This year’s Augmented World Expo 2024 was held in a new location: Long Beach, California. At the event, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey reminded the audience that Long Beach is where some of the earliest prototypes of the Oculus Rift were born, so in a sense AWE has come full circle by moving south from Santa Clara.
These gloves are still the gold standard for haptics in VR, and one of the most interesting developments for HaptX is that they are now being used to generate training data used in AI models intended for robots. HaptX customers are using real human input from these gloves to train robotic AI models with hundreds of data points and much finer granularity than is available from video inputs. This application excites me for the future.
The Beam Pro uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and a display to help users utilize their XREAL AR glasses without needing to drain their phone’s battery. I have a review unit of the XREAL Beam Pro in my hands, and I expect to write a detailed review once I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces.
Last but certainly not least, DigiLens also announced a partnership with Google that makes ARGO the first standalone AR glasses to run Google’s latest Gemini LLM. I tried this out on the noisy and congested convention floor, asking it a simple image query about what I was looking at and was quite impressed with how well it worked under such challenging conditions.
These glasses are extremely limited in resolution, but their only purpose is to show text, which they do really well. The XRAI glasses are powered by a Snapdragon 4100 Wear processor, which is similar to the chip found in Meta’s first-generation Ray-Ban glasses. I would have loved to see them go with an AR1 Gen 1 chipset, but these glasses seem to focus on power conservation above all else.