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AR 1.0 is dead: Here’s what it got wrong – TechCrunch

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The first wave of AR startups offering smart glasses is now over, with a few exceptions.

Google acquired North this week for an undisclosed sum. The Canadian company had raised nearly $200 million, but the release of its Focals 2.0 smart glasses has been cancelled, a bittersweet end for its soft landing.

Many AR startups before North made huge promises and raised huge amounts of capital before flaring out in a similarly dramatic fashion.

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The technology was almost there in a lot of cases, but the real issue was that the stakes to beat the major players to market were so high that many entrants pushed out boring, general consumer products. In a race to be everything for everybody, the industry relied on nascent developer platforms to do the dirty work of building their early use cases, which contributed heavily to nonexistent user adoption.

A key error of this batch was thinking that an AR glasses company was hardware-first, when the reality is that the missing value is almost entirely centered on missing first-party software experiences. To succeed, the next generation of consumer AR glasses will have to nail this.

Image Credits: ODG

App ecosystems alone don’t create product-market fit

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A Space Balloon Will Host The World's Most Expensive Meal For Nearly $500k – Yahoo Movies Canada

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Space Balloon above the Earth – Instagram

An evening dining at high altitudes with unobstructed views of the heavens and Earth sounds like something only possible on “The Jetsons,”  but with space travel on the rise, this can now be a reality. SpaceVIP, a luxury space travel company, and Space Perspective, a carbon-neutral spaceflight experience company, have teamed together to offer an out-of-this-world experience for only $495,000.

Set to launch in 2025, the exclusive experience will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space balloon will travel 100,000 feet above sea level, at which passengers will be served while the sun rises above the Earth’s curvature. Taking place on Space Perspective’s Spaceship Neptune craft, the balloon will carry six lucky (and wealthy) passengers for a unique dining experience hosted by Rasmus Munk. Munk is the co-owner of Michelin-starred Alchemist Restaurant, a Copenhagen fixture known for its avant-garde dining practices and 50-course meals.

In a press release obtained by Robb Report, Munk says he hopes to create a menu that represents humankind’s shared interest in space. “I want to highlight food as a common thread in our human existence, and it will be truly meaningful to serve it while gazing down at the Earth’s curvature,” he says in the release. Although the six-hour trip won’t take place until next year, test flights are set to start in April 2024.

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Read more: 30 Healthy Snack Ideas That Won’t Ruin Your Diet

The Space Balloon Features Luxuries Beyond Food

Space Balloon with aircraft hangingSpace Balloon with aircraft hanging

Space Balloon with aircraft hanging – Instagram

While the promise of incredible dishes from a chef with two Michelin stars is certainly part of the draw, the space balloon has its own perks. Spaceship Neptune has 360-degree windows, allowing the passengers a full view of the Earth from above. The balloon is also fitted with a cocktail bar with fresh herbs, plush reclining chairs, and Wi-Fi.

Once they hit 100,000 feet above sea level, the passengers’ attentions are sure to be turned to whatever Munk is serving. Although the menu is yet to be released, his award-winning Holistic Cuisine at Alchemist shows the space experience is worth the $495,000 price tag. While Rasmus Munk has a full kitchen at his disposal at Alchemist, Spaceship Neptune has a much smaller one, so he’ll have to prepare part of the dishes before the aircraft takes off. With this barrier, Munk may have to use similar techniques that mirror the clever ways NASA astronauts cook and bake in space, using the kitchen mainly to heat and top off the dishes.

Munk’s meals must also account for the flavor changes at higher altitudes. Food tastes different on an airplane at only 42,000 feet above the ground, so it’s sure to be altered at 100,000 feet. Whatever Munk decides to make, we hope the passengers use their Wi-Fi connection to show us what we’re missing.

Read the original article on Tasting Table.

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Apple in talks to let Google's Gemini power iPhone AI features, Bloomberg News says – theSun

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Apple is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.

The negotiations are about licensing Gemini for some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, the report said, adding that the terms or branding of an AI agreement or how it would be implemented have not been decided.

Alphabet shares jumped more than 6% in early U.S. trading, while Apple was up 2.5%.

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It is unlikely that any deal would be announced until June, when Apple plans to hold its annual conference of developers, and the iPhone maker also recently held talks with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI about using its model, according to the report.

Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

A potential deal between the firms could help Google expand the use of its AI services to more than 2 billion active Apple devices, boosting the search giant’s efforts to catch up with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

It could also help allay investor fears about the slow roll-out of AI apps by Apple, which has lost the crown of the world’s most valuable firm after a 10% decline in its shares this year.

The firms have a years-long partnership that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser, and a genAI tie-up may help the Alphabet unit navigate fears that services like ChatGPT could threaten its search dominance.

But the agreement could also invite sharper scrutiny from U.S. regulators, who have sued Google on grounds that it unlawfully stifled competition by paying billions of dollars to Apple to maintain its monopoly in search.

“This strategic partnership is a missing piece in the Apple AI strategy and combines forces with Google for Gemini to power some of the AI features Apple is bringing to market,“ said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino with clearly a major licence fee attached to this,“ he said, referring to Apple’s California headquarters.

Google in January partnered with Apple’s rival Samsung to deploy its genAI technology in the South Korean firm’s Galaxy S24 series of smartphones, as part of its efforts to boost the use of Gemini after some missteps during its roll-out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the company was investing “significantly” in generative AI and would reveal more about its plans to put the technology to use later this year.

The Bloomberg report said Apple was planning to use its own homegrown AI models for some new capabilities in its upcoming iOS 18, but was seeking a partner to power genAI features, including functions for creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts. (Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Janane Venkatraman, Varun H K and Susan Fenton). – REUTERS

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PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration

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The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.

The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.

Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.

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The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?

The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).

The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.

The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.

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