Transformation Group

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https://transformationgroup.io/ai-century-draft-introduction/ https://transformationgroup.io/ai-century-draft-introduction/#respond Sat, 19 May 2018 05:08:44 +0000 Shel Israel News and Updates AI Century Irena Cronin Shel Israel slaughterbots http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1556

Irena Cronin and I are writing a book called AI Century: When Machines Get Smarter Than US. As I have been doing since Naked Conversations in 2005, I am posting drafts ...

Irena Cronin and I are writing a book called AI Century: When Machines Get Smarter Than US . As I have been doing since Naked Conversations in 2005, I am posting drafts of Content and looking for feedback, ideas and fact-checking from friends and followers.

There was a video going around showing Michelle Obama performing a striptease, except that it wasn’t really her. It was produced in FakeApp, a face-swapping video software so good it might have fooled even her own husband. It is an example of a new genre called deepfake.

Welcome to the AI Century. There will be all sorts of amazing things, some of which will be truly miraculous, and others will not even be what they appear to be.

Consider this: There is a cute little drone that can sit on the palm of your hand. It contains advanced facial recognition capability to identify people as it buzzes past them. When it encounters a known perpetrator, it assumes the speed of a bullet and smashes through that person’s skull. This has not yet occurred, but proponents say it can be built today and used by the military, law enforcement or perhaps professional assassins. No human decisions will be involved in actual takedowns.

There is also a concept video of slaughterbots swarms that can annihilate protesters, senators or perhaps schoolchildren. Today, it’s just intended to warn people of chilling dangers, but it disturbs us, because the technology exists to actually build such things, and we can imagine organizations, governments and individuals who might really want to do such things.

This world-changing software is pervading a great many things in a great many ways. Some are disturbing, but many more are life-enhancing. Some will take away jobs, but most will make the world more efficient, safer or cleaner.

For better or worse, AI will be the most dominant influence on how work, culture, life and the planet itself will change over the next 75 years at least, thus the title for our book.

Over in China, where despite best efforts to control population growth, the government seems unable to train enough teachers to keep up with the growing student population, they are experimenting with virtual teachers. Students can select the gender and soon the age of their personal teachers who instruct them in language, geography and history with software developed by a British hack-and-slash game publisher. Using AI, it watches the students watching the video. The virtual instructor goes at the ideal pace for each pupil. When one kid drifts off, then the software puts a pop quiz up to regain attention.

A few years from today, bots like Alexa will manage most homes in the developed world. People will expect to interact with digital machines by voice, trusting these personable devices to make most household management decisions on their behalf.

Let’s picture your home, five-or-ten years down the line. Alexa’s AI will be far better than it is today. Imagine, if you will, that it snowed last night. Alexa makes a few calculations and then sounds your wakeup alarm 26 minutes earlier than you had scheduled, autonomously deciding what extra time you’ll need to get to your destination safely by robo-car. Of course, Alexa also adjusts related details. She will brew your coffee and start your car earlier. It is unlikely that your car will still burn fossil fuel, but if it does, Alexa will lift your garage door to ensure you don’t inhale dangerous fumes.

Thanks to AI we have new and better ways to communicate with our machines, and we are getting closer to them than we ever imagined back when the closest we could get was the smartphone.

For example, brain-operated external skeletons are starting to help quadriplegics to get around on their own. These devices are cumbersome and expensive today, but they are getting more affordable and portable faster than was believed possible just two years ago.

The same goes for prosthetic limbs. People are being fitted with a new generation of brain-powered arms, hands and fingers that let them lift a coffee cup up to their lips without help. Haptic synthetic skin lets the amputee feel the warmth of the coffee in the mug.

AI is already in your life in ways far less dramatic than these examples, and you may not have even noticed. Software bots have replaced many humans in online support and while far from perfected, they are generally making it faster and easier for you to get your problem solved than the unfortunate human that was replaced.

It is entirely likely that something you are carrying, wearing or located nearby, was manufactured in a lights-out factory, named because illumination is unnecessary in a facility that operates around the clock without human participation.

Maybe you are one of the fortunate few whose life has already been saved by medical scanning technology that can detect cancer earlier than has ever been possible, or conceivably, it was just your calendar letting you know it is time for your next appointment.

All this and so much more is here and now or very soon will be. Some of it is disturbing, most of it is clearly beneficial and, in all cases, it is inevitable. This new AI Century may have started slowly, but the technology will be the defining factor in how Earth changes over the next 50-75 years.

All we can tell you is that AI changes are coming, and they are coming faster than you may think. There are those who will tell you that AI will be the planet’s salvation and others who warn it is driving us toward Doomsday.

We have spent much of the last three years looking at the events and issues and we see the world being somewhere in between those two outcomes. We watch from the perspective of business decision makers and write mostly to help them decide on how, when and why to use AI strategies, but these days the line that separates work from life, in general, has been blurred: AI has a lot to do with that as well.

We find ourselves surprisingly optimistic about AI and the future of humankind. But we also see enough issues to believe that people should proceed with caution, anticipating that when the machines get smarter than us, they will very often surprise us—and we hope they are mostly pleasant.

What should you do about all the relentless and unavoidable changes? We have written the AI Century as a guidebook to help you navigate through the rising tide of turbulent changes in business operations and customer relationships.

We will tell you lots of stories about how AI is being used in the enterprise, in customer experiences, in marketing, healthcare and logistics. We tell you where we think it is going in order to adjust your course accordingly.

https://transformationgroup.io/announcing-ai-century-when-machines-get-smarter-than-us-new-business-thinkers-book/ https://transformationgroup.io/announcing-ai-century-when-machines-get-smarter-than-us-new-business-thinkers-book/#respond Tue, 15 May 2018 18:56:08 +0000 Shel Israel News and Updates http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1529

Irena Cronin and I have been working together for more than six months now, and we are both so happy with the way it has turned out that we became partners ...

Irena Cronin and I have been working together for more than six months now, and we are both so happy with the way it has turned out that we became partners in Transformation Group last week.

Now, we are thrilled to share with you our plan to co-author ‘The AI Century: When Machines Get Smarter Than Us,’ a new book for business thinkers about this massively disruptive new technology.

It will be released in Q1 2019 and we hope it will serve as a guidebook for business thinkers trying to understand the fundamental and lasting impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on business and life for the next 75 years at least.

We will be self-publishing ‘AI Century’ and are seeking to raise money to cover the cost of researching, writing and publishing it through corporate and individual sponsorships.

We have written a sample Introduction entitled, “Michelle Obama’s Striptease, Slaughterbots & Curing Cancer,” which should give you a sense of the tone, content and point of the whole book. We also have written an Extended Table of Contents, which will serve as our writing roadmap, and finally, a one-page list of Sponsorship options.

We feel this is an important book. It is based on the passion that Irena and I share for the technological and cultural implications of machines destined to become smarter than those who created them. We see a better world coming, if certain dangers can be avoided.

This will be my 8th book in 13 years. Each time, I wrote a better book by developing a community around it, sharing early drafts of every chapter publicly, interviewing hundreds of people and constantly getting feedback from people more loyal to the readers than to the authors.

I hope you will join us for this long and exciting journey that we are embarking upon with this pre-announcement notification.

https://transformationgroup.io/transformation-group-names-irena-cronin-partner-president/ https://transformationgroup.io/transformation-group-names-irena-cronin-partner-president/#respond Tue, 15 May 2018 16:39:23 +0000 Shel Israel News and Updates AI Business World Business Wire Irena Cronin Shel Israel Transformation Group LLC http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1598

Irena Cronin has been named Partner and President of Transformation Group, a newly created post. Cronin joined Transformation Group in October as Head of Research and Innovation. According to Shel Israel, Transformation ...

Irena Cronin has been named Partner and President of Transformation Group, a newly created post. Cronin joined Transformation Group in October as Head of Research and Innovation.

According to Shel Israel , Transformation Group CEO and co-founder, “I am amazed with Irena’s depth of knowledge and passion for AI, her absolute professionalism and her stellar reputation in both the business and tech communities. Additionally, she adds to Transformation Group’s assets an understanding of international economics, particularly in China, where she has lived and studied.”

As president, she will run client services, as well as develop new products and services. While Israel will remain deeply involved in these areas, his main focus will be as principal writer on a new book with Cronin about AI’s impact on business and life. He will also continue as Editor of AI Business World , a business newsletter covering AI, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other disruptive technologies.

Israel and Cronin also announced their ability to appear together as speakers and workshop leaders at business events covering AI, AR and VR. She remains President of Spout Reality, a firm focused on the AR and VR industries. Previously, Cronin has worked on Wall Street as an equity research analyst, where she gained extensive experience in valuating both public and private companies.

Cronin holds a Joint MBA in Finance/MA in East Asian Area Studies from the University of Southern California and an MS in Information Technology – Management and Systems from New York University. She graduated with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Economics (summa cum laude). She is nearly fluent in Mandarin, has intermediate fluency in Japanese and beginner’s proficiency in Korean.

Founded in 2017, Transformation Group, LLC, advises business decision makers on strategies related to Artificial Intelligence, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, Facial Recognition, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, and related disruptive technologies.

https://transformationgroup.io/transformation-group-transformations/ https://transformationgroup.io/transformation-group-transformations/#respond Tue, 10 Apr 2018 19:02:03 +0000 Shel Israel News and Updates AI AR Irena Cronin Shel Israel The Fourth Transformation Transformation Group LLC transformations VR http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1470

Transformation Group, LLC recently observed its first birthday. This year produced a great many changes. Our team, products and services were all restructured. Today, I’m writing to tell you ...

Transformation Group, LLC recently observed its first birthday. This year produced a great many changes. Our team, products and services were all restructured. Today, I’m writing to tell you about a string of even more significant changes coming shortly.

Transformation Group is a corporate consulting organization that emerged from a book. The Fourth Transformation , published in December 2016, argued that Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR & VR) would fundamentally change our relationships with digital technology in the same way that the iPhone did.

We still believe this to be true: It’s just that AR & VR are part of a deeper and larger change, involving other technologies that are also powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is time for Transformation Group to broaden its products and services to cover robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and chatbots in addition to AR and VR. In addition to covering immersive technologies in handsets and headsets, we will now also cover new interface technologies including voice, gesture, eye interaction and brainwaves.

Irena Cronin, Transformation Group’s Head of Research and Innovation, and I have been talking about this since shortly after she joined with us late last year. The trigger point to begin the many changes we will make in the coming months came a couple of weeks ago when I had an impressive interview with a startup called Emotiv , which makes Brainwear —wearable devices that let people move stuff around with brainwaves. These objects may be on a computer screen, or in the form of prosthetic arms, or maybe even a warehouse forklift.

I have already posted a YouTube clip on Emotiv, but while I was writing up my interview notes for my AR Business World ( ARBW ) newsletter, it dawned on me that Emotiv has nothing to do with AR or VR. It didn’t fit into the newsletter, yet it was a story that I felt my readers needed to know about.

That led to a decision to rename ARBW to AI Business World ( AIBW ). It was a simple matter of changing one letter on the masthead. If you are a subscriber, you will see the next newsletter has a new blue masthead. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can check out old issues here or click here to subscribe .

My newsletter was designed as a mechanism to keep current on tech events for ourselves and our clients. In the past, my online interviews have become fodder for new books and that is likely to be the case with AIBW .

Irena and I are thinking about co-authoring a new book with the working title of The AI Century: When Machines Get Smarter Than Us .

My last three books were self-published, and if we can raise funds from companies or individuals wishing to associate their brands with our book then our hearts are already set on writing it with an anticipated early 2019 release.

https://transformationgroup.io/ar-vr-retain-new-millennial-employees/ https://transformationgroup.io/ar-vr-retain-new-millennial-employees/#respond Thu, 08 Mar 2018 17:20:14 +0000 Shel Israel News and Updates http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1459

This is another one of those Forbes Contributor columns that reads like a press release, but it shows a useful idea on how Honeywell is addressing a widespread problem of training ...

This is another one of those Forbes Contributor columns that reads like a press release, but it shows a useful idea on how Honeywell is addressing a widespread problem of training young employees, who then jump ship–often to a competitor–once they become experienced.

Honeywell is using immersive technologies to capture the wisdom of a retiring generation and then using it to train new, fresh-out-of-school recruits, who might make fewer of the same mistakes. I heard about something like this at an Idaho mining company I visited years ago. They had an “Old Joe” archive, where retiring workers would sit in front of a fixed 2D camera and tell stories of their work, each designed to prove a particular point.

I thought it was a good idea at the time. It was the best an employer could do with the technology of 2006, when I covered it. But now we have the immersive technologies of AR and VR, which allow trainees to see, not just the narrator, but the project being discussed. They don’t just sit and watch a screen in a dark room, but they don headsets and walk through the projects to see augmented information and data.

The twin tools of AR and VR are, quite simply, the best teaching and training tools that have ever emerged. Students learn by virtually doing. They retain more for longer periods of time. They stay alert and engaged rather than struggle with outdated 2D films that would cure insomnia in most people.

Honeywell is to be commended for their thought leadership. It is one important step in using new technologies to retain, motivate and improve loyalty in newly recruited employees. There are other approaches to the recruit-train-lose syndrome as well.

For example, Barminco , Australia’s leading mining company has been commended for modernizing both its recruiting and training methods, using VR to teach risk assessment in mines. They also use VR to save the time and trouble of training someone to work in mines, and then have that person discover that actually working in the dark, damp, cramped environment is not how they want to spend daylight hours.

In short, the VR training videos allow the company to weed out people who are most likely to leave before they actually start work.

I think using cool technology is an extremely smart way of getting younger employees to feel they have joined a forward-thinking organization, but there is more involved in retaining employees. Employers note that Millennials often leave within two years of being hiring and trained, very often to go to a competitor. This is because the competitor will financially reward a trained employee to join them just to save the time and money that the competing employer has invested.

The simple solution to that is to give trainees bonuses when they finish training and start being valuable. While giving younger generations the digital tools they love to play and communicate with at work, paying them more and giving them enhanced benefits has always been a good way to retain young employees–and for that matter, old ones as well.

https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-13-ar-startup-600-million-users/ https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-13-ar-startup-600-million-users/#respond Mon, 26 Feb 2018 19:35:13 +0000 Shel Israel AI Business World Newsletter News and Updates Aarabi AR Business World AR startup ARBW Emotiv EPOC Magic Leap Magic Mirror Memory Mirror Modiface Mowery VRvana http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1408

ARBW #13 This AR Startup Has 600 million Users. Can You Name It? Neither Could I. I wrote about Modiface in my most recent book, but thought I was writing ...

ARBW #13

This AR Startup Has 600 million Users. Can You Name It? Neither Could I.

I wrote about Modiface in my most recent book, but thought I was writing about Sephora. I wrote about it again in a previous ARBW issue, but that time I thought I was writing about L’Oréal.

It’s an easy oversight. Founded in 2008, Toronto-based Modiface is privately held and is not a consumer-facing company at all.

It provides a software developer’s kit (SDK) and realtime video for leading brands in the $445 billion global beauty industry . They have more than 100 partners including Sephora, Walmart, Clinique, Smashbox, Mac, Estee Lauder, Shiseido, Dior, Tarte, YSL, Armani, Urban Decay, Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford, etc.

According, to Parham Aarabi, the University of Toronto engineering professor who started Modiface, initially it was an attempt to use machine learning and AR to read lips. The Modiface SDK is the overwhelming choice of beauty brands because of its unique color simulation that provides a superior and more realistic product rendering in “Magic Mirrors” that are appearing on upscale beauty product counters all over the world.

Aarabi, estimates that so far, over 600 million shoppers have used products containing the AR software to virtually try on lipstick, eyeshadow, liner, mascara, hair color and other cosmetics. Simply by touching the screen (or mirror), people can see what they look like in any particular item, without actually applying it, thus providing a more enjoyable and efficient experience. The technology cuts down shopping time, mess and sample product waste.

The result is a measurable sales boost. According to Aarabi, partnering brands report an 84 percent increase in conversions online and a 31 percent boost in stores where 92 percent of all beauty products are sold , and where engagement and upselling are actually more important than just sales. Growth has increased significantly over the past four years and is edging toward the exponential.

The brands have different goals, I learned. Mobile apps are intended to boost sales online, while in-store, it’s about engagement and upselling.

Other Reflections

Beauty products are a very big business, and the lessons being learned by the Modiface experience are most relevant to the remainder of the consumer shopping industry. Already, similar technologies are being used at retail stores ranging from Neiman Marcus where “Memory Mirrors” allows shoppers to see what they would look like in clothing that is still on the hanger.

If a shopper takes an outfit on a hanger and holds it in front of a mirror, then the mirror shows precisely what she would look like if she tried it on. The shopper can then take a second or third outfit and hold it up. The mirrors show her what she looks like in each of the three dresses simultaneously, once again using AR to improve the shopper experience.

But customer experience is only half the story, a story that applies to most brands. The other is the extreme value of collecting user facial recognition data.

Data Gathering

These AR mirrors are actually computer screens equipped with 3D sensors and cameras. While shoppers try on items, the screens gather non-intrusive data. While Modiface cannot recognize people, it can recognize facial shapes, skin tone, hair texture and color, wrinkles and other facial characteristics.

Machine Learning enables it to identify which facial characteristics are likely to buy various products. As this data gets collected, Machine Learning enables it to identify which facial characteristics are likely to buy various products at certain times of the day or year and in particular regions.

It will know what eyeliners are preferred by people who have particular facial shapes and skin tones, and how that may change between winter and summer. This allows stores to predict inventory with increased accuracy.

This is how all of retail will be transformed over the next five years, or so I believe. It starts with a simple idea that seems to make a small difference, but users reveal it makes a bigger difference than people originally thought. Then the tech is adopted by others into new applications. Eventually, the tech becomes a universal tool for any party trying to enhance customer experiences in stores, on phones or soon in headsets.

Thus, a startup aspiring to aid the hearing impaired becomes a beauty industry standard. The concept spills into apparel and from there, who knows where it will go.

Special thanks to my Facebook friend Jim Courtney , who pointed me to this great story.

Elsewhere in AR World

From Voice to Brain Interfaces

It is clear that the most rapidly adapted digital interface has become voice. Amazon and Google are already driving a near-exponential assent of voice interaction as a faster, better, safer interface. But wait, there’s more. There’s the potential for Eye Interaction, and beyond that, there is technology coming out that is operated with your brainwaves. In The Fourth Transformation , we dedicated an entire chapter to to Eyefluence, a startup since acquired by actually manipulate objects with your eyes.

Unlike eye- tracking software, eye interaction allows you to actually manipulate objects with your eyes. For example, I could type this newsletter use an AR headset and Eyefluence software about nine times faster than I can type on a good day.

It is faster because the eyes are the fastest part of the external body. It is the shortest route from external into the human brain. But they are not the brain itself, which is the fastest part of the entire body.

There is a fair amount of activity unfolding in something called BCI—or Brain-Controlled Interface . All of the action I have found involves healthcare, particularly with patients who may not have full use of limbs, eyes or voice. In the book, I reported on Mindmaze , a Swiss med-tech company, that has developed a headset connected to external sensors that pick up electrical brain impulses to treat myriad chronic issues including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, amputation trauma and stroke trauma.

While it has produced promising results in clinical trials, the headset remains a cumbersome device weighing nearly a pound, the last time I checked. For more than ten years, researchers have been experimenting with brainwaves and prosthetics. The refinements have become impressive. Amputees are demonstrating the ability to wiggle prosthetic fingers and to sense heat by brainwave .

Now, I’ve learned from Rob Mowery , another Facebook friend about BCI technology from another early-phase med-tech company.

The Emotiv EPOC+ is a $799 device that allows EEG testing more easily and supposedly more accurately than the current system of attaching sensor plates to the skull with gel.

It is a relatively lightweight system and eliminates the look of Mindmaze devices, whose impressive functions require something that resembles a prop in an old Frankenstein movie. EPOC is more limited and much less expensive.

Mowry also pointed me to the Neurosky Mindwave , which is available for as low as $79.95 from Amazon.com, of all places. The device can measure EEG responses to commercials and ads for marketers.

Mowry has been trying out both the devices and his early response is that they are not quite ready for prime time. He has been playing with the EPOC and Google. He is getting about a 50-60 percent success rate when he really tries.

Over on Amazon, the Neurosky low-end device as a two-star rating, and the higher end version is unrated altogether. Despite all these flaws and limitations, I believe that this is a remarkable start for a technology that changes our relationship with personal digital devices. I do believe that sometime in the next decade typing, tapping and swiping keyboards or screens will be about as commonplace as the rotary phone dial is today.

If this is a topic that holds your interest, you may want to attend AR & the Future of Healthcare , a live, online class presented by Kristi Hansen Onkka, founder, and CEO of HealthiAR, a med-tech consulting group and myself. We will be discussing these and at least 20 other AR/VR medical case studies. The class will be from 10-to-noon Pacific time on March 6 and the cost is regularly $147. Use the Code ARBW and save $20.

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Magic Leap & the NBA

If you have been reading ARBW for a while you probably know that I am skeptical about Magic Leap becoming anything close to what it promises to be.

Despite all that, I hope to be proven wrong. I am on the side of users in terms of AR and VR. I favor more companies competing harder for our business and thus driving innovation up and prices down.

Last week, Magic Leap announced a deal with the NBA, and showed Shaq O’Neal wearing a prototype of the headsets that have been promised for release this year. When he was a player, he demonstrated just how magically he could leap. I hope the headsets actually do the same for AR when they come out.

We shall see.

According to the announcement delivered earlier this month from the stage of Recode, a top-tier tech conference, fans in the headsets will be able to view multiple screens overlaid on a wall or watch the game in an optical corner while walking around. They can also watch the game on one screen while keeping Facebook open or … well, you get the 3D picture.

Ultimately, the way I want it to work is that I can convert my living room dining room table, yard, or outstretched hand into a live game. I would be able to watch from the perspective of any seats in the stadium, or on the court itself. I could see the game the way a drone would see it, or I could sit on the bench or join a team huddle.

Magic Leap does not promise anything like that in its 2018 version. Nor does anyone else. But someday, that is likely to be how fans enjoy basketball, soccer, rugby, football or live professional wrestling.

Will Magic Leap be the one who will take us there?

Maybe… Maybe not. Perhaps it will be Apple, which seems also likely to get into the headset game sometime soon. But Apple may also be looking at applications that are a lot less playful, as the following story suggests.

Could Apple be looking at Enterprise Headsets?

Last week Techcrunch wrote that it could confirm rumors that Apple had quietly bought VRvana.com , a Canadian maker of the Totem, an attractive VR headset that features mixed reality, but has not yet shipped. The Totem uses technology considered superior to Hololens for integrating AR and VR into a single headset.

The interesting part may be that VRvana has been entirely focused on enterprise applications. A target that Apple CEO Tim Cook has declared part of the company’s AR future, despite most observers regarding Apple as a consumer-facing company that makes products so desirable that they wend their ways into the enterprise.

This makes some sense because most number crunchers see today’s non-gaming headset market situated overwhelmingly in the enterprise where price and appearance are far less important than in the consumer market.

In either case, this to me is a bit like my above Magic Leap story. If it is true, then users win. Innovation increases and prices fall. If Apple is involved, you can bet the appearance of the device is likely to improve.

VR in public education

If you have read Ready Player One , Ernest Cline’s excellent sci-fi novel (soon to be a movie), you would see a vision where the best teachers in the best classrooms existed not on Earth, but on a virtual world called Ludus, where student avatars learned from virtual teachers who took them to the places they were studying, ranging from ancient cultures to space travel.

I believe that education is an extremely promising application for VR on Earth. I have previously reported on China experimenting with virtual teachers whose look, teaching methods and pace are selected by each student. I’ve also written about US and UK high schoolers who take virtual tours of historic points of interest such as the White House and Buckingham Palace. Now, comes this ABC report on teens in a Brooklyn high school learning about life on an upstate New York farm .

VR education is not just for school kids. Walmart is training 140,000 in-store employees with it. Energy companies are training oil rig workers before they leave land-based classrooms. Med students are learning anatomy with virtual humans, rather than frozen cadavers.

While, we don’t yet know the long-term effects on the developing human brain, and the implication of changing school socialization structures, it is already more than clear that immersive experiences are far more effective for teaching than lectures, textbooks, and 2D training films.

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https://transformationgroup.io/arbw12-five-ar-startup-change-world/ https://transformationgroup.io/arbw12-five-ar-startup-change-world/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 17:27:43 +0000 Shel Israel AI Business World Newsletter News and Updates AR startup Lumus Meta Prezi Shel Israel Transformation Group Vuzix http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1369

ARBW #12 Five Transformational AR StartUps My love for Silicon Valley was shaped by spunky little startups who understood that they were facing impossible odds, yet took on giants in ...

ARBW #12

Five Transformational AR StartUps

My love for Silicon Valley was shaped by spunky little startups who understood that they were facing impossible odds, yet took on giants in the marketplace and prevailed. Some of these withered and died for one reason or another; others flourished but then got acquired.

Some resisted acquisition attempts, ignored experts who saw them facing insurmountable barriers, and decided to go it alone. These include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, who don’t just dominate AR and VR, they are the most valuable and powerful corporate entities on Earth.

This formidable gang of five got there for a combination of reasons, but what is certain is that they had to present the world with disruptive technologies that changed work and life.

Once again, we have entered times being rapidly changed by technology: it is not just AR, VR and the secret sauce called AI. There are robotics, cybercurrencies, autonomous vehicles and aircraft, more.

There is no doubt in my mind the the five mighty companies will remain formidable during this wormhole of change we are just now entering. These five giants have proven more adept at meeting challenges of change than did their many forgotten Goliaths who was stood on the top of the competitive mountaintops. Each is quite good at acquiring or destroying little engines of companies that could change the world.

Still, I am seeing companies of great promise. If they are going to unseat these might incumbents, they are going to change them, as each establishes their own strong positions on the competitive playing fields. They are each quite diverse in what they do and how they do.

Probably, not all of them will opt to remain independent, but each is likely to have a long ramp over the next few years, where they will grow from promising early phase companies to independent powerhouse.

1. Meta: Focusing on the OS

Last month, Irena Cronin , Transformation Group’s Head of Research and Innovation, and I met with David Gene Oh , Meta’s Head of Developer Relations. He gave us a preview of what they have now shown at CESand we were favorably impressed.

The Meta 2 headset has been refined to make it lighter weight and more comfortable. Additionally, Meta has partnered with Ultrahaptics and Zerolight , two haptic technology developers who work on providing AR and VR activation experiences in the automotive industry.

Irena and I both tried on the glasses and had similar impressions. For me, the first thing I noticed was that because it was more comfortable, wearing it felt more natural allowing me a more immersive experience than I had when I tried a Meta 2 prototype nearly a year earlier. The second thing I noticed was the impressive improvements to the optics that allowed me to see virtual images so sharply that they seemed almost real. The field of view also seemed to have widened a bit as well.

In front of us, was a virtual bookshelf containing a series of objects. David encouraged us to choose one of them and then reach out to pick it up just using our hands. There was no controller and no weird gestures were required.

Taking first turn with the headset, Irena grabbed hold of the planet Earth, lifted it up and released it in midair. She used her hands to make it larger and then to spin it around. In my demo, I used the same hand gestures to explore a realistic human brain.

Irena observed,”The operating system for Meta 2 had greatly improved since the last time I had demoed it just a few months before it. Tracking and images were crisper and manipulation with hand movements was easier. I was greatly impressed.”

Irena had nailed it: Oh told us: Moving forward, “Meta will focus on operating systems.

I think this strategy is game-changing for Meta and perhaps the industry itself. To me, this is a master stroke. It will allow the company to do what founder-CEO Meron Gribetz has consistently declared he wants to do: remain independent. As the developer and designer of operating systems, Meta, Oh told us, “Meta can address a whole new set of ideas around interaction and how users will be productive using AR technology. We have a team of neuroscientists focused on user interactions because the old OS paradigm from 2D [monitors] to 3D [AR] will have to be written, so why not [by] us?”

In Meta’s vision, all objects will have a digital presence. Users will just look for something and then grab it. Users will be able to reach out and actually grab a virtual object using the Meta OS and sensors or haptic technologies from companies like Ultrahaptics. For example, you will be able to look at a 3D album cover, grab it and play it using a similar interface to what Irena and I used with the planet and brain.

When I pointed out that Meta’s Achilles’ Heel seemed to be that it was the only major AR device maker that still remained tethered to a computer which seriously limits movement for industrial and consumer apps, Oh conceded that this was true and promised the tether would eventually disappear once the tech would allow Meta’s optics and field of view without requiring the power of an external computer.

To grab and manipulate a hologram, you need to see the entire object, and it needs to appear in very high fidelity. Meta will also needs to produce this experience at a competitively low price.

Meta, asserted that Microsoft Hololens and ODG R-8 and R-9 each have certain advantages. ODG was best in outdoor applications, and Hololens, according to Oh, provides the best immersive AR experience, so that users in Meta 2 headsets can interact up close with 3D models using a wider field of view

CES attendees seemed to have been as impressed with Meta as we were. Their demo allowed attendees to ogle and virtually fondle a $2.5 million super car. In my research, it was the most discussed AR exhibit and CES Awarded it for the Most Innovative Exhibit.

Meta also announced a partnership with Dell, its first major hardware partnership. Based on Oh’s statement related to focus on OS and the Dell deal, I would not be surprised to see Meta go out of the device business somewhere down the line.

Rather than continue to design headsets against the likes of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and eventually Apple and Amazon, it seems to me Meta could possibly convert one or more of them into customers.

I also continue to believe that Meta is dedicated to remaining independent of large competitors that might want to gobble it up and take the thorn out of their side. I have twice interviewed Meron Gribetz , who seems passionate about staying independent during these foundational years in the AR transformation. Oh echoed those thoughts with equal passion in this more recent interview.

Whether Meta endures and prevails as an independent company remains to be seen. Either way, it is doing something now that changes the speed at which AR headsets will reach their full potential. It has put its focus on the operating system, which is where its focus belongs for now.

2. Prezi: Presenting In Depth

There’s a story about the above photo that I’ll get to in a moment. First, I need to give you a little context.

I make a lot of presentations, some are live and others are streamed. Historically, I have used Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides. Each has attributes I like, but a potential downside to them, Jill Duffy observed in an article last week announcing PC magazine’s Award to Prezi Next as the Best Presentation Software of 2018. It is the first presentation software to enable AR, which it does in an innovative and game-changing way.

Now back to the above photo. This is a photo of a wall screen where you see Irena, Prezi CEO Peter Arvai and myself gathered in a small room. The guy with the gun does not exist. He is a virtual object.

Yet both Irena and I felt real discomfort from the illusion that the gunman was really there, pointing a weapon at our heads.

It underscores how much more vivid Prezi AR presentations actually are. They are more likely to take your breath away than leave you snoring. As Irena observed, “Prezi allows the person putting together a presentation to be so much more creative than if they had used PowerPoint or Google Slides. Connections between ideas and points could be more directly visually addressed. As a result, presenters are able to become better story-tellers and persuaders. Communication is upped a notch. The integration of AR into Prezi looks extremely promising and the method by which it is done does not appear to be hard to do. I’m really looking forward to getting more updates about it.”

Prezi is not even an AR company. Instead it is an underdog in presentation software. They are eclipsed by PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides at least for the time being.

But, they are already important – and positioned to take very significant slices of market share over the next five years. They are important to me because they are early demonstrators of how AR and VR will change all things. All application software will have immersive components, particularly productivity software.

While Prezi may be the newer, smaller contender, doing battle against technology’s King Kong, Godzilla, and Incredible Hulk, the company is doing quite well. Since it was founded in 2009, the website claims it has been used by 85 million people for over 325 million presentations. With the addition of AR, it has a killer component to an essential business and teaching app.

It is also strongest with the most preferred customers: students and recent workplace entrants. Perhaps, even more important is that Prezi is favored among young people. Its strongest market niche has been education. As Prezi users graduate and enter the business world, they often evangelize the product to colleagues at work. Today, Prezi’s greatest area of growth is the business user.

Young customers who are early adopters on a global level are not just low hanging fruit, but the sweetest fruit on a growing tree. Biology indicates that they will be Prezi users for a longer time period than older PowerPoint users.

To be clear, older users are already adopting Prezi AR in significant numbers. Just watch this TED talk by Stanford University’s neuro-endocrinologist and author Robert Sapolsky where the same virtual guy with the gun pops up yet again.

I think Prezi offers a more dramatic and effective way to present. It breaks the natural existing barriers between speakers and their presentation materials. There is a “Wow” factor in it that you just cannot achieve in PowerPoint.

However, here’s the funny thing about “Wow” factors: they eventually become the anticipated norm. What dazzles audiences today will be expected by audiences tomorrow.

It just so happens that I was head of the PR agency that launched PowerPoint. When we showed business users those headlines followed by bullet points on a computer screen, it took their breath away. It was so much more exciting than the flip charts it replaced.

Showing a PowerPoint presentation as it is today four years from now when there will be 100 million people with AR headsets according to IDC, and over a billion people with AR capability in their handsets, will be about as exciting as etching your key points on parchment and nailing them to the auditorium door.

I am sure that in these same four years other presentation software companies will have added AR technologies to their capabilities as well, but in so doing, they will position Prezi as the thought and technology leader in this category. Prezi will be embraced by earlier adopters and the people who are most likely to influence others at work.

Let me put aside my pompoms and other cheerleading paraphernalia. The most famous AR underdog is also among the best financed, having raised just short of $2 billion in less than three years.

It has done this without shipping a single product, without announcing any formidable partnerships, by filing numerous patents that don’t quite reveal precisely what the headsets under development will do, and by releasing the spectacular demo above, which was later revealed to be a fake.

Until about ten years ago, the tech industry had a name for products that behaved this way. Software or hardware that was announced and promoted, but never made available or was withdrawn, was called vaporware. There were many examples, and more than one case where the investments and company assets disappeared in the night to some far off place that had no extradition agreements with the US.

Could Magic Leap be the greatest vaporware play of all time? Personally, I think that is entirely possible, but I am not really in a position to say for certain, one way or another. I have never seen the product; never met someone working for the company, and do not quite understand the mysterious ways that the prototypes that others report on seem to break the basic laws of physics to produce a product as magical as the faked whale seems to be.

Those few who have seen Magic Leap glasses seem to be absolutely blown away by their experience. The two who spoke the most convincingly to me were both Hollywood executives who assured me that what Magic Leap would launch—supposedly early this year—would blow away everything I had seen and heard about this mystical product backed by Google and Alibaba.

Credible tech reporters, such as Rolling Stone’s Brian Crecente , have written about Magic Leap in ways that seem like they were “captivated by magical vision” to use the words of founder and CEO Rony Abovitz.

“You will have your own personal life stream,” Abovitz said. “You also have your own identity and our view is that the life stream belongs to you. It’s a data set that, just like writing a book, is your personal copy. That means there is a need to make people aware that they have a life stream that has value and then connecting that to other things that you could have; goods and services and interactions around the life stream. So just like you can write a book and trade that for something, I want to license it and get paid, we believe the life stream is yours. Our job is to create a series of protections around it. But then to enable creators and developers to build really cool things if you let them access part of it.

“So it’s always explicit, it’s always permission-based. But there are amazing experiences and possibilities you can have. The experiential part is the best because if I just see objects that are disconnect from me in the world, there is not really an experience. I am just looking at something. But if something is aware of me and aware of the environment and I am aware of it, now you are in a whole new place. You’re in a whole new kind of story-telling that really begins to feel like life. So our system knows where your eyes are looking, where you are in space, where the world is and what you are saying and what you are hearing and that provides input. So somebody could know where you are and come right up to you, look you in the eye. You could say hello to something and then do something else. So you have this ability to have presence and awareness and interaction with characters and stories and experiences. Even if it’s something simple like there is a web space and the web space acknowledges you or I just want to leave something and you could leave it there and come back to it later. So I could leave a digital object somewhere and it could stay there. So that awareness became something we emerged into. We started out focusing on the light field, but we realized the thing was really special computing. The sensing and awareness, your sensing and awareness combined with the visualization became really powerful.”

To be honest, I have read through these paragraphs a few ties, and while I am captivated by the eloquence and vision of it, I still don’t know quite what these glasses are supposed to do or for whom.

I don’t understand how a web space is made to respond to my headset with current web space technologies. I don’t understand what it means to be able to leave something and come back to it in AR.

I don’t know if the devices are intended for consumers or enterprise workers. I have no idea about price, availability, distribution, who makes the software, or who is beta testing the product supposedly near-ready to be unveiled.

If Magic Leap, is real and it ships sometime in the near future, then maybe it is a game changer—and maybe not. I cannot rule out that people closer to the company extol how great it’s going to be. That money vaster and smarter than my own is behind it.

If this is true, then the world of AR will be a better place. If not, then the word “vaporware” will be revived and Magic Leap will be the best example ever.

We shall see. If Magic Leap can do what it keeps promising it can do, then it will leapfrog to the forefront of AR headsets and software. There are those of us who just don’t believe in Magic, but if we are proven wrong the world will be a better place for what this company contributes.

I still get kidded about putting Google Glass on the cover of Age of Context , my 2014 book with Robert Scoble. Google over-hyped and wrongly positioned a very promising prototype, arousing scorn and ridicule that overshadowed the great promise built into the product.

Rumors to the contrary, Glass has not died. It has been relegated to several large niches including health care, logistics and warehouse picking, where it’s value is beyond dispute.

Also beyond dispute is that despite the media—and consumer—negative reception, the product served as an inspiration for thinkers and technologist who have taken it forward into this transformation.

Glass, in my view, is the trigger point of the Fourth Transformation. While the Glass device is unlikely to be refined or updated, at least two companies have developed flagship products heavily built upon Glass and both were favorably received at CES where each launched promising technologies.

The Vuzix ‘AHA!’

I got to try out a Vuzix Blade at a San Francisco reception at the new US Headquarters of Re’Flekt , a promising German AR software company, which is a Vuzix Partner.

I liked what I saw in the lightweight, sporty headsets that let you do all the basic things you do on a cellphone, or for that matter, on Google Glass. You can use taps and swipes on the right stem of the headset as you could with Glass. But the big ‘Aha!’ is that Blade works with Amazon Alexa and you can whatever you can do on Alexa through natural speech. That is pretty exciting.

You just ask Alexa a question, and the answer appears on your screen. It can show you a map and guide you as you walk or safely drive. I imagine at some point soon you will be able to ask who a person approaching you is and discern whether she or he is a business prospect or a possible assailant. You could also talk to a Glass device using Google Now. But to do so, you had to look up and then tilt your head back about 30 degrees making users appear to be imitating turkeys in a rainstorm.

The device still needs a little tweaking. The battery is limited so that you can only watch a video clip right now. You’d need to plug it in to watch a full length movie. Like Glass, Blade just has a single AR screen, which allows you to see augmented data, but not enjoy 3D just yet. Also the screen is visible to people in front of you, a phenomenon that got a few Glass wearers pitched out of neighborhood taverns.

There are already a few innovative Vuzix apps, that show great potential. An Amsterdam-based startup called Huxley builds AR operating systems for food produced in greenhouses allowing growers to use tech when they are with crops, rather than back at the corporate office. Huxley uses cameras and infrared sensors to be placed around the greenhouse and Vuzix glasses that let the producer see whether each plant needs adjustment in water, humidity, or temperature.

“With Huxley, we can basically get more food with less water,” Hooks told Business Insider.

The biggest barrier I see to Vuzix adoption currently is price. I was told Vuzix will release an $1800 developer’s version shortly. Later this year, it plans to introduce a consumer version in the range of $1,000. At that price, I think most people would still prefer an iPhone X.

Second, is the issue of consumer branding. The Vuzix name may have some strength in the sunglasses category, but it is not known in consumer electronics, where it will need distribution. Then again, it is already partners with Amazon, through the Alexa deal, which may be all the distribution it needs to become a household name.

Lumus: Miniaturizing the Optics

Another promising player is Lumus , an Israeli company known for high quality, minimized optics. This is relevant because every device maker I have talked with readily admits the need for improved smaller optics.

AT CES, Lumus showed two prototypes: one designed for everyday users, and the other for professionals whose work demands more precision, or broader fields of view in this case an impressive 55 degrees. A Facebook friend who saw the two products at CES said that the single screen had been miniaturized to the extent that she could barely notice the screen when it lit up. Lumus, will continue to focus only on OEM relationships. Its current partners include Daqri, the current leader in head-mounted devices for hardhat workers.

The reason why these two nascent companies are on my list is that these headsets are the ultimate vision of the Fourth Transformation. Today, they are in a category called AR Light because they allow limited functionality and optics that make immersive perspectives difficult.

The devices themselves are called Smart Glasses. I believe that over the next five years or less, all the functionality that we now see in the highest end headset will be available in devices that look like smart glasses. However, they will have more functions and be fashionably more diverse and appealing.

Vuzix, Lumus and perhaps ODG are currently the technology leaders in smart glasses. They have the ramp and can lead the way, if they are determined and agile enough. I am rooting for each one, but, as always, I am rooting for the user even more. Two or three players in the same space means faster innovation and lower prices, making it better for the rest of us.

Neither Vuzix, nor Lumus have declared any determinations to remain independent or not, so far as I know. But I like their positions. They are currently small with very exciting ramps in a category that I would call ‘headsets for the rest of us.’

NOTE : ODG, the first Enterprise AR headset company cancelled a meeting with Irene and me shortly before CES. They also announced their first foray into consumer headsets, but I was unable to get details prior to the deadline for this newsletter. They very well could be added to this list as a sixth company that could change your world in the next five years.

https://transformationgroup.io/artw-2-what-is-ar-without-machine-learning-3/ https://transformationgroup.io/artw-2-what-is-ar-without-machine-learning-3/#respond Fri, 15 Dec 2017 02:01:03 +0000 Irena Cronin AR Tech World Newsletter News and Updates http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1581

Significance – Why talk about this now? According to Business Insider: “The world is focused on Augmented Reality (AR) right now when they should be paying more attention to machine learning. ...

According to Business Insider : “The world is focused on Augmented Reality (AR) right now when they should be paying more attention to machine learning. Both are exciting, but machine learning is the tech powering AR and will make our lives simpler and easier.”

As someone who took the legendary Machine Learning Stanford Coursera course taught by Andrew Ng , I can affirm that machine learning is indeed the main driver to AR becoming the break-though technology that everyone thinks it will.

What is machine learning? Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. It is best thought of as “ an approach to achieve artificial intelligence.” The term “machine learning” was coined by Arthur Samuel, a pioneer in computer gaming and artificial intelligence in 1959 while he was at IBM. The key to machine learning are the algorithms that programmers create, and there are several different types that are utilized for different functions. The most promising for AR are those connected with computer vision and are of the unsupervised learning type. These type of algorithms allow for baseline behavioral profiles for objects to be learned and established which are then utilized to discover meaningful anomalies.

What is AR without machine learning? Even the simplest AR technology would not be able to exist without utilizing machine learning. For example, Snapchat lenses which are considered to be an extremely simple representation of AR need machine learning algorithms to understand facial characteristics. The algorithms have to be devised with flexibility in mind for not everyone’s face is of the cookie-cutter variety. With these very simple examples of AR, Snapchat is able to charge companies who want branded lenses a luxurious amount of money – upwards of $1 million a day per lens .

There are several companies that have already utilized more sophisticated machine learning algorithms to place virtual objects in rooms,
such as Lowe’s

Without getting overly technical for this first newsletter on AR and machine learning, I will now turn to a very recent example of a machine learning program that Apple has just announced that will be very useful in the creation of AR apps.

Although this did not make big news (probably because its relevance is not clear due to its overly technical nature), Apple just released Turi Create , a graph-based distributed computation framework developed for machine learning tasks, to the public via GitHub. Turi Create originates from a company named Turi (formerly Dato Inc.; before that GraphLab Inc.) founded by Prof. Carlos Guestrin in 2013 to continue development support of the GraphLab open source project. On August 5, 2016, Turi was acquired by Apple Inc. for about $200 million to augment Apple’s machine learning efforts.

I was fortunate to be able to use and test the Turi Create framework when it was still part of Dato Inc. and found it to be relatively easy to maneuver. This happily shortened the amount of time needed to develop machine-learning tasks and algorithms. Additionally, messages on the Hacker News page of the Y Combinator Blog indicate that insiders are aware of its usefulness. The robustness and sophistication of AR apps relies on iterative steps like these made by major companies.

Here is to the New Year bringing us closer to the vision of where AR should be headed!

https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-11-augumented-reality-2017-irrational-exuberance-clean-sober/ https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-11-augumented-reality-2017-irrational-exuberance-clean-sober/#respond Sun, 10 Dec 2017 23:09:56 +0000 Shel Israel AI Business World Newsletter News and Updates Alan Greenspan Amazon AR 2017 ARFitness ARKit Augmented Reality Augmented Reality 2017 Charles Dickens Google HealthiAR J.S. Gilbert Kristi Hansen Lexset Loco Dojo Mapbox Mapdata Microsof Mike Boland MIT Technology Neal Stephenson Oculus Rift Poly.API Rachel Metz Simplygon Cloud Stanford University STRIVR Sumerian Techcrunch The Fourth Transformation Tom Wolfe Transformation Group VR/AR industry Walmart http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1201

Usually, we remember Charles Dickens at this time of year for, “A Christmas Carol,” but as I write this final AR Business World newsletter of 2017, I find myself looking ...

Usually, we remember Charles Dickens at this time of year for, “A Christmas

Carol,” but as I write this final AR Business World newsletter of 2017, I find myself looking back at the past 12 months with the opening lines of a “Tale of Two Cities,” resonating in my mind.

It was the best of years for vision, but not for adoption. It was a time for mind-boggling trailers of leaping whales, and disappointing performances to follow. It was a year of great innovations, but limited adoptions; a time for Unity and product fragmentation. It was a year of lofty goals that could not grasped.

Such ironies also filled my personal life. The Fourth Transformation became a best-seller. Transformation Group, LLC was formed and developed successful media, educational and consulting products. Yet, it was simultaneously a period in which a long-term partnership and friendship dissolved, corporate strategists for the most part remained in “wait-and-see” mode related to immersive technologies and much-hyped game changers, such as ARKit,Achanged very little other than Apple’s credibility as a category game changer.

At the same time, immersive technology investments flourished. People who experienced immersive technologies in headsets soared from a few million people in 2016 to several score millions in 2017.

In 2017, corporate adoption rose sharply. Ten percent of the Fortune 500 started pilot projects, some reporting extraordinary results in productivity, accuracy and profits and was on track to double each year for five years . The enterprise outspent consumer-facing businesses by a ratio of $10-to-$1 , with the ratio tapering each year for the next five.

The consumer side, however, lagged for a variety of reasons this year, many of them related to the products’ high prices, short battery lives, clunky designs, and limited fields of view to name a few. These contributed to a consumer demand that was limited at best, too smart merchants not wanting to get too far ahead of customers, and tangible merchants so desperate to make tough quarterly returns they could afford neither time nor money to get distracted.

So as 2017, an odd year, draws to its inevitable close, what is the conclusion that we can draw? What is the lesson for us to learn?

In the late 1990s, Alan Greenspan, then Federal Reserve chairperson, coined the term irrational exuberance . He was referring to investor immersion in a dot-com bubble that was dangerously inflating market values.

To my way of thinking, 2017 will be remembered as AR’s Year of Irrational Exuberance– if not for the entire world, which had troubles of its own, but for the VR/AR industry and those who share my Transformative vision for it.

This does not make it the worst of time by any means. We who dream dreams must be happy to pay the price to make them come true and often those payments span more than a mere 12 calendar months.

But as the baby breath of the new year awaits us after the conclusion of Christmas, the question I have been thinking about long and hard, is what will 2018 be like. First, it is not an odd year and second, much of the industry seems to be treating these final few weeks as if they had the worst New Year’s hangover in the history of celebration.

In the last 12 months, nearly every aspect of the AR business ecosystem at a rate that is beyond healthy; it is actually remarkable in terms of money invested and products purchased, in terms of game-changing innovation, public awareness, technology, product and price refinement.

The only real problem of 2017 is that we insiders simply drank too much Kool-Aid. It altered our sense of reality in the same way Ken Keysey did for his followers according to Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test back in 1968.

I think 2018 will be different: it will be a more pragmatic year for the developers, vendors, buyers and adopter of immersive technologies. It is a year where the champions of Augmented Reality will cling to the reality of business and market adoption.

More will happen with less effervescent enthusiasm. The little corporate pilot programs will become fruitful and multiply in enterprise usage.

This Clean and Sober year will generate less hoopla and more profits. It will be a time where real business decision makers start figuring out long-term strategies and short-term implementations. It will be a time to measure, evaluate and educate. It will be a time to look over your metaphoric shoulders to see if your competitors are gaining ground with AR deployments and to look at customers and the people you wish to recruit, so you can understand how new technologies are fundamentally changing the cultures you need to reach the most.

What was this year’s tiny little test, will be next year’s best practice. The companies that went first will leverage their success to take a competitive edge and establish thought leadership. In 2017, AR observers saw so much promise, which explains how otherwise sane people may have been sucked into a small dose of irrational exuberance.

We will also see a shift in who has to learn a foreign jargon. In 2017, members of the AR community expected decision makers in retail and the enterprise to learn the language of the new technologies including terms such as volumetric, field of view and six degrees of freedom . It reminded me of an earlier era when productivity software publishers boasted when they produced 1200-page user manuals that users dreaded to open.

In 2018, the AR industry will learn the language of the business they are selling to. They will learn to see he customer problems with empathy and sell technology that reduce complexity, improve efficiency and make money.

During 2017, I found myself frustrated more than one time by corporate executives who were trying to pick and choose between several disruptive technologies. They would talk about difficulties on whether to stake their futures on AR, AI, robotics, IoT, cryptocurrencies, autonomous vehicles and so on.

This is the wrong approach in my view. You cannot select one of these without considering how it integrates with the other. It is like having a carpenter decide to adopt a hammer at the expense of a saw. These are the tools of the near-term future and they often work best when used with each other.

J.S. Gilbert , a tech industry insider, predicted that these new technologies will begin to converge. “This will be a pivotal year as far as businesses setting the table; Attention will go to infrastructure, education, and other important factors to adoption.”

I agree. But to me, the big challenge of 2018 will be for c-level executives to paint strategic pictures that go five-and-ten years out, so that the middle level executives of the organization can start planning incremental steps in the form of low-risk, low-cost, easy to design and easy to implement pilot projects that steer toward that larger corporate goal.

I did not find many companies doing this in 2017, but I believe there will be many doing so in 2018.

Next year—as this year—the enterprise will be where the virtual lion’s share of AR investment will occur. According to Mike Boland , founder of ARtillry, an AR research firm, in 2017, the enterprise outspent the consumer side in AR by a ratio of $10-to- $1. While the margins will narrow in the coming years, Boland predicts the enterprise will enjoy a $10 billion ROI on AR investments in 2018, with the greatest investment going into manufacturing and assembly — where the greatest return was enjoyed in 2017.

The consumer side of AR in 2017 was not without its own little victories. Most notably Pokemon Go! grossed over $1 billion in 2017. It is following up in 2018 with 50 more cute little characters that the producers hope people will zap in parks and other public places. Personally, I can curb my own euphoria for Pokemon. I would not be unhappy to see it go. However, there are other immersive toys coming to market such as the Merge VR headsets that reveal puzzle games and living hearts through an amazing sponge cube when worn.

I had originally thought that products like the Merge Cube would make this the first AR Christmas, but I was wrong. AR will represent an extremely small percentage of Christmas retail sales. I doubt that 2018 will be the first AR Christmas either, but immersive headsets, toys and games will make AR more significant.

I also expect to see more use of AR to modernize the holiday shopping experience, particularly by merchants smart enough to appeal to the youngest family members — who we called Minecrafters in The Fourth Transformation .

Perhaps by 2020, AR will be a major component of holiday gift giving. Perhaps it will be later.

In the coming year, I will look at the future of business and consumer AR with the same enthusiasm as I demonstrated in 2017, but I will do it in the context of a more balanced clean and sober perspective.

ELSEWHERE IN AR WORLD

Meanwhile, in the closing weeks of 2017, I am seeing major announcements from huge companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and smaller companies with large aspirations that tempt me to get irrationally exuberant yet again.

In fact, there were more significant announcements than I have time or space to share with you if I wish to get my own holiday shopping done. Below are the ones that I consider to be the most significant for reasons that I will explain.

In the past ten days, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all launched 3D object libraries that make it easier to develop 3D, VR and AR properties. They all have very clear similarities and equally clear differences.

Object libraries are where graphical objects are stored and then licensed to people or companies who wish to use them. These are not new in any way. Those cute emoticons that pepper our social posts are examples of object libraries.

What is new and different is not just that visual objects are moving into 3D for use by VR/AR developers, such as Google just announced, but they are already spilling over into use by non-technical professionals and everyday people including children.

At its annual developer conference in late November, Amazon introduced Sumerian , a new library of 3D objects. Sumerian is believed by some anthropologists to be Earth’s first human language, and plays an important role in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the Sci-Fi that inspired virtual worlds and VR Goggles.

When Sumerian is ready in early 2018, it will let non-technical people create VR, AR or 3D apps to be viewed with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and iOS/Android handheld devices. An employer can build virtual training classrooms where new employees, scattered about a global enterprise, could all join and participate. A real estate agent could easily provide a virtual building tour.

Writing in MIT Technology Review , Rachel Metz noted that Sumerian works interactively via voice with the AI-based software used in Amazon Echo’s Alexis. The company believes anyone who can build their own website will be able to incorporate Sumerian’s 3D objects. These new spaces will be viewable through Google Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, as well as iPhones and iPads.

I have long been calling Amazon the sleeping giant of immersive technology. While so far Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have declared and demonstrated how vital AR is to their future, Amazon has been quietly taking position without most people noticing.

With the possible exception of Google, Amazon appears to be a leader in Artificial Intelligence, which is where the magic comes to AR. It is when your devices start getting to know you better than your own spouse does. Alexis is the leading consumer technology using AI today. In fact, Echo recently introduced a screen option, and that screen puts it just one augmented bunny hop away from an AR/VR Echo if you ask me. Amazon will be able to use Sumerian to showcase its own tangible products, such as furniture, where it will be competing against Ikea and Walmart.

Meanwhile, Google, the other personal digital technology giant with AI capability, has been busy as well. Less than a week after Sumerian was announced, the company announced the Poly.API . While still aiming just at developers, Poly enables a much faster and easier development of thousands of 3D objects. As Techcrunch described it , Poly “represents yet another step in the company’s efforts to court AR/VR developers with useful tools that expand beyond the company’s Daydream and ARCore platforms.”

While these two libraries do not directly compete, they clearly overlap, and I think that will be far more so by this time next year. First, if the objects are so easy to use that a non-developer can use them, and if they are engaging enough for commercial showcasing such as Amazon furniture, then there is really no reason why a developer would not use them to get an important job done faster.

I would guess that in the short-term future both Amazon and Google will accelerate development of new properties. I would also not be surprised to see AI quietly pervade new objects in both libraries. I also would be very surprised if works from both libraries don’t start spilling over into industrial and productivity applications where VR and AR mixed with AI can do wonders with gamification that improves training, safety and productivity.

Finally, Microsoft also jumped in with Simplygon Cloud which intends to help make content more friendly on game development platforms. Its essence is reducing the complexity of polygons, the core architecture of 3D objects.

I usually don’t mention games in this newsletter, but the similarity of these three new platforms, launched within ten days of each other, at the end of this Year of Irrational Exuberance , gives me hope that in the coming Year of Clean and Sober better software will be developed in less time in every area where immersive technologies can be used.

In a previous ARBW Issue , I talked about six major brands launching AR apps for home furniture buyers. Now comes a seventh application. This time from an unknown start-up that promises to take home design and buying a significant step forward. This makes it one of the most attractive acquisition targets I have seen lately.

The startup is called Lexset , and it is the first home design app to incorporate machine learning, the part of AI that allows technologies to think for themselves. Lexset learns from the design and mood of a room. It then searches the web for objects ranging from couches and lamps to wall hangings that it thinks will enhance the design of the room. Eventually, I assume it will be able to personalize future recommendations by the choices it sees users making.

I see Artificial Intelligence as a missing link to the transformational powers of AR. It is only when our headsets know us well enough to offer us customized choices, that the fundamental change covered in The Fourth Transformation become a reality.

Obviously, furniture shopping is becoming one of the first killer AR apps. The existing competition creates a great opportunity for Lexset, a new and unknown player. But, more than the app is the tech. The Lexset capabilities are the start of digital machines making accurate choices for people on individual patterns.

This may be creepy to some, but it will prove to be irresistibly useful to others.

Competition is starting to appear in more places in the AR business landscape in categories that show the greatest promise, such as employee training.

I’ve written a few times about the Silicon Valley startup STRIVR . It is one of the industry’s few Cinderella stories. In 2015, it began by developing VR software to help the Stanford University quarterback to train without getting sacked by practicing linebackers. By 2017, Walmart was using it to train 140,000 store employees.

Now, comes a British based company called Loco Dojo which started as a VR game. It is now building VR training software with a new corporate training app called Make Real which is in prototype for a global telecom. Make Real does not replicate quarterback training, but it does let future maintenance workers wearing Oculus Rift headsets experience the daunting and dangerous job of climbing mobile phone masts while seated securely in the corporate classroom.

The more competition there is for furniture buying or training people to do challenging jobs, the better it is for users. The technology gets better and cheaper faster and faster. That is what I like to see.

It also shows me a new career path for the many VR game developers who are discovering there are just so many ways to zap aliens before the game market gets glutted. Now, they can still build on Unity, and sell products to the world’s largest enterprises using the skills they leaned as game developers.

Mapbox is a leader in vector maps, 3D renderings that visually show data in remarkably useful ways. It has been around for a few years and is flourishing by all reports I can muster on a privately held company.

After securing $164 million in new financing a few weeks ago, it quickly bought up a couple of important companies that will leapfrog its AR capabilities. First, it acquired Mapdata , a neural network company that enables navigation software to overlay useful driving data on top of a navigational map.

A few days later, it acquired ARFitness , which enables exercisers to track their movement over terrain while hiking, cycling or running.

Where do I think Mapbox is going? Everywhere. This is a very promising company that is enjoying an extremely strong and disruptive position against more traditional mapping companies. Mapbox will allow us to see maps that look like the roads and trails we use, the cities we live in and the world’s we inhabit.

Perhaps, the most important niche to be rapidly adopting immersive technologies is one of the historic laggards of personal digital technology, healthcare. In the last year, I’ve seen apps that help people with personal health and quantified self-issues, apps that help terminally ill fulfill bucket list requests, and training apps that train better anatomy students and prepare surgeons before they perform delicate procedures. I have even found an AR app being used as a sales tools for corrective dental surgery.

But, many of these apps are only being used by a few forward-thinking schools and practitioners so far. While great capabilities are being demonstrated, the medical industry—for good reason—is slow to adopt new practices until scientific, clinical tests are conducted.

Now, that is starting as well. Robert Mazumder, an occupational therapist and a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, near Toronto has been using VR software and headsets.

Mazumder measures heart rate and galvanic (electric currents produced by chemicals) skin response to determine subconscious response to various urban environments. Subjects are misled a bit in their instructions, so they can’t carry biases into the VR setting.

This is indicative of how I see many medical issues will be investigated and addressed in the future. “Taking a clinical study approach is the best way to gain acceptance from the medical community,” Kristi Hansen Onkka , head of HealthiAR , a healthcare marketing consulting firm, told me.

Onkka and I will teach an online class on AR for healthcare professionals on Feb. 6, as the next edition of Transformation Group’s AR and the Future series.

I leave you with this, my parting thought of the year in terms of ARBW: May you be clean and sober for most of 2018, but remember, a little irrational exuberance really isn’t all that bad now and then.

https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-10-why-apple-and-android-ar-are-like-the-dec-vax/ https://transformationgroup.io/arbw-10-why-apple-and-android-ar-are-like-the-dec-vax/#respond Sun, 12 Nov 2017 12:00:37 +0000 Shel Israel AI Business World Newsletter News and Updates AR/VR ARBW Shel Israel http://irenacronin.wpengine.com/?p=1095

For those of you who are neither students of computer history or old, like me, I want to talk about the DEC VAX and why AR on iPhones and ...

For those of you who are neither students of computer history or old, like me, I want to talk about the DEC VAX and why AR on iPhones and Androids keeps making me think of that brief shining star of passing times.

The VAX was the flagship product of the Digital Equipment Corp. It’s co-founder Ken Olsen insisted it be called the Digital VAX, but no one cared. What’s important here is that for a brief, forgotten time in the late 1970s into the 1980s, the VAX was considered the most disruptive hardware technology for business. It started and dominated a category called minicomputers .

What was important about minis, as they were usually called, is that they gave businesses almost as much computing power as mainframes for a lot less money. What is important about them now is that they greatly expanded who could use computers and made people want them more and more, before they faded into computing history obscurity. They also made programming easier, so that more people could use computers to do more things–at least in business environments.

More people saw more ways they could do more things at work, if not yet in the home.

Olsen was considered the greatest tech entrepreneur of his time. I interviewed him as a rookie reporter in the early 1970s and found him more than a little patronizing. He kept calling me ‘son,’ and told me when I should write things down in my stenographer’s notebook.

What impressed me is not that he included other members of the DEC team as deserving so much credit, it was his seeming attitude that now that the VAX had been invented, there was little need for anything else in computing. In the following years, he would dismiss the promising new UNIX operating systems as “snake oil,” and held absolutely no use for the grassroots movement taking shape behind what was then called microcomputers and would eventually be called PCs.

Shortly after the Macintosh was introduced, Olsen declared, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

All that is a bit beside my point, which is that a great many technologies come and go. Some of them, like the DEC VAX, are transitional in that they transport computing from one point to another in a lasting way as did the minicomputers and the VAX.

Transitional, however is not transformative. Transformative technology changes life, work, culture and lasts for very long periods of time.

Apple with its ARKit and Google with ARCore are good and important transitional technologies. They will enable many millions of people to experience AR. Mostly, these will be everyday people looking for fun games and entertainment, or to perform some task such as seeing what a showroom couch will look like at home without having to take it home.

But, AR in handsets is only transitional technology. It is not representative of the Transformation that Robert Scoble and I discussed in our book . A Transformation which we argued will change everything including global culture and commerce.

Today’s handset AR is leading edge technology for consumers. For the most part, tech professionals are underwhelmed with what has been produced. Many tell me that it will get better soon. That more exciting AR smartphone apps are on their way and I should just wait.

I do not believe this is the case. I do not think it’s possible to give users a full AR experience until this technology moves to headsets a few years down the line. The ARKit wonderment of 2017 or 18 will be the manual typewriter phase of the AR Transformation.

So what does all this mean to business decision makers, to corporate teams and consultants trying to map immersive technology strategies? Should your company just sit and wait until the headset issues such as battery, weight, fashionability, comfort and adoption all get worked out?

Most technologists and strategists I talk to think that mass adoption of affordable headsets is probably less than five years away and perhaps as soon as 2020.

My response is that depends greatly on what your business is. If you are an enterprise or involved in the backroom productivity of a consumer-facing operation, my answer is that probably makes sense. I have yet to see a mobile app that makes sense for the enterprise and I have yet to speak to an enterprise player who is considering it.

If you are a retailer, a healthcare service provider, or an educator, I think you have no choice, but to give your shoppers, patients and customers as good an experience as you possibly can, and that is probably going to involve smartphones for a few more years.

Developing an AR app for a phone will also help get your team and culture better prepared for things to come, and it probably is necessary to do what your competitor might do first, if you do not hurry.

Just remember AR phones are just transitional, and you should not get lost in something that will be unimportant in 3-to-5 years. Five years from now, they will not have much relevance in my view. In terms of strategy, you really need to be thinking now about a very big tomorrow when everyday people will be using headsets at work and play, at home and in malls.

If you are a retailer or in some other form of public facing business such as real estate, entertainment, healthcare or education, you should move forward now, so that you can enhance your customer’s experience today and for the next few years.

But I strongly advise you to keep in mind that in the next three-to-five years, your customers will start wanting headset experiences. The earliest to have that expectation will be your younger and more affluent customers.

If you are thinking about the enterprise or the backrooms of retail operations, I would pay little attention to AR on smartphones. I would start looking at headsets now, and thinking about how they will continue to emerge over the next few years.

If you are interested, I am presenting an online class on this topic on Nov. 28. As a subscriber to ARBW, you can have a $20 discount on the $197 price. Just click here to subscribe and then reach out to my assistant, Karelyn Lambert to obtain the code.

Elsewhere in the AR World

My upcoming class spends a good deal of time talking about logistics. It may not be as exciting as alien zapping in 3D, which garners far more editorial attention, but every business thinker understands the significant bottom-line implications of the topic.

It is not just the B2B enterprise. Logistics is the backbone of every retail operation, whether it is brick-and-mortar, online or multi-channel.

Issues such as faster delivery, low-cost routing, load optimization and meeting customer deadlines directly impact company finances.

Adopting of AR for logistic-related activities is accelerating for these reasons, and the cost seems almost irrelevent to the issues at hand. While the cost of headsets may discourage a Best Buy shopper, an operations manager trying to squeeze additional dimes and dollars out of warehouse operations considers $1,500-$3,000 per device to be a small investment with significant upside potential.

For example, DHL has partnered with Ricoh in a ‘ Vision Picking’ project . The term refers to the process of seeing what needs to be shipped and accurately selecting it from hundreds of incorrect—but similar—parts. Collectively, this is a multi-billion dollar issue for any company needing to move things from place-to-place.

“Workers in factories and warehouses, along with those who perform service in the field, can benefit from AR/VR devices that streamline workflow by providing access to hands-free information while completing a manual task, such as maintenance or repair.

Smart glasses or head-mounted displays can overlay instructions, maps, system information or real-time feedback over a worker’s field of view. Some of these applications also offer the ability to collaborate with colleagues from remote locations who can see what the user sees and can guide him to troubleshoot any issues,” Deloitte wrote.

Elsewhere, VR is being used to train new warehouse employees, reduce the number of mistakes made by new employees and other ways similar to what I reported previously is happening with Walmart retail employees .

So much media attention is going to the visually stimulating stuff of VR. I am more excited about the nuts and bolts of business: logistics, training, safety and assembling products. This is the stuff that bottom-lines are made of, and it is where I believe the overwhelming action of the next five years will be for AR.

While I spent some time this week researching heads-up displays (HUDs) in automobiles, I was surprised to discover that big rig truck drivers were moving faster toward headset adoption than the folks at Porsche and even Tesla.

Of course, the big rig drivers will not be wearing headsets as they careen down the world’s highways.—although they will soon be enjoying HUDs in their windshields, so that they do not need to unsafely look down at dashboards.

The transportation industry employs over 8.7 million people in the United States , with a majority of them being truck drivers. Long-haul drivers face a difficult time on the road should their vehicle suffer a mechanical issue. Breakdowns cost time and money. When an inoperable van sits in a breakdown lane, drivers have to locate an available repair service nearby, and then just sit and wait as deadlines and schedules erode.

But now there’s headset AR repair instructions, so drivers can make minor repairs themselves, and then, be on their way in a few minutes, rather than a few hours or sometimes days. According to Freightless , an online trade publication, early adopters have started to equip drivers with smart glasses containing software from AR developers such as Re-flekt .

It’s apps like these that are starting to transform the world by improving efficiency, productivity, safety and ultimately, profitability . They don’t generate much media, but they keep trucks on roads, pick orders in warehouses, and ensure safety compliance in factories. This makes me believe that immersive technologies will transform the core infrastructure of commerce.

I liked an article that appeared in the current Harvard Business Review arguing that all managers need an AR strategy now. You may find some of the article a bit simplistic in describing technologies, but it makes a very important point: Business decision makers need to think about immersive technology as a long-term strategy rather than just a pilot project.

Since she joined up with Transformation Group, Irena Cronin and I have given a good deal of thinking to how we should consult, educate and present to corporations. Very often we hear requests for simple, low-risk, get-started projects, which we are happy to accommodate.

But, pilot projects make sense only if they initiate a series of baby steps toward a focused, strategic goal. If you do not start with an end in mind, then as the old adage goes—any road will get you there.

While much of the last two weeks had me immersed in enterprise and backroom AR technologies in preparation for my upcoming class, I was touched and perhaps inspired by a Verge article on capturing holographic memories .

The idea is simple, you can use AR, even on a phone, to capture one generation’s thoughts for another to enjoy later down the line. When you capture baby’s first steps in 3D, you can save them to present to that baby on his wedding day. Likewise, the wisdom of an elderly person in her twilight years can be captured and saved for an unborn grandchild to experience on their wedding day as well.

I love this app. I see remarkably poignant business applications as well. In the enterprise, the wisdom of someone about to retire can be shared with future generations doing the same work. The founding parent of a startup company may be able to address hundreds of future employees about the original vision in a hundred-years, in the hope that culture does not lose its way, even as tech changes the nature of an enterprise.

I have not yet had the chance to visit the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, where I am told there is a jaw-dropping AR variation of the popular traveling exhibit called Body Worlds . The Tech Museum version is called Body Worlds Decoded .

Visitors are handed Lenovo Phab 2 phones using Google Tango technology. Suddenly, the Body Works forms are immersive. Visitors can tour the inside of human bodies to see the most intricate of details.

What a great way to teach anatomy to students, or for that matter, teach anything to anyone.

More than that, this is the future of exhibits. I see a day when every museum, every classroom, every employee orientation, every guided tour and every exhibit booth at CES will use AR or VR to give visitors a more immersive experience.

It is a natural evolution. Just like it was when video started to replace still pictures to inform people more realistically. Tech just makes the human experience better; don’t you think?

I have never thought of Saks as an early mover in any form of technology. It is heartening to see such a traditional merchant moving toward immersive customer experiences even if the tech being shown in the video breaks no new ground.

What interests me here is that this partnership between Saks, Qualcomm and MasterCard is using ODG headsets . They are offered in-store to Saks shoppers.

Founded in 1998, ODG is the granddaddy of AR headset makers. The headsets are in their eighth generation of refinement. ODG has long been a respected player as an OEM supplier to industrial and military partners.

ODG is also a personal sentimental favorite. Other than a few low-end offerings such as Cardboard, ODG’s headset was my first experience in true Mixed Reality, and the quality of what I saw stunned me, particularly related to field of view. I am looking forward to visiting them with Irena Cronin in a few weeks, and I am curious to see how far they have progressed since I tried on the ODG 7.

I am thrilled to see companies making a foray into consumer applications, such as the video shows being used at Saks. I hope to see these efforts in more retail venues. As well as with Meta , my other favorite headset maker, who recently launched a downright sexy new Meta 2 which sells for $1500, half the price of last year’s model, putting it on a trajectory for a consumer-priced Meta 3 at about this time next year.

Irena and I will visit Meta on the same day, and I will report on both after those meetings.

To be clear, I am no cheerleader for any one tech vendor. I am on the side of business adopters and end-users. I do what I can to report on innovations that will seed adoption, and the more tech companies competing for that business, the faster the innovation will come and the lower the adoption costs involved will be.

I tend to favor underdogs. ODG and Meta are hardly the dark horses who come from behind in movies. They are not even the cool kids in the garages of classic startups. They are both established companies with formidable resources and teams. But, their names are not recognized ubiquitously like Microsoft, Samsung, Apple or Google, so I enjoy seeing the challenges they bring to the playing field, and if they cause some disruption to the game, then corporate partners and end-users are better off for it.

To be clear, ODG has simply entered into a deal with other businesses that include Saks, Qualcomm and a credit card company. They are not selling to end-users at this point. But, to see them in a venue where shoppers are involved is heartening to me.

I have no idea whether Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, three formidable competitors are entertaining similar plans, but I would assume so, since Prezi is already making noise. Once again, as an end-userist, I will be thrilled to see it. AR is just better for presenting. The benefits are pretty self-evident, or so it seems to me.

Instead of sitting and watching presentation decks, which can sometimes be about as exciting as reading a foreign language phone directory, we can now become immersed inside a deck, where we will see more, learn more and retain more.

This will be my last ARBW before the American Thanksgiving Holiday. It happens to be my favorite holiday, when I actually pause to consider the abundance of reasons for being thankful.

This year has been more of a roller coaster than most, and yet, I have so much to be thankful for that I feel uncharacteristically humbled. Among the many reasons, is that I enjoy writing this newsletter so much, and I have so many readers, like you, to be thankful for.

ARBW #13

This AR Startup Has 600 million Users. Can You Name It? Neither Could I.

Other Reflections

Data Gathering

Elsewhere in AR World

From Voice to Brain Interfaces

Magic Leap & the NBA

Could Apple be looking at Enterprise Headsets?

VR in public education

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ARBW #12

Five Transformational AR StartUps

1. Meta: Focusing on the OS

2. Prezi: Presenting In Depth

The Vuzix ‘AHA!’

Lumus: Miniaturizing the Optics

ELSEWHERE IN AR WORLD

Elsewhere in the AR World