Making an augmented-reality headset that can depict digital images so precise they seem real is tricky. Letting you interact with them in an intuitive way is even trickier. Deep-pocketed companies like Microsoft and Magic Leap have been working on it for years, and neither has yet released a consumer product.
Is Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, building an augmented-reality headset?
That’s what thisWall Street Journal piece reports, citing unnamed “people briefed on the company’s plans” as saying that Intel may be building a headset to blend digital imagery with reality and planning to let other companies manufacture it.
PTC (NASDAQ: PTC), a Needham, MA-based company best known for its computer-aided design and product development software, said it’s buying Vuforia, Qualcomm’s vision-based augmented reality technology, for $65 million.
Virtual and augmented reality may not be widely adopted today, but investors are betting that it’s going to be big in the future. The space has seen its most active quarters in 2015, with more than 40 deals (and $240M invested) in this year’s first half. Q4’14 was by far the biggest quarter for funding in recent history, though the amount was driven almost entirely by a $542M Series B financing to Magic Leap, which included Google, Qualcomm Ventures, and KKR among other investors.
He was born to a farming family in Egypt and then made his way to Queens as a child where he earned $20 a day working in a pizza shop. He was in and out of school for years, then caught up on Khan Academy and later made it into Columbia University’s computer science program.
Now he’s founded a Y Combinator-backed company called Smartspot, which has just raised $1.85 million from Khosla Ventures and Signalfire.
Blippar, an augmented reality ad platform that uses real-world tags to deliver extra AR content in offline situations, has raised $45 million in new funding from undisclosed investors. This comes on the heels of a big 2014 for UK-based Blippar, wherein the company made its first acquisition by purchasing Layar in June. Combined, the merged companies boast over 50 million global users.
But given the growth of the space, Blippar is ready to take the next step forward.
Time travel has long been the fantasy of physicists and historians alike, but unfortunately, unless you are Michael J. Fox in “Back To The Future,” it will be some time before you will be able to experience it. Meanwhile, as we anxiously await the invention of a real time machine, researchers have discovered that virtual reality devices can be used to give the illusion of going “back in time.”
In a darkened room in the back of a small furniture store just south of San Francisco International Airport, the couch in front of me keeps changing colors and patterns, from red to blue to beige to a gray, white, and green pattern.
The couch is real—I can reach out and poke the cushions—but the psychedelic surface-shifting effect is created with augmented reality technology that projects fabric patterns onto the surface of the couch (which in reality is a boring shade of gray).
It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late-1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking they had stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.
