I’m riding around a race track. Well, I’m here at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach. You can see the Apple Vision Pro and Mest three all over the show floor for things like haptics and art experiences riding horses around in mixed reality on the show floor or for things like drawing and art with like things like logs, mixed reality pen. That’s because they’re the most versatile building blocks that, that are available right now, but they’re big. Then the next step is to make these things smaller and there are companies showing how that can be done. First of all the lenses I met with a company called Loomis talking about how small and good the lenses can be for projecting displays and they looked really good. The question is who’s going to adopt them? There are also companies like that are building light engines ways to shrink down the ways that you project onto those glasses. There are also companies trying to track how to do hand gestures because a lot of those expensive mixed reality headsets will they have their own built in power sensors? Right on here. One company Ultra Leap is showing how you can have low power cameras built into a hacked version of meta’s Rayban glasses to do things like micro gestures on the go. And eventually meta ray bands may get cameras like that or other future smart glasses. Also, there’s your watch. There are so many ways that your watch could work as a connected interface. And I’ve been waiting for that double point is one company I saw here that’s using gestures to control your TV or lights. And eventually, yes, work with glasses as well. And they’re using a modified software package on the Samsung watches. There’s also Tap Xr that’s doing its own custom built wearable that has a camera and some sensory capabilities to do that type of stuff. So I saw companies kind of offloading that and it doesn’t feel like we’re far away from having that then work with the glasses. But again, it gets to what’s the software A I is all over the place right now and you can see companies pivoting, of course, they would because it’s a big hype filled thing. But there are also useful things that A I can do on glasses. You could identify things by asking about them. You could have it eventually begin to recognize things and assist you met is experimenting with this already. And the limit to that though is that you’re going to have to figure out how to deliver those services over into some processor that you’re carrying with you, these glasses are not enough meta ray bands pair with your phone. X reels, connect with your phone. X actually built its own little device that looks like a phone called the Beam Pro. This $200 basically almost phone. It’s an Android powered thing. It’s trying to be the phone concept for a world where phones don’t perfectly work with AR glasses yet. And X Real’s product has the ability to become a touch pad or launch apps and mixed reality and cast them up and make them more compatible instead of just mirroring your display. And it also has an extra pasture USB C port for charging while also wearing the glasses. It takes spatial photos with more widely spaced cameras. Some of these ideas are probably going to come to phones, but the phone compatibility for these is already really inconsistent. And then you’ve got the wild cards like haptic gloves. There are giant ones like hap decks, there are mid range ones like sense glove that pull back on your fingers and also vibrate and also have something that squeezes your hand. And then there’s b haptics which basically has a whole bunch of vibrating motors all over your body on vests and, and wrist pieces and gloves. And a lot of this may sound really gimmicky. But I also saw a really moving art piece called I will defy you that moved me to tears and use tactics to express the emotions of somebody who had survived an attempted electroshock gender conversion therapy experience, I’m feeling moved, even talking about it. Those vibrations gave me a sense of connection. Haptic is trying out new sensations will eventually kind of create sensations of emotion or connect to things that we tag to emotion. I don’t think we have a clear understanding of where all these pieces will come next. And so I’m not ready to dismiss any one of them yet, as you walk around the show, like awe, it’s all experimental. All of these pieces are trying to find one bit here one bit here. Some of it’s practical. Some of it’s wild and the big companies like Apple and Meta are not that present here. So these companies are trying to find a way to explore the future and I think the future is a moving point. We don’t have a product that’s perfect yet. We don’t have the iphone of your perfect wearable glasses yet. I think they’re going to be something like this. I think they’re going to work with your hands. I think they’re going to be A I powered and I think they’re going to work as displays sometimes or also be headphones and also be glasses probably will take a couple of years to get there. You’re seeing just the beginning steps of that here, but it feels a lot more possible now than it did before. I just don’t know when I’m going to be able to buy the perfect one yet.
