Mobile World Congress (MWC) took place in Barcelona this week. 2024 showcased new mobile phone breakthroughs with generative AI assistants, wearables, foldables and sensors. Notably, Deutsche Telekom gave a closer look at its “AI phone,” which replaces apps with generative AI assistants.
Figure AI, a startup developing humanoid robots, raised $675M. Investors in the Series B round include Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. The company’s Figure 01 robot is designed to perform dangerous and undesirable jobs in sectors like manufacturing and shipping. What about desirable jobs in trades like construction? You know what else is dangerous? War. Just saying. At the same time, Figure and OpenAI have entered into a collaboration agreement to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots. The collaboration aims to help accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language.
Ideogram Text-to-Image Midjourney competitor Raises $80 M. This values the company well north of $1 Billion. Andressen Horowitz led the round. Ideogram 1.0 has an amazingly effective feature called Magic Prompt, which created the image above.
More Bonkers Sora videos. Just in case we forgot to worry about what happens when we don’t know what’s real anymore, Open AI is releasing more demos of its new text-to-video generative AI tool. Tyler Perry says he’s halting construction on his Atlanta studio because of it, although there might be 680 million reasons why he’s stopping that have nothing to do with AI.
Goodbye Dreamscape, Hello Dreamscape Learn. The location based VR entertainment company backed by movie studios and celebrities is closing its only remaining VR entertainment center in LA and formally changing its name to Dreamscape Learn. Thier primary business is now immersive education products, developed with ASU. This follows the quiet demise of Dreamscape locations operated by their partner, AMC Theaters. Like Fighter Town, Virtual World, Disney Quest, in the 90s, contemporary stand-alone VR concepts The Void and Dreamscape found out the hard way why stand-alone VR entertainment doesn’t work: too few seats at peak times, too many seats most of the time, and too many employees all the time.
Qualcomm GM & VP of XR, Hugo Swart, Exits Company after a twenty year run. The popular executive was one of the industry’s most vocal, visible boosters. Swart built the XR division from scratch, and was responsible for the Snapdragon XR chipsets for Android phones and VR headsets from Meta and others.
Samsung – Qualcomm – Google XR HMD manufacturing to begin this year. Apple’s MR headset Vision Pro’s positive sales performance has created pressure on competitors. Samsung, Apple’s rival, plans to respond with its XR device, expected to begin production in late 2024. The Vision Pro received both positive and negative reviews but reportedly sold over 200,000 units within its first month. This success has pressured competitors like Meta Platforms and Samsung, a long-time rival of Apple in various product categories. In response, Samsung formed an “XR Alliance” with Google and Qualcomm in early 2023 to develop XR devices.
Zuck Takes Korea As Meta Partners With LG. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Asian tour, encompassing South Korea, Japan, and India, underscores Meta’s strategic focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR) technologies. During his visit, Zuckerberg met executives from LG Electronics and Samsung to discuss XR partnerships. Upload reports a Korean news outlet that LG will release an updated Quest Pro in 2024. Meetings with tech and government leaders, including South Korea’s President and Japan’s Prime Minister.
The AI generated ads for an overpriced clown show leads to fraud charges. You have to be running for president to pull off a scam like this.
Ed Haas produced a crazy series of “Baby Climbers” using Midjourney’s text-to-image tool. Follow his work on Instagram.
This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Suzanne Haspinger, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of HoloLight. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
What We’re Reading
Kara Swisher’s Memoir “Burn Book” Released. The venerated author, journalist, podcaster and entrepreneur has been following the tech industry since the birth of the Internet in the 90s. She knows where all the bodies are buried.
