This Week In XR: FundamentalVR Series B, Roomba Household Spy

Consumer Tech This Week In XR: FundamentalVR Series B, Roomba Household Spy Charlie Fink Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. A former tech executive covering XR and The Metaverse for Forbes. New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Aug 11, 2022, 06:15pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The really big news in tech world this week is Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba. Dust is not the only things the household robot collects. It also vaccums up data, mapping your house while it cleans.

That data is valuable. Significant also is FundamentalVR’s raise of $20M for surgical simulation. Training again is proving to be one of VR’s most important, useful, and lucrative applications.

Simulated surgery with VR and haptic feedback from simulated instruments. FundamentalVR FundamentalVR Surgical Sim Raises $20M Their unique approach uses haptics to give users force feedback on scalpels and other instruments. The platform allows for full rehearsal of medical and surgical procedures.

The investment was led by EQT Life Sciences and brings the company’s total funding to $30M. Did Amazon Buy Roomba To Turn It Into a Household Spy? Think about it. For the last couple of years the smart device has been lidar mapping the interior of people’s houses and “data” is said to be one of the key assets of the robotics company sold.

The firm, founded in 1990 by scientists from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, has sold more than 30 million units, and earned a place in popular culture. Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel presents a new camera-drone while attending a session during . .

. [+] the Viva Technology (Vivatech) show in Paris on June 17, 2022. (Photo by Eric PIERMONT / AFP) (Photo by ERIC PIERMONT/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Snap plans employee layoffs after disappointing Q2 earnings With 347 M monthly uniques the problem is not the app’s popularity, it’s with monetization.

Apple’s privacy protections and the downturn in the advertising business have sapped the company’s ad dependent business model. Snap’s accessories business (Specs, Drones) isn’t contributing anything to the bottom line, and they don’t have any other sources of revenue. The stock has cratered.

Alex Heath of the Verge says rumored layoffs are inevitable. Google bringing ‘Immersive Stream for XR’ to AR/VR headsets Google says it is actively working on an OpenXR client to stream XR experiences. When a smartphone connected to Google’s cloud service sends a camera pose it is instantly rendered photorealistically on high end computers and then streamed back down to the device, theoretically with zero latency.

This could be a way the Metaverse will get to volumetric, photorealistic, real time rendered images sooner rather than later. Keiichi Matsuda, co-founder of Liquid City design, and director of the famous viral short film HYPER-REALITY (was commissioned by John Hanke to build a location based AR experience using Niantic’s new Lightship SDK. The installation, The Reality Channels , was unveiled at Niantic’s fist developer conference, the Lightship Summit 2022, in San Francisco two months ago.

Above is a video of the experience and a look at how it was made. Rec Room launches its new game Showdown on its popular cross-platform social game platform. In it, players spawn in Sarsaparilla Springs, a western ghost town that has been transformed into a battlefield for cork-loaded 3v3 shoot outs.

Pick your next virtual life from these 10 amazing MMORPGs According to USA Today, these are the top five virtual worlds: Final Fantasy IV, World of Warcraft, and Elder Scrolls Online, Eve, and Lost Arc. The 23rd edition of MUTEK will take place from Tuesday, August 23rd to Sunday, August 28th in Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles. MUTEK is a Montreal-based festival dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts.

Five A/V artists were invited to transform their cutting-edge live performances into XR artworks. This project expands distribution and monetization models for both the non-profit festival and artists. The works will join the catalog of Astera, the largest international distributor of immersive productions.

Apple’s $2000+ AR/VR Headset Will Only Have 1. 5 Million Units at Launch . In what is absolutely not news, MacRumors analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote last Sunday that the tech giant will release less than 1.

5 million units to prosumers. This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column and Ted Schilowitz, Head of Future Technologies at Paramount Global. This week we’ll be joined by Alex, Senior Contributor to The Verge, who will be talking with us about his recent reporting on Meta and Snap.

We will later be joined by Alex Sychov, founder and CEO of Somnimum Space. You can find us on Spotify , iTunes , and YouTube . What We’re Reading Interview: Director Of HBO Doc We Met In Virtual Reality (Kyle Melnick/VRScout) Top Meta execs flee California under Zuckerberg’s remote work policy (Theo Wayt/The New York Post) This is how Snap is fostering the future of augmented reality (Harry McCracken/Fast Company) Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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