Virtual & Augmented Reality news

Developing cutting-edge AI systems like ChatGPT requires massive technical resources, in part because they’re costly to develop and run. While several open source efforts have attempted to reverse-engineer proprietary, closed-source systems created by commercial labs such as Alphabet’s DeepMind and OpenAI, they’ve often run into roadblocks — mainly due to a lack of capital and domain expertise.
Hoping to avoid this fate, one community research group, EleutherAI, is formin

A group called Fight for Echo has purchased a sky banner in support of the ill-fated VR game.It was recently announced that the popular VR esports game Echo VR will be shutting down on August 1st, 2023 at 10:00 am PST, much to the dismay of the VR community. Originally launched back in 2017 on Oculus Rift, Ready at Dawn’s zero-g sports game has served as a staple for competitive VR experiences for the past six years.
The news hit hard among players, so much so that one group, Fight for Ech

I’ve yet to walk the entire floor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year (that’s the goal for this afternoon), but my sense is the majority of the robots present fit into one of two categories: robot vacuums or greeter robots. With Pepper out of commission, maybe there’s a wide-open market there. Who knows?
The two Xiaomi robots — CyberOne and CyberDog — may well have been the most prominent of the show, and neither were especially inspiring. It was fun fin

A recent leak could provide new details regarding the company’s hardware roadmap.
A new report from The Verge claims that Meta intends on releasing three additional VR headsets over the next several years. This includes a direct follow-up to Quest 2 as well as the more recent Quest Pro mixed reality headset.Citing an internal roadmap presentation shared with Meta employees, the report states that a Quest 3 VR headset is scheduled for release later this year. The device will reportedly be t

It is raining AI-powered features all across search engines. Today, Brave Search launched a new “Summarizer” feature, which is powered by different large langue models (LLMs) — OpenAI’s GPT tech isn’t one of them. Just like the name suggests, its job is to provide a synopsis of a search query using different sources.
The summary feature is available to all Brave Search users on desktop and mobile. In the examples given by the company, it can summarize results for qu

Humanoid robots are one of those ideas that never truly goes out of style — it does, however, tend to ebb and flow across the decades. Whatever you happen to think about the project or the company that built it, Tesla’s Optimus prototype has revived the conversation around the form factor and efficacy and viability of general-purpose robots. Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert told me in an interview this week, “I thought that they’d gotten a lot more done than I expecte

Roofing isn’t a glamorous job. In fact, one could reasonably argue that it checks off the classic three Ds of automation — dull, dirty and dangerous — with aplomb. It’s a prime candidate for transformation at the hands of some clever roboticists. It always ranks at or toward the top of the list of most dangerous construction jobs, and there are a lot of roofs in the world — every human who wants one should have one.
Renovate Robotics is building systems for the expr

Meta is planning to ship a VR headset in 2024 which the company wants to make as accessible as possible to consumers.According to a report by The Verge, Meta’s VP of VR, Mark Rabki, told thousands of employees in a memo that it plans to release a consumer VR headset in 2024, codenamed Ventura.
“The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market,” Rabki wrote in the memo.
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