001 — Reality Check 🌱
Welcome to the first issue of Reality Check!
A newsletter about the next wave of interaction design for spatial computing.
The Latest in AR Eyewear Design 👓
It’s only January and we’ve seen much development from various companies in the race to shrink computing power to eyewear, many of which were showcased at this year’s CES tech runway.
A popular candidate, Vuzix Next Generation Smart Glasses, boasting a minimalist design, are representative of a north star for standard eyewear for many of these contenders.
In contrast Panasonic showcased a very steampunk pair of HRD glasses, the first of its kind.
Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 AR glasses target a different audience and are being “developed as a means to transform work across different industries” according to the company.
Designer James Tsai pushes Nintendo’s AR agenda with conceptual Joy-Glasses, as a provocation to the future of immersive gameplay.
CREAL reveals its first light-field AR headset prototype, with plans of sizing down to AR glasses in Q4 2022.
Even smaller in size, Mojo Vision has started developing prototypes for AR contact lenses in partnership with Japan’s contact lens producer Menicon.
3D World Mapping and AR in Transport 🗺️ 🚘
Snapchat’s recent acquisition of NYC startup StreetCred proposes to build out the company’s location data platform, which many speculate could steer further development of features like Location Lenses and Snap Map.
Meanwhile, location platform, Here Technologies announced it will offer 3D models of 75 major cities including London, Paris and San Francisco.
Tangentially, we begin to see location data in application with Panasonic’s automobile heads-up-display using AR to overlay graphics onto real world objects, making navigation more contextual to our multi dimensional world.
Other car companies like Volkswagen plan to bring AR powered HUDs to most of their electric car line and Cadillac shows off a fancy 33-inch LED display with 3D graphics in their Lyric model.
Virtual Shopping Environments 🛍️
It’s not a surprise seeing a boom in AR shopping experiences, primarily due to people spending more time at home over the past year. While brands have seen success with Try Ons on Google, Instagram, and Snapchat, they continue exploring more immersive opportunities to showcase their products.
Obsess, for example helps brands build virtual stores where shoppers can interact with pieces in a virtual environment.
Brands like Charlotte Tilbury, NYX, Ralph Lauren, and Coach have also released virtual shops recently, some of which let users try items on using AR.
While it’s not a shopping experience, similarly The MET Unframed lets you tour the museum virtually using your mobile device, and place art pieces from their collection in your home using AR.
Pick of the Week! 🥑
DALL·E is a trained neural network that creates images from text captions.
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