct, we can follow that student throughout the day to see maybe who they interacted with,” another school official added. The district’s decision to bring facial recognition to schools has sparked a nation-wide debate about the ethical aspects of the technology. In China, however, facial recognition in schools and elsewhere is already part of daily reality for most of the country’s 1,4 billion citizens. In some Chinese schools, facial recognition systems are used to monitor student performance, catch cheaters, and check whether students are paying attention in class. The system can record whether students feel happy, sad, surprised, and so on. The gathered data can then be used to evaluate the performance of the teachers. Outside schools, the Chinese government has created a massive network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, and it uses them to locate criminals, shame jaywalkers, or even deal with toilet paper theft, among other things. The police in the country is also making use of the technology, with special glasses that scan faces in a crowd to locate criminals.

Growing Privacy Concerns

It’s impossible to deny that facial recognition technology has many legitimated uses, but it’s difficult to draw a line between what’s useful and what’s intrusive. “Facial recognition is a tool, and it can be used in a variety of different ways. We can be comfortable with some uses of the tool—like, to help us unlock our phones. That doesn’t mean we should be comfortable with all uses, like surveillance by law enforcement,” says Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer with the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to defend and preserve individual rights and liberties, facial recognition cameras don’t belong in schools since they pose serious privacy and safety risks and make students feel like they are constantly under suspicion. The potential for the abuse of facial recognition technology has even prompted Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, to call for public action and corporate responsibility. “If we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike.”

Conclusion

We are moving toward a future where facial recognition technology watches over every step we make. Like any technology, facial recognition can be used for both good and bad. At the moment, we are at an important crossroad that will determine which uses of facial recognition we’ll find acceptable and legal in the future and which won’t be allowed.

Intel Is Cancelling Its Vaunt Smart Glasses

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT, Technology trends

In April, Intel has announced its plans to shut down the New Devices Group (NDG), which marks the end of its Vaunt smart glasses, which the company demonstrated in February.

The Vaunt smart glasses were part of Intel’s broader effort to diversify its product offering and expand to other markets. The New Devices Group (NDG), which was formed in 2013 to make fitness trackers and smart glasses, was hit with a major layoff in 2016. Back then, Intel denied that the company was stepping back from wearables, but Intel’s struggle to gain a foothold in the wearables market was evident.

Now, after an investment of several hundred million dollars by Intel, the company is no longer denying that its foray into the wearables market hasn’t panned out as expected.

“Intel is continuously working on new technologies and experiences. Not all of these develop into a product we choose to take to market. The Superlight [an internal name for Vaunt] project is a great example where Intel developed truly differentiated, consumer augmented reality glasses. We are going to take a disciplined approach as we keep inventing and exploring new technologies, which will sometimes require tough choices when market dynamics don’t support further investment,” an Intel spokesperson told CNBC in an email.

The end of the Vaunt smart glasses isn’t exactly a surprise. “Intel has a reputation for showing off ideas that never turn into real products. It comes up with a cool concept, proves out the technology, then hopes to convince others to take that idea and turn it into a real product,” wrote Verge executive editor Dieter Bohn in February.

Intel’s intention with the Vaunt smart glasses was to make them as discreet as possible. In a sense, they were supposed to be the answer to the tsunami of privacy worries that had swept the industry after the launch of the Google Glass. Even from a close distance, the Vaunt smart glasses looked just like any regular pair of prescription glasses with a plastic frame: no visible display, no chunky battery, no touch controls, and, most importantly, no camera.

Instead, the Vaunt smart glasses featured a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL), which is a semiconductor-based laser diode that emits a highly efficient optical beam vertically from its top surface. Intel used this very low-power laser to project a red, monochrome image with a resolution of 400 x 150 pixels onto a holographic reflector, which then reflected it directly onto the retina.

“We use a holographic grading embedded into the lens to reflect the correct wavelengths back to your eye. The image is called retinal projection, so the image is actually ‘painted’ into the back of your retina,” said Jerry Bautista, the lead for the team building wearable devices at Intel’s NDG. “We had to integrate very, very power-efficient light sources, MEMS devices for actually painting an image.”

Thanks to their innovative display technology and discreet looks, the Vaunt smart glasses were in a good position to become the first commercially successful smart glasses, and Intel even had a solid vision how to sell them to consumers.

”There’s something on the order of 2.5 billion people that require corrective lenses,” said Jerry Bautista. “They get their glasses from somewhere. Sixty percent of them come from eye care providers. … We would say these glasses belong in those kinds of channels. People are going to buy them like they buy their glasses today.”

Clearly, that plan didn’t pan out as intended, and Intel isn’t the only company in wearables that’s struggling to meet its goals. The wearable market would have actually shrunken in the fourth quarter of this year if it weren’t for Apple, whose shipments grew by 58 percent to 8 million devices, up from 5.1 million a year earlier, according to research firm International Data Corp. Fitbit’s shipments declined by 17 percent to 5.4 million in the quarter, and Xiaomi’s shipments fell by 5 percent to 4.9 million in the same quarter.

Despite the current state of the wearables market, the global wearables sales revenue is still projected to exceed 40 billion by 2021, compared to a little over 30 billion in 2018. According to a report in the FT, Amazon is working on building a pair of smart glasses to house its Alexa voice assistant, Google is focusing on helping professionals in manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare be more productive with its Glass Enterprise Edition, and Microsoft has demonstrated a number of real-world applications of its HoloLens headset. HoloLens however still carries a large price tag per unit and is painful to wear for over an hour which creates a barrier for industrial / enterprise applications.

It seems then that Intel’s failure simply indicates that smart glasses are not yet ready to leave the confines of factories, offices, and our homes. “The field of view, the quality of the display itself, it’s not there yet. We [Apple] don’t give a rat’s about being first. We want to be the best, and give people a great experience. But now anything you would see on the market any time soon would not be something any of us would be satisfied with. Nor do I think the vast majority of people would be satisfied,” said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook last year.

Focusing too much on the technology, this is something that Intel failed to see until the company could no longer afford to ignore the reality.  Unfortunately, it appears we are still a few years out from that killer HUD that marries consumer price points, wearability, and functionality.

The Future is 5G

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

The very first mobile telephone call was made in 1973 by a senior engineer working for Motorola. A lot has changed since then, and we now use mobile phones for a lot more than making phones. In fact, mobile phones no longer even have a monopoly on mobile communication.

Today, we rely on a number of different cellular- and internet-connected devices (Internet of Things – IoT) to stay productive, and we’re rapidly moving toward a connected future where nearly every electronic device wirelessly sends and receives information to offer various smart features / insights.

As our needs and personal electronic devices change, the infrastructure we rely on needs to change as well. A new generation of cellular technology is introduced to the world approximately every 10 years, with the current generation, 4G, having been first commercially deployed in 2009. The time is right for the next generation of cellular technology to come and replace 4G, and we already know what it will offer.

BLUF:

1.    Horsepower – How does 10Gbps – 20Gbps sound? That is 100x faster than LTE and 10x faster than the fastest home internet connection today from a fiber provider like Verizon FiOS. Conservative estimates show expected latency to be 1/4th of LTE at 5ms from 20ms.

2.    No Cables Required – Cable companies are in trouble and will be scrambling to have a cellular presence, which can be seen with Comcast Xfinity Mobile. If you live in a major metropolitan market and are building a new home in 2019+, forget about installing coax cable.

3.    Telco Data Dwarfs Google’s – If a majority of phone, home entertainment, and IoT device internet access is funneled through 5G networks, the wireless providers of 5G will have more data access than any single technology vendor such as Facebook, Google or Apple.

4.    2020 – target for most major markets, rural areas should not hold their breath as the infrastructure priorities will continue to be major metro regions initially.

What Is 5G?

The chances are that you’ve already heard of 5G. Major carriers including Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint are testing 5G in cities around the country, and chipmakers like Qualcomm and Intel are working hard developing 5G hardware to bring the fifth generation of cellular networking to consumers worldwide.

But despite all the buzz around 5G, there’s actually no official “5G” yet. Instead, there are several definitions of 5G, each of which includes slightly different specifications.

Arguably the most common definition of 5G is the 3GPP Release 15. 3GPP is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, a collaboration between groups of telecommunications standards association. Apart from the 3GPP Release 15, there’s also the more rigorous ITU IMT-2020 definition from the International Telecommunication Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations that is responsible for issues that concern information and communication technologies.

“If anyone tells you they know the details of what 5G will deliver, walk the other way,” noted former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. “Our proposal is the final piece in the spectrum trifecta of low-band, mid-band and high-band airwaves that will open up unprecedented amounts of spectrum, speed the rollout of new-generation wireless networks and redefine network connectivity for years to come. I’m confident these actions will lead to a cornucopia of unanticipated innovative uses and generate 10s of billions of dollars in economic activity.”

Even though hardware manufacturers, regulatory bodies, and governments have yet to paint a clear picture of what 5G is, we already have a pretty clear idea about what some of its most important components will be. But before we take a closer look at them, it’s helpful to first walk through the evolution of cellular technology and consider how each impacted the mobile landscape.

How We Got Here?

1G

The first generation of mobile networks was introduced in the 1980s and allowed for wireless voice calls. This was the time of the Motorola DynaTAC series of cellular telephones, which took around 10 hours to charge, lasted only for 30 minutes of talk, and featured a tiny LED display that consumed as much battery power as entire smartphones do today. During the reign of 1G, the only people that could afford mobile phones were one-percenters as the Motorola DynaTAC, and many other phones, cost thousands of dollars.

2G

With the introduction of 2G, mobile networks shifted from fully analog systems to digital ones. 2G networks were commercially launched on the GSM standard in 1991 and offered encryption, much higher signal penetration, and data services for mobile, including SMS and MMS. Cellular data was enabled by GPRS, which offers a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 50 Kbps, and EDGE, which offers a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 1 Mbps.

3G

The third generation of wireless mobile telecommunications technology offered even faster data rate than 2G, which allowed it to find application in wireless voice telephony, mobile Internet access, fixed wireless Internet access, video calls, and mobile TV. It was based on the IMT-2000 standards and first made available in Japan in 1998. By June 2007, which is when the first iPhone was released, the 200 millionth 3G subscriber had been connected to the network.

4G

The requirements for the 4G standard were specified by the International Telecommunications Union-Radio communications sector (ITU-R) in March 2008, and it offered maximum data transfer speeds of 1 Gbps for low mobility communication, such as pedestrians and stationary users. However, most mobile users hadn’t been able to enjoy truly fast data transfer speeds until the arrival of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and the launch of LTE services by carriers many years later. Even today, there are entire regions where 4G coverage is non-existent, and it’s highly likely that the rollout of 5G will follow a similar pattern.

Features of 5G Networks

The members of ITU have agreed on 5G performance requirements for 5G, calling for a minimum of 20 Gbps downlink and 10 Gbps uplink per mobile base stations. “The IMT-2020 standard is set to be the global communication network for the coming decades and is on track to be in place by 2020. The next step is to agree on what will be the detailed specifications for IMT-2020, a standard that will underpin the next generations of mobile broadband and IoT connectivity,” said François Rancy, Director of ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau. ITU’s draft report also specifies extremely low latency of 5 ms, which is a significant improvement compared to 4G LTE’s 20 ms. High data transfers speeds and low latency are essential not only for mobile content consumption but also for emerging applications such as driverless cars. Beyond these foundational improvements, 5G also includes a suite of new technologies, including small cells, millimeter waves, massive MIMO, and beamforming, just to name those that are most likely to make it to consumers.

Small Cells

5G relies on high frequencies with low wavelengths that have difficulty penetrating solid objects. To ensure strong signal in densely populated areas, carriers will deploy many portable miniature base stations that require minimal power to operate to form a dense network that acts as a relay team. “This radically different network structure should provide more targeted and efficient use of spectrum. Having more stations means the frequencies that one station uses to connect with devices in one area can be reused by another station in a different area to serve another customer. There is a problem, though—the sheer number of small cells required to build a 5G network may make it hard to set up in rural areas,” explains IEEE Spectrum.

Millimeter Waves

If you’ve ever tried to set up a WiFi network in a large apartment building, you probably know how crammed the WiFi frequency spectrum is. The situation is similarly grim in the radio frequency spectrum, which is why 5G is experimenting with broadcasting on millimeter waves. Millimeter waves are broadcast at frequencies between 30 and 300 gigahertz, allowing for massive amounts of data to be transmitted without any interference issues. But millimeter waves have one huge drawback: they can’t easily travel through obstacles. That’s why they’re a good fit for massive MIMO.

Massive MIMO

Base stations today support only up to eight transmitters and four receivers. 5G cell towers of the future will support about a hundred ports, increasing the capacity of mobile networks by a factor of 22 or greater. The name of this technology is massive MIMO, and it’s the next evolutionary step from MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output), a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmit and receive antennas to exploit multipath propagation.

Beamforming

According to IEEE Spectrum, “Beamforming can help massive MIMO arrays make more efficient use of the spectrum around them.” This technology can be found in today’s high-end Wi-Fi routers, and it identifies the most efficient data-delivery route to a particular user, allowing engineers to achieve the high throughput and low latency required for 5G even when there are obstacles in the way.

When is 5G coming?

5G technology debuted at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, where it was used by Samsung and Intel to stream live VR coverage of sporting events. As exciting as such early demonstration of the next-gen mobile technology may be, regular mobile users will have to wait at least a few more years before they’ll be able to enjoy 5G connectivity. Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung have all announced chipsets with 5G support, but carriers will set the pace of 5G adoption. Densely populated metropolitan areas will be covered first, while rural places may have to get by with 4G or even 3G for several more years.

Conclusion

“These next-generation networks and standards will need to solve a more complex challenge of combining communications and computing together. With 5G, we’ll see computing capabilities getting fused with communications everywhere, so trillions of things like wearable devices don’t have to worry about computing power because network can do any processing needed,” Keddy told Quartz in an interview ahead of the 2017 Mobile World Congress. The next-generation mobile technology is taking shape, promising to support billions of connected devices. From smart cities to driverless cars to augmented and virtual reality to the internet of things, 5G use cases are numerous and its impact on the world as we know it will be profound. Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. This article expresses my own opinions not those of my company. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.

Xiaomi Looks to Conquer the IoT Market

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT

Seven years since the launch of Xiaomi’s first smartphone in August 2011, the Chinese electronics and software company headquartered in Beijing is now expected to become the biggest public listing the world has ever seen, with a valuation of at least $50 billion in IPO. Xiaomi is among the top five brands in China—alongside Huawei, Apple, Vivo, and Oppo—and it’s also the second largest smartphone seller in the subcontinent, after Samsung. Its market share in India, which has recently overtaken the United States to become the world’s second-largest smartphone market in the world after China, has grown by over 290 percentbetween Q3 2016 and Q3 2017. According to market researcher IDC, the surge can be attributed to Xiaomi’s brick-and-mortar expansion as well as its partnerships with major retailers.

From Smartphones to Smart Gadgets

But Xiaomi’s huge success cannot be attributed solely to its geographic expansion. “They’re firing on a lot of cylinders,” said seed investor Hans Tung of GGV Capital. “The word of mouth effect that users have and become fans of their product are across the board not just on smartphones, but also on TVs, on a lot of gadgets for home.” In fact, IDC’s latest estimates for the wearables market in the third quarter of 2017 speak clearly: Xiaomi and Fitbit tied for the first place, both with a market share of 13.7 percent, while Apple’s market share was only 10.3 percent and Huawei’s 6 percent. Apart from wearable devices, Xiaomi’s ecosystem of IoT gadgets includes the Mi Robot Vacuum Cleaner, Mi Smart Speaker, Ninebot Mini, Mi LED Desk Lamp, Mi Air Purifier, Mi Water Purifier, Mi Drone, and many others. Most of Xiaomi’s smart gadgets are manufactured under its MIJIA crowdfunding platform, which has become a treasure trove of new products and innovation. Apart from a few notable exceptions, Xiaomi typically sells its gadgets only in China, although they are readily available via third-party retailers on AliExpress and several other websites. Xiaomi products have become so popular and successful around the world that Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun revealed on Christmas day 2017 that “Xiaomi’s IoT platform has over 85 million units of IoT devices, 800 smart devices, and 400 partners,” making it the world’s largest IoT platform for smart hardware.

Xiaomi IoT Devices Are About to Get Smarter

To cement its position on the Chinese market, Xiaomi has recently announced a partnership with Baidu, a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products, often described as China’s answer to Google. “Exact details of the tie-up are not being disclosed right now, but the two firms said will immediately explore opportunities in voice recognition, deep learning, and computer vision, in addition to more work with DuerOS,” reported TechCrunch. DuerOS is Baidu’s operating system, and its purpose is to assist enterprise developers in deploying their artificial intelligence solutions. According to Baidu, DuerOS can turn any product with a microphone and speaker into a smart device with world-class AI speech and image recognition technology. Xiaomi is also planning to launch 80 IoT products in South Korea, which is why it has partnered with Naver, the biggest search company in South Korea and parent company of Japan-based chat app firm Line. Xiaomi wants to include Naver’s AI platform Clova in its IoT devices and strengthen its position on the South Korean market.

Conclusion

It is estimated that the number of Internet-connected devices will reach 21 billion by 2020. According to Statista, the global Internet of Things market is projected to grow from $2.99 trillion in 2014 to $8.9 trillion in 2020, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 19.92 percent. Xiaomi naturally wants to capture the lion’s share of the market, and the company wants to accomplish it by bringing its products to more markets around the world and by establishing strategic partnerships with other tech companies to innovate at a pace very few companies can compete with.

The State of Mobile VR and AR Headsets in 2018

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT

There was no shortage of VR- and AR-related news in 2017, from hardware releases to interesting technology developments to company acquisitions. According to Digi-Capital’s new Augmented/Virtual Reality Report Q1 2018, VR and AR are on their way to approach up to $90 and $15 billion revenue respectively within the next 5 years, reaching an install base in the high tens of millions to over 100 million by 2022 for the combined VR and AR headset market. To better understand the road ahead, as well as the groundwork the year 2017 laid for the future of VR and AR experience, we can examine the current state of mobile VR and AR headset, which represent the focal point of most consumers’ attention.

More Choice and Better Headsets

For a long time, consumers interested in VR and AR had very little choice how to experience the wonders of virtual worlds. There was either the basic Google Cardboardheadset, which, while interesting and affordable, also made VR look like a gimmick because of its flimsy nature and narrow field-of-view, or the three musketeers of VR: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR—all three of which cost several hundreds of dollars and require additional expensive hardware to work. There were also various AR apps for smartphones, such as the wildly popular mobile game for iOS and Android, Pokémon Go, with its location-based augmented gameplay elements. Pokémon Go was released in July 2016 and quickly became a viral hit, but no other AR game or app has since then managed to come even close how Pokémon Go was popular at the height of the global craze that followed its release. Even though many people have yet to get used to writing “2018” instead of “2017,” we’ve already seen several major hardware announcements from established players and newcomers alike.

HTC Vive Pro VR

On January 8, 2018, HTC announced an upgraded version of its HTC Vive headset, which debuted on April 5, 2016. The most notable improvement is the increase of the headset’s resolution by 78 percent, from 1080 x 1200 per eye to 1400 x 1600 per eye. The new resolution puts the HTC Vive Pro VR ahead of most competing headsets, including the Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Other improvements include a pair of high-fidelity headphones and a redesigned head strap that is supposed to make the headset feel less front-heavy and more stable. Also added are dual microphones and dual front-facing cameras, which allow game developers to experiment with new gameplay mechanics. The HTC Vive Pro VR keeps compatibility with both 1.0 and 2.0 SteamVR tracking. Together with the HTC Vive Pro VR, the company has also announced its own wireless adapter for both the original HTC Vive headset as well as the upgraded version. The adapter relies on Intel’s WiGig technology to transmit data over the 60 GHz band, avoiding issues with interference and low latency.

Oculus Go and Mi VR

2018 is shaping up to be a great year for mid-range VR headsets. At Qualcomm’s CES 2018 press conference, Facebook VR VP Hugo Barra shared news on the company’s $199 standalone headset, the Oculus Go, which is built by Xiaomi and features the same processor as the LG G6 and the original Google Pixel: the Snapdragon 821. Xiaomi will be selling a China-specific version of the Oculus Go headset, called Mi VR, but it seems that the two versions will have identical hardware specifications. Both the Oculus Go and the Mi VR would fill the gap between the $129 Gear VR, which is limited to Samsung devices, and the likes of the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR. Google and Lenovo have also announced a standalone VR headset to be released in 2018, the Mirage Solo, but it’s expected to be priced between $300 and $400, making it far too expensive for most people with a casual interest in VR.

Pimax 8K

All current virtual reality headsets could use a resolution boost, and that’s exactly what Chinese startup Pimax offers with its massive 8K VR headset. Built to support the mainstream content currently available in the market, the Pimax 8K features two 4K displays and boasts a field-of-view of 200 degrees while promising only 15 ms latency. “Pimax 8K is a cutting-edge virtual reality device designed for VR futurists. Our goal is to create an intuitive VR without the shade of the headset, and sharp enough that you won’t be disturbed by pixels,” states the company in its Kickstarter campaign, which has earned it over $4 million from almost 6,000 backers, which is more than even Oculus VR’s initial crowdfunding campaign. Pimax is also selling a smaller version of the same headset, with the 5K resolution. The company claims that 5K is enough to eliminate the screen door effect, which is the ability to see the fines lines that separate individual rows of pixels when wearing a VR headset or sitting too close to a monitor. Given how successful Pimax’s Kickstarter campaign was, it seems that there’s a huge market for high-resolution VR headsets. Even though we are still 20 years from ideal VR resolution, according to Jason Paul, the General Manager for VR Strategy at NVIDIA, the resolution of current popular VR headsets is high enough to make consumers interested in the technology, and 8K VR headsets such as the one from Pimax can go a long way in helping VR become mainstream.

Intel Vaunt Smart Glasses

By far the most interesting AR announcement so far, one with the potential to fill the massive hole left after the spectacular failure that was the Google Glass, came from Intel. The company has demonstrated a pair of smart glasses, called Vaunt, that don’t look like smart glasses at all, which is the most remarkable thing about them. Intel seems to understand that people won’t suddenly find it socially acceptable to wear a massive computer on the head just because we now have the technology that makes it possible to project tweets right in the center of the eyeball. Instead, Intel’s smart glasses actively try to display as little information as possible and contain as little technology as possible—no speaker, no microphone, and no camera. The glasses house a suite of electronics designed to power a very low-energy laser that shines a red, monochrome image with a resolution of 400 x 150 pixels onto a holographic reflector on the glasses’ right lens, and this image is then reflected directly onto the retina. “We had to integrate very, very power-efficient light sources, MEMS devices, for actually painting an image. We use a holographic grading embedded into the lens to reflect the correct wavelengths back to your eye. The image is called retinal projection, so the image is actually ‘painted’ into the back of your retina,” explained Jerry Bautista, the lead for the team building wearable devices at Intel’s NDG. Intel’s plan is to first allow developers to get their hands on the Vaunt smart glasses before shipping the glasses to consumers. The company hopes to create a thriving AR ecosystem and refine their hardware platform so that other hardware manufacturers could adopt it and improve upon it. If they succeed, AR could experience a renaissance.

Windows Mixed Reality

“The biggest advance was arguably Windows Mixed Reality: a VR platform built into Microsoft’s Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, supporting headsets that don’t need external cameras or markers,” wrote senior reporter at The Verge Adi Robertson. Windows Mixed Reality works with Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which were launched in cooperation with Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other major hardware manufacturers. The headsets initially started at $399, but Microsoft has recently discounted many of them by 50 percent on Amazon, making its VR platform more accessible than ever. Also included in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update was the Mixed Reality Viewer. “By simply using the camera on your PC, you can see 3D objects mixed into your actual surroundings – people, places, things, or anything you can imagine,” Microsoft explained.

The Groundwork Has Been Laid; Content Needs to Follow

With the selection of VR and AR headsets being broader than ever, and with the support for VR and AR content being integrated directly into the Windows operating system, the only area where VR and AR need to catch up is the selection of interesting content users can enjoy. VR versions of popular PC and console titles such as Doom, Fallout 4, and Skyrim, have successfully demonstrated how immersive and extensive VR experiences can be, but they also felt like compromises held back by the current hardware and the limited experience of game developers. The good news for all fans of VR and AR is the fact that several companies with deep pockets are willing to bet on the success of this emerging market segment and finance the development of VR and AR apps and games to escape the supply and demand circle, where there is insufficient demand because there are not enough interesting products on offer.