HeyGen raised a $60M Series A For Gen AI Video. Recently profitable with $35M in ARR, HeyGen was valued at $440M just a few months ago. The AI video generation company will use the Series A funding to enhance creation and localization of high-quality videos. Benchmark led the round, with participation from Thrive Capital, BOND, Conviction, and others.
Mobile AR, MR Surge At AWE 2024. The 15th Augmented World Expo (AWE) took place in Long Beach this week. Mixed Reality (MR) on the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro, and a surge in mobile AR tools dominated the show, with AI having a remarkably low profile. The show featured 500 speakers over a dozen tracks, including a fireside chat with Oculus inventor Palmer Lucky. There was also a marvelous XR museum, the induction of the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie awards show. On the expo floor were 300 exhibitors, with a strong showing from developers of Mixed Reality entertainment content. Meta, Snap, and Niantic made major annoucments.
Major record labels sue AI music companies Suno and Udio. Today the Recording Industry Association of America filed suit against the AI music generators, seeking damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, citing ‘en masse’ copyright infringement.
Hugo Swart Joins Google. The genial and well liked executive was previously GM and VP of XR for Qualcomm, and headed the launch of Snapdragon. Swart will lead the XR glasses partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm.
New Free AI App Butterflies has a mind of its own. The free app is like Instagram, but when you sign up you create an AI avatar, or Butterfly, that starts posting photos and interacting with other accounts. It sounds so weird I’m going to download it right now. The six-month-old startup raised a seed round of $4.8 from SV Angels, Coatue, and others.
Runway’s latest hyper-realistic AI video model. Runway is getting set to unveil their latest Gen-3 Alpha AI video model and showcase its own Sora-level capabilities. OpenAI has dominated the conversation about cinematic AI since it introduced video generator Sora in February. At the time, Sora appeared to be lightyears ahead of the rest of the AI video industry. But with the release of Vudu from Google, Kling from China, Luma’s Dream Machine, and now Runway Gen3, Sora’s market dominance has evaporated before officially releases.
‘Gorilla Tag’ Tops $100M in VR Revenue. The milestone makes the game one of the most successful VR titles of all time, maybe even the most popular. They also announced they’re seeing over 1M daily users, and 3M monthly. Gorilla Tag was the first app to pass 100,000 reviews on the Meta Quest Store.
The winner of Curious Refuge’s new AI trailer contest is “The Day the World Prayed,” by Mark Wachholz, in which the Vatican opens its archives and a researcher quickly uncovers the truth: Jesus never existed, and the church know it all along, sparking a worldwide crisis of faith. He won an Apple Vision Pro, a Curious Refuge Course, which he doesn’t need, and some branded sponsor merch. “This is a concept trailer for the project as a limited TV series. The trailer was made entirely with AI image and video tools,” says Machholz on the video’s YouTuber description. “ I used Midjourney V6 for AI image creation and RunwayML Gen-2 for AI video creation. The voices were generated with Elevenlabs, and some music tunes were composed using Udio. ChatGPT helped immensely with planning, brainstorming, proofreading, and constant collaboration. Additionally, EpidemicSound provided the bulk of the score music and sound effects.”
Loose [sic] Yourself in the Music. Saadettin Konukseven, a Turkish creative director with 16 years of experience, now runs his own agency in Istanbul. “Last year I met with generative AI tools and I fell in love.” He wrote to me. ““I love AI because it broke all the barriers for creators. The only thing you need is a computer and dreams.” After Luma launched their text-to-video AI tool, Dream Machine, two weeks ago, Konukseven said he “just wanted to do an experimental thing.” Here’s the first prompt he used: “a young black man with black tshirt going out of his home at midnight, camera pan with angle, cinematic.” After creating a five second video with this prompt, Konukseven used the option to extend the scene with additive prompting, which was “a young black man with black t-shirt entering an empty street, midnight cinematic, camera pans left, wide angle shot.” He ultimately finished the whole video with 11 prompts.
“AI Echoes of the Strange” by Aaron Jackson (aka Captain Hahaa) was also created with Luma Labs AI Dream Machine last week. “I used a bunch of Midjourney images I had made a while back that I hadn’t managed to animate properly with the current video generating tools at the time,” Jackson explained in an email. “I have been making all of these videos on a Macbook Pro since 2013. LLMs bring access to technology I would never be able to afford myself. We are looking at an age of accessibility.” He said his inspirations for the piece were Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and The StoryTeller by Spielberg. AI music was made with Suno.
“The Punk King Death Machine” by Roberto Chamorro is a concept trailer for a limited TV series. He used Midjourney V6 for AI image creation and RunwayML Gen-2 for AI video creation. The voices were generated with Elevenlabs, and some music tunes were composed using Udio. ChatGPT helped immensely with planning, brainstorming, proofreading, and constant collaboration.” Said Chamorro. “Additionally, EpidemicSound provided the bulk of the score music and sound effects.”
This column, once called “This Week in XR,” is also a podcast hosted by author Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is XR Hall of Famer author and entrepreneur Tony Parisi. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
What We’re Reading
Metaverse And Augmented Reality Remain Unpopular With VCs (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase)
