This Week In XR: SXSW Winners, $350 Million For Adept AI, Tilia Raises $22 Million

Forbes Innovation Consumer Tech This Week In XR: SXSW Winners, $350 Million For Adept AI, Tilia Raises $22 Million Charlie Fink Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. A former tech executive covering AI, XR and The Metaverse for Forbes. Following Mar 16, 2023, 08:03pm EDT | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin It’s not yet clear how the new round of layoffs at Meta will affect its metaverse division, Reality Labs.

Meta says theie XR product roadmap (Quest 3 later this year, a low cost Quest in 2024, see through AR glasses in 2025) will remain unchanged. For now. As AI ascends the hype cycle and the Metaverse predictably descends into a trough of disillusion, the company is clearly reordering its priorities.

Medical technology concept. Remote medicine. Electronic medical record.

getty Adept AI Is A Unicorn. The startup, founded by former Google engineers, announced it has raised $350 M to use AI to develop enterprise applications. The funding comes less than a year after it raised $65 million.

The Series B round was led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital . While their valuation was not officially announced, the scale of the investment suggests Adept AI is already worth over a billion dollars. Brad Oberwager, Executive Chairman and acting CEO of Linden Lab and now CEO of Tilia.

Linden Lab Tilia raises $22M to handle payments for digital economies . The company, which was spun out of Linden Lab, also appointed Brad Oberwager, previously executive chairman, as CEO, and Catherine Porter as the company’s first chief business officer. The funding comes from Seoul, South Korea-based fintech leader Dunamu, which is joining existing investor J.

P. Morgan Payments. In 2021, Oberwager acquired Linden Lab, the company behind the “Second Life” metaverse.

In October Linden announced it had partnered with J. P. Morgan Payments to spin out Tilia.

Consensus Gentium smartphone experience won the award for Best XR at SXSW this week. SXSW MORE FOR YOU $100M Magic: Why Bruno Mars And Other Stars Are Ditching Their Managers Haute Tequila Brand 21 Seeds Is The Fashion Scene’s Drink Of Choice Black And Latinx Children Learn Better From Black And Latinx Teachers, Study Finds SXSW XR Award Winners. Consensus Gentium from writer and director Karen Palmer won the top prize, even though it isn’t technically an XR experience.

The story takes place on your smartphone, and leverages face tracking. You are cast as a dissident who has shunned the government surveillance app, but needs to download it to travel in order to attend to her mother. There were a few moments when I thought the messages I was reading on my smartphone were my own, an experience entirely unique to this new medium.

A Special Jury Award went to Body Mine from Cameron Kostopoulos, which enables a man to inhabit a woman’s body, making a profound case for VR as an empathy machine. $1,015. 99 Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 smart glasses Google Google Sunsets Glass 2.

0. In what is nothing but good news for Vuzix, Realwear, Lenovo, and other vendors of wearable microdisplays, Google announced this week that as of September 15, it will no longer sell or upgrade Google Glass 2. 0.

Glass now joins Google’s graveyard of way-too-early XR projects like Daydream, Tilt Brush, and Poly. Google may not be done with glasses yet. Last fall they demonstrated a binocular see-through device, based on technology acquired by North, that can do everything Glass does – and way more.

Glass is still used by hundreds of companies to support warehousing, manufacturing, and remote support. LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 07: Jason Sudeikis and Tim Cook attend the Apple original series . .

. [+] ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3 red carpet premiere event at Westwood Village Theater on March 07, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/WireImage) WireImage Apple’s AR/VR headset reportedly being pushed out due to ‘huge pressure to ship’ There was a pile of articles this week about Tim Cook insisting on a June launch over the objections of his engineers.

So many tech pundits have opined, we’ve created a special section below, and given it a clever name: Bobbing for Apple. It took Apple watch a while to catch on, but it did not have the inflated expectations associated with XR, and the devices aren’t nearly as expensive. Between now and the launch in June, it’s going to be hard to manage expectations.

The Otherside Yuga Labs Otherside Bored Ape Metaverse to Launch ‘Second Trip’ on March 25 . Daniel Alegre, CEO of Yuga Labs, which runs the Bored Ape Yacht Club, is spending over $300 M to build the Otherside metaverse. This second test of the massively multiplayer metaverse will take place on March 25th in the form of a guided experience simultaneously shared with 10,000 simultaneous uniques.

“Second Trip” is open to owners of virtual land NFTs which represent yet-to-be-created land in the as-of-yet unreleased Otherside metaverse. Non-holders can also watch a live stream of the event on the company’s YouTube channel. I put it on my calendar.

The collaboration will yield a new course this fall. Mighty Coconut Mighty Coconut’s Walkabout Mini Golf Announces Meow Wolf Partnership, and Mobile App. As SXSW got underway last Friday, they unveiled a creative collaboration with Meow Wolf for a new course coming in Q3; the Walkabout Mini-Golf Pocket Edition, an AR mini-golf game for iOS, coming this summer; and deals to bring the title to hundreds of arcades in the location based entertainment industry.

Mars is entering the Metaverse. Metavrse Metavrse Mall Welcomes Mars’ Juicyverse , home to Starburst candy in the Metaverse. TheMall and STARBURST® have teamed up to announce the launch of their newest virtual world, the Starburst Juicyverse, in collaboration with MetaVRse and BambuMeta® Web3 Loyalty.

Miro Shot performed a live concert you watch in Mixed Reality using Vive’s new Elite XR HMD. Miro Shot This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guests are Karen Palmer, producer and director of “ Consensus Gentium ” a smartphone movie that won first place at for XR Experiences at SXSW, Cameron Kostinopulous, whose VR experience “ Body of Mine ” won the special XR jury prize, and Roman Rappak, whose Miro Shot performed a sold out mixed reality concert in Austin.

We can be found on Spotify , iTunes , and YouTube . What We’re Reading Psychedelics Meet Up With Virtual Reality at South by Southwest (Tiffany Kary/Bloomberg) This Week in Schadenfreude Mark Zuckerberg Ends the Tech Party (/The Street) Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions are shrinking (Kali Hays/Insider) Mark Zuckerberg Is Suddenly Weirdly Quiet about the Metaverse (Mary Harrison/Futurism) Bobbing for Apple From the iPhone 15 to an AR/VR Headset: Apple Products to Expect in 2023 (Lisa Eadicicco/CNet) Mixed-reality distortion field: Is Tim Cook’s legacy doomed? (Macworld) Tim Cook bets on Apple’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy (Patrick McGee and Tim Bradshaw /Financial Times) Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Check out my website or some of my other work here .

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