For the past 20 years, our team has been building an ecosystem around technologies we believe are bringing superpowers to the people: augmented reality, virtual reality and wearable tech. We believe these technologies are making us better at everything we do and will overtake personal computing as the next platform. To help breed these superpowers, we are launching Super Ventures, the first incubator and fund dedicated to augmented reality.

“Establishing an investment fund and incubator furthers our influence in the AR space by allowing us to invest in passionate entrepreneurs and incubate technologies that will become the foundation for the next wave of computing,” said Super Ventures Founder and GM, Ori Inbar.

Today we are announcing our inaugural fund of $10 million along with initial investments in several AR companies including Waygo, a visual translation app specializing in Asian languages, and Fringefy, a visual search engine that helps people discover local content and services. Our fund will also invest in technologies enabling AR, and we are separately backing an unannounced company developing an intelligence system to crowdsource visual data.

“I am extremely excited to be working with Super Ventures,” said Ryan Rogowski, CEO of Waygo. “The Super Ventures team has an impressive amount of operational experience and deep connections in the AR community that are sure to help Waygo reach its next milestones!”

“We feel each and every Super Ventures team member provides substantial advantages to Fringefy from technical aspects, to the user experience, and business strategy,” said Assif Ziv, Co-founder of Fringefy. “We are excited to tap into the Super Ventures team’s immense network and experience.”

“Super Ventures is building an ecosystem of companies enabling the technology that will change how computers — and humans — see and interact with the world,” said the CEO & co-founder of the unannounced company. “We are truly excited to be part of this brain trust, and to leverage the network and expertise of the Super Ventures team.”

The Super Ventures partnership is made up of Ori Inbar, Matt Miesnieks, Tom Emrich and Professor Mark Billinghurst.

Ori Inbar has devoted the past 9 years to fostering the AR ecosystem. Prior to Super Ventures he was the co-founder and CEO of AR mobile gaming startup Ogmento (now Flyby Media — acquired by Apple). He is also the founder of AugmentedReality.org, a non-profit organization on a mission to inspire 1 billion active users of augmented reality by 2020 and the producer of the world’s largest AR, VR and wearable tech event in Silicon Valley and Asia, AWE. Ori advises dozens of startups, corporations, and funds about the AR industry.

Matt Miesnieks most recently led an AR R&D team at Samsung and previously was co-founder & CEO of Dekko, the company that invented 3D AR holograms on iOS. Prior to this, Matt led worldwide customer development for mobile AR browser Layar (acquired by Blippar), and held executive leadership roles at Openwave and other mobile companies.

Tom Emrich is the founder of We Are Wearables, the largest wearable tech community of its kind, which has become the launch pad for a number of startups. He is also the co-producer of AWE. Tom is well known for his analysis and blogging on wearable tech as one of the top influencers in this space. He has used this insight to advise VCs, startups and corporations on opportunities within the wearable tech market.

Professor Mark Billinghurst is one of the most recognized researchers in AR. His team developed the first mobile AR advertising experience, first collaborative AR game on mobile devices, and early visual authoring tools for AR, among many other innovations. He founded the HIT Lab NZ, a leading AR research laboratory and is the co-founder of ARToolworks (acquired by DAQRI), which produced ARToolKit, the most popular open source AR tracking library. In the past he has conducted innovative interface research for Nokia, the MIT Media Lab, Google, HP, Samsung, British Telecom and other companies.

“The next 12–18 months will be seen as the best opportunity to invest in augmented reality,” said Matt Miesnieks. “Our goal is to identify early-stage startups developing enabling platforms and provide them with necessary capital and mentorship. Our guiding light for our investment decisions is our proprietary industry roadmap we’ve developed from our combined domain expertise. The companies we select will be the early winning platforms in the next mega-wave of mobile disruption.”

“Our team will take a hands-on approach with the startups, leveraging our industry experience, research knowledge and networks to help them meet their goals while part of the incubator,” added Professor Mark Billinghurst.

“Unique to Super Ventures is the community we have fostered which we will put to work to help support our startups,” said Tom Emrich. “Our community of over 150,000 professionals not only gives us access to investment opportunities early on, it also offers a vast network of mentors, corporate partners and investors which our startups can rely on to succeed.”

Join us in bringing superpowers to the people.

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Optinvent Unveils the Smart Glass that doesn’t make you look like a Creep

The ORA-X is a revolutionary mobile device in a disruptive form factor – Forget “Smart Glasses” that look geeky. Enter a new category: Smart Headphones – running Android – with high quality audio – and an adjustable see-through display.

January 05, 2014, Las Vegas, NV. – Optinvent, a world leader in smart digital eyewear, unveils today, for the first time anywhere, the design of its revolution ORA-X smart headphones.

Targeting music lovers on the go, the ORA-X is a brand new category that is part smart glass, part high-end wireless audio headphones. It runs Android and will feature quality audio sound as well as a disruptive see-through retinal projection technology.

“Smart Glasses have been plagued by what I call a ‘paradigm prison’. You can’t make a fashion accessory out of them no matter how hard you try. Consumers are just not ready to embrace looking geeky for the added functionality.” says Kayvan Mirza, CEO and Co-Founder of Optinvent. “The ORA-X is a clean break from this paradigm. Now not only can you hear music, but you can ‘see music’.   And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.   It’s also about hands free mobile computing without looking like a cyborg. It’s about “augmenting your senses” while still looking stylish.”

Imagine watching music videos and clips on the go, searching the web, video conferencing, taking pictures, sharing on social networks, GPS, and all the other uses that smart glasses promise…. without looking like a cyborg. Traditional headphones can give you high quality audio but their functionality hasn’t evolved much beyond that. However, they have become a fashion statement and people can be seen flaunting these colorful head-worn accessories. The ORA-X wants to go further by adding vision. This is a new and compelling user experience and this revolutionary device could mean the end of the “regular” headset. Why just hear when you can see?

ORA-X

The ORA-X is scheduled to be released in 2015. It will run standard Android apps – just like any standalone smartphone or tablet device. It is based on Optinvent’s cutting edge display technology and includes high end acoustics.

On the hardware side, specifications include:

• Large, transparent virtual display
• High fidelity speakers w/ active noise cancellation
• Microphone (for calls and voice commands)
• Front-facing camera
• 9 axis motion sensor
• Wireless connectivity (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS)
• Trackpad (mouse and swipe) for tactile interactions with the device
• High capacity Li-Ion rechargeable battery
• Powerful microprocessor and GPU with enough memory to support complex applications

For more information, please visit http://www.optinvent.com

About Optinvent

Optinvent is a world leader in digital eyewear and see-through retinal projection technology. Optinvent’s team has 20+ years of experience in the field of consumer electronics and is recognized in the industry for developing cutting edge patented technologies and products.

Press contact:

Maiwenn Regnault

maiwenn@oxygen-pr.com

(415) 609-0140

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Harnessing the Power of Human Vision

By Mike Nichols, VP Content and Applications at SoftKinetic

For some time now, we’ve been in the midst of a transition away from computing on a single screen. Advances in technology, combined with the accessibility of the touch-based Human Machine Interface (HMI) have enabled mobile computing to explode. This trend will undoubtedly continue to evolve as we segue into more wearable Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. While AR and VR may provide substantially different experiences to their flat screen contemporaries, both AR and VR face similar issues of usability. Specifically, how and what are the most accessible ways to interact using these devices?

The history of HMI development for both AR and VR has iterated along similar paths of using physical controllers to provide user navigation. Although the use of physical controls has been a necessity in the past, if they remain the primary input, these tethered devices will only serve as shackles that prevent AR and VR from reaching full potential as wearable devices. While physical control devices can and do undoubtedly add a feeling of immersion to an experience, in particular with gaming, you would no more want a smart-phone that was only controllable via a special glove, then you would want to control your smart-glass through a tethered controller. As the technology for AR and VR continues to evolve it will eventually need embedded visual and audio sensors to support the HMI. In particular, visual sensors to support a full suite of human interactions that will integrate with our daily activities in a more natural and seamless way than our mobile devices do today.

In Depth

A depth sensor is the single most transformative technology for AR and VR displays because it is able to see the environment as 3-dimensional data, much like you or I do with our own eyes. It’s the key piece of technology that provides us with the building blocks needed to interact with our environments – virtual or otherwise. The depth sensor allows us to reach out and manipulate virtual objects and UI by tracking our hands and fingers

A scenes’ depth information can be used for surface and object detection, then overlaid with graphics displayed relative to any surface at the correct perspective to our heads’ position and angle. Depth recognition combined with AR and VR presents a profound change from the way we receive and interact with our 2D digital sources today. To simulate this effect, the video below shows an example of how a process known as projection mapping can transform even simple white cards in astonishing ways.

“Box” Bot & Dolly

It’s not hard to imagine how AR combined with depth can be used to transform our view of the world around us. To not only augment our world view with information, but even transform live entertainment such as theater, concerts, sporting events, even photography and more.

Take a more common example like navigation. Today, when we use our smart phones or GPS devices to navigate, our brain has to translate the 2D information on the screen into the real world. Transference of information from one context to another is a learned activity and often confusing for many people. We’ve all missed a turn from time-to-time and blamed the GPS for confusing directions. In contrast, when navigating with depth-enabled AR glasses the path will be displayed as if being projected into the environment, not overlaid on a flat simulated screen. Displaying projected graphics mapped to our environment creates more context aware interactions, and becomes easier to parse relevant information based on distance and view angle.

Bridge the gap

As we look to the future of AR and VR they will both certainly require new approaches to enable an accessible HMI. But that won’t happen overnight. With commercialized VR products from the likes of Oculus, Sony and more coming soon we’ll have to support an interactive bridge to a new HMI through existing controllers. Both Sony and Microsoft already offer depth cameras for their systems that support depth recognition and human tracking. The new Oculus development kit includes a camera for tracking head position.

We’re going to learn a lot about what interactions work well and those that do not over the next few years. With technology advances still a ways off to make commercial AR glass feasible as a mass market option, it’s even more important to learn from VR. Everything done to make VR more accessible will make AR better.

Stay tuned for our next guest post, where we’ll take a closer look at how depth will provide a deeper and more connected experience.

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