Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X
Photo by Mallika Singh
5 Takeaways From This Year’s Augmented World Expo
04:33 PM | June 06, 2022
As the “metaverse” slowly transitions from a buzzword to reality, the Augmented World Expo—a gathering of augmented reality CEOs, engineers, creators, consumers and investors—showcased what the future of the industry might look like.
Since its first event in 2010, AWE has grown to over 250 augmented and virtual reality companies from around the globe. The 2022 conference, which ran from June 1-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the Bay Area, was the biggest yet—and flush with new experimental formats and new technology.
One example of the conference's new approach: a three-act augmented reality play performed at the conference called “MetaTr@versal: A Day in the Life.” Written by extended-reality (XR) technologist Sophia Moshasha, the play used VR screen mirroring to tell the story of an entrepreneur pitching new interoperability standards to investors.
“It was super ambitious, because we were using technologies from ARWall,” said AWE Head of Operations Andrea Lowery. “I can't even characterize all the different audio visual inputs and time and energy and creativity and tech that went into this thing.”
This year’s AWE featured keynotes, breakout rooms and a tech playground that included interactive and immersive experiences. Here are the five standouts from the conference and the advancing technology.
Magic Leap’s New Headset
Lines began snaking around the corner of the Magic Leap booth before the exposition floor even officially opened, as crowds gathered to try the Florida-based company’s new Magic Leap 2 augmented reality headset.
Participants were paired up and assigned to one of three demos. I was able to try the “wildfire” demo, where the glasses scanned a printed code on a circular tabletop and displayed a topographical map. The demonstrator toggled overlays off and on, showing the spread of weather and fire across the landscape. The company hopes their technology will be used in the future to train first responders, as well as workers in manufacturing, health and defense, among other industries.
The new headset aims to tackle some of the problems with the release of its first incarnation—including a narrow field of view and limited range of applications—by expanding the horizontal field of vision from 50 to 70 degrees and reaching out to more potential partners.
The most impressive part of the Magic Leap 2 was optical dimming, which shuts out nearly all light outside the augmented reality elements on the tabletop, drawing users’ focus to the data and cutting down on glare in outdoor environments.
Tilt 5
Tilt Five: Immersive Table-Top Gaming
Tilt Five was another popular booth. The startup produces augmented and virtual reality gaming hardware, and has partnered with third party game developers to build software that integrates turns table-top games in AR experiences. The full system includes a game board, a light pair of AR glasses and a control wand.
The company raised over $1.7 million in fan funding on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. It’s been shipping out completed products to its backers since December and hopes to have them all sent out by the end of the summer. Now, it has set its sights on expanding its offerings.
“We actually just signed with Asmodee Digital, who makes games like Catan, Carcassonne and Gloomhaven,” said Tilt Five Head of Communications Stephanie Greenall. “So we'll be taking a select number of their titles and putting them onto the board.”
Since last year’s AWE conference, Tilt Five has added mixed reality streaming, which allows fans to share their adventures on streaming and social platforms and the “XE Gameboard,” a larger board that tilts up so you can see further into the game.
TikTok’s booth showcasing its new AR features on June 3, 2022. Photo by Mallika Singh
TikTok Plays Catch Up in AR
About two months ago, TikTok launched Effect House, an AR development platform that plugs right into its mobile app. It’s an attempt to catch up on creative studio applications like Meta’s Spark AR Studio for Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat’s Lens Studio.
Effect House is built on a visual scripting system and a range of popular templates that is meant to make it easier for everyday creators to create their own visuals, without needing to know much about writing code.
According to Greg Feingold, AR ecosystem community lead at TikTok, there are already around 8,000 creators on Effect House’s Discord account, and videos using Effect House have already reached over 1 trillion views.
Fungisaurs
Fungisaurs: Augmenting Play with Figurines
L.A.-based artist and digital sculptor Aiman Akhtar’s background in 3D modeling and animation at studios including Nickelodeon, Dreamworks and Blizzard prepared him to develop his own line of augmented reality kids’ toys–in the form of small “dinosaur mushroom creatures.”
Fungisaurs started as a collection of real-life plastic toys in 2017, funded partially on Kickstarter. Three years later, Akhtar partnered with augmented reality company Octagon Studio to build ARise, a camera app that brings the physical toys to life and supports interactive play.
Next up for the company is more app integration, card functionality and a second series of characters.
“If we have a card read as well as the object, then we can trigger animations, we can trigger background changes,” Akhtar said. “So we can make narrative board games that can actually convey stories and have more interactivity between players.”
Fungisaurs was one of the only companies at AWE with a product tailored towards kids.
A conference attendee tries the HaptX DK2 Gloves on June 3, 2022. Photo by Mallika Singh
HaptX: Prototype the Training, Not the Product
HaptX, a leading producer in the haptic XR space, makes AR products for customers in training, manufacture, design and telerobotics. The company is based in Redmond, WA with offices in both San Luis Obisbo and San Francisco.
Its development kit, the DK2 Gloves, uses compressed air to simulate resistance by applying braking to the backs of the gloves, up to eight pounds of force per finger and up to 40 pounds per hand. The air contours the shape of the gloves to objects touched in virtual reality worlds.
Recently, HaptX worked with Nissan to mock up its Nissan Leaf electric vehicle virtually. Its system allows designers to touch and interact with the virtual car, obviating the need for wasteful and expensive automotive prototypes, which can cost up to $200,000 per model. HaptX’s gloves, meanwhile, cost in the high five figures for enterprise customers.
HaptX had both a stationary and mobile demo station at AWE. The mobile device was set up in a backpack. One woman trying it out at the Expo said the backpack’s weight was about the same as two MacBooks.
“This will get significantly smaller in the future,” said Victor Oriaifo, an account executive at HaptX.
He said the company aims to shrink the portable device once it’s manufacturing at scale.
***
Watch the main stage presentations on the AWE.Live mobile app ( iPhone/ Android), where the remainder of the sessions will appear by the end of next week. View this article in video form on our TikTok page!
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that AWE had its first conference in 2013. It was in 2010. It's also been updated to more accurately reflect the number of users on TIkTok's Discord account.
From Your Site Articles
- Tripp Raises $11 Million to Simulate Psychedelic Euphoria - dot.LA ›
- The Future of The Metaverse May Be Your Web Browser - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
https://twitter.com/rachelkisela
Streaming Data Giant Meta Moves Its Headquarters to LA
07:15 AM | July 30, 2021
As Netflix, Disney, Amazon and others duke it out in the streaming wars, a growing list of tech companies that cater to their needs are benefiting.
Among them is Meta Data Software, a service that organizes massive content libraries, supplementing television shows, films and other content with rich data — from the cast and crew members involved to legal and licensing information.
Founded in London in 2018 and serving its SaaS product to catalog-owning clients that include MGM, Fox, WarnerMedia and Epix, Meta is now moving its home base to L.A.
Its biggest project may be yet to come. Amazon is poised to swallow its client MGM's iconic library, home to 4,000 films including the Bond franchise and such classics as "Rocky", along with 17,000 television shows.
Earlier this summer a group of investors led by Rob Delf paid $3 million for a majority stake in Meta. Delf, who previously led Santa Monica-based data management service Rightsline, has assumed the CEO role at Meta. Meta's founder and former CEO Robin Tucker will serve as its chief product officer from London.
"As streaming services have exploded, and the types of features and functionality that they've delivered becomes more sophisticated...the kind of requirements around the data that you need to hold really expand exponentially," said Tucker, a former designer at Apple.
Other companies supporting the new streaming world from the periphery include Struum, a consumer service that bundles different services into a single subscription, and Brainbase, a data management system for intellectual property including trademarks and patents.
"[Entertainment companies] have to be able to access their libraries all the time, and be able to track where different things are licensed for, which rights, for how long and they really need to have an organized way of doing it because otherwise they will make mistakes and do inconsistent deals," said entertainment-tech lawyer Richard Thompson.
The recent flurry in streaming of M&A activity has made keeping all the data straight more challenging, said Thompson. Amazon announced it had acquired MGM in May, less than two weeks after WarnerMedia's HBO Max and Discovery announced plans to merge. Rumors are swirling that independent studios including Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and LeBron James' SpringHill Entertainment are exploring sales.
"When you have two different hunks of libraries that now need to be managed together, to find ways to consolidate that management under one system is definitely an opportunity for this kind of thing," Thompson said.
Delf said his priorities over the next 18 months include finding more customers – namely studios and streaming platforms – and hiring people in customer support, sales and account management roles.
Meta occupies a niche of the entertainment industry known as the media supply chain. Companies that own content libraries – studios like Disney, streamers like Netflix, for example – use an amalgam of systems to help keep track of the different kinds of data that accompany the many titles in those libraries: things like licensing rights, distribution schedules and audio-dubbing files.
Meta helps media giants manage their metadata: including titles, synopses and content ID numbers. In the past, that has often been a painstaking process done with spreadsheets.
Meta's technology includes a user-friendly data management interface and AI tools that can automate mundane duties like filling in missing data. With this, Delf said Meta has reduced the time requirement for some tasks – like preparing a show to launch in a new market – "from 75 minutes to five seconds." The company also claims to have saved its customers over $10 million annually compared to manual data management.
"As an investor and an entrepreneur, really it's about better, faster and cheaper," Delf said.
Tucker, the former CEO turned CPO, said that in contrast to the sleek user interfaces that entertainment executives are used to, data management software has typically been a clunky stepchild. Part of his vision is to give those execs an easy, aesthetically pleasing interface.
"If he could solve that, then he's halfway to the solution," Thompson said.
From Your Site Articles
- Prewitt Ridge's Steve Massey on Scaling Systems Engineering - dot ... ›
- Brainbase Launches Two New Trademark Tracking Products - dot.LA ›
- Brainbase CEO Nate Cavanaugh on Striking Out as a Young CEO ... ›
- Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Sold to Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs' Media Startup - dot.LA ›
- Meta Quest Pro Comes With Hefty New Price Tag - dot.LA ›
Read moreShow less
Sam Blake
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
https://twitter.com/hisamblake
samblake@dot.la
Pediatric App Huckleberry Raises $12.5 Million in a Telehealth Boom
04:13 PM | November 05, 2021
Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash
When Jessica Toh had her first child, who proved to be an erratic sleeper, she wanted to use her background in computer science and statistics to understand why.
In 2017, she started Huckleberry, an app that aims to leverage AI to predict babies' sleep schedules and help caretakers get some rest.
The Irvine-based app announced it raised $12.5 million on Wednesday led by Morningside Ventures, a science-focused venture capital firm.
The Huckleberry app allows parents to track everything from feeding to pumping sessions, how often a diaper needs to be changed — and sleep. Parents plug in various information about their child, like when they were born and how many naps they take, and, leveraging data from other customers and the child's sleep schedule, the app predicts the optimal time to put a child down for a nap so they sleep better through the night.
"It allows parents to have more peace of mind and to plan better," said Toh, whose own baby woke every two to three hours for its first 20 months.
Toh says the app fills a gap in pediatric care. When parents take their newborns for frequent checkups, doctors are focusing on the growth and health of the child. But few resources exist for parents juggling a child's unpredictable sleep with work, personal relationships and their own mental health.
"If your child is waking up all the time at night, they're alive," Toh said. "That's the main concern here from the medical side. Now from a well-being side, it's not great."
Huckleberry is one of several biometric health apps that have grown in the absence of accessible acute care. Popularity in weight loss apps, exercise apps, sleep and habit-building apps have grown in the pandemic, according to Pitchbook.
"As more studies indicate that digital health apps can result in similar outcomes where traditional care may be unavailable, we expect the market for digital alternatives to remain robust," said Pitchbook analyst Kaia Cobain in a 2020 report on telehealth.
Huckleberry plans on expanding into new child behavioral verticals with the raise, like helping parents track exposing their children to allergens, and managing tantrums. The company works with dozens of sleep, nutrition and behavioral health experts to contextualize the data.
"It's just crazy — the more you get into it and the more you realize there are actually all these experts in these different areas, just most people don't have access to them," Toh said. "You need a very acute need before you can work with them. But the reality is that everybody has that kind of need to some degree."
From Your Site Articles
- Heal Get's $100M in Humana Deal to Extend Telehealth - dot.LA ›
- Airvet Raises $14M to Provide Telehealth to Pets - dot.LA ›
- Holistic Health Kenshō Moves Into Telehealth ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la
RELATEDTRENDING
LA TECH JOBS