Stravito, an AI powered knowledge management solution that enables teams in retail organisations to extract and use insights for critical decision-making, has announced the roll-out of Focus Mode, Snapshots, and multilingual support to its generative AI tool, Stravito Assistant.
Krzysztof Sadowski, Insight Platforms & Tools Lead at Shell, has been testing Snapshots and comments: "We have a library of over 5,000 reports, offering a wealth of knowledge. However, navigating through this extensive collection can be overwhelming and time consuming. The new Snapshot feature addresses this challenge by providing automated summaries with key insights and recommendations. Additionally, the generated summaries are both relevant and coherent."
Featuring compatibility with French, German, Spanish and 100+ languages, Stravito Assistant has also rolled out multilingual support. The tool can respond in the same language as a user’s prompt and reference sources in multiple languages - with links to original documents for transparency. This ensures knowledge is not siloed by language barriers and organisations can access research across global markets to make informed, locally relevant decisions.
Thor Olof Philogène, Founder and CEO at Stravito, comments: "Generative AI has increased the speed and accuracy of market research analysis at an unprecedented rate, helping businesses make informed decisions faster than ever. Stravito Assistant’s unique features - Focus Mode, Snapshots and multilingual support - have been created to further enhance efficiency and empower teams with an engaging and user-friendly way to uncover trusted insights that may have taken hours or days to produce."
“These updates reinforce our commitment to providing purpose built AI powered tools that help global enterprises leverage their market research to make data driven, cost-effective decisions that fuel innovation and long-term growth.”
As we witness a digital transformation revolution across all channels, AI tools are reshaping the omnichannel game, from personalising customer experiences to optimising inventory, uncovering insights into consumer behaviour, and enhancing the human element of retailers' businesses.
With 2025 set to be the year when AI and especially gen AI shake off the ‘heavily hyped’ tag and become embedded in retail business processes, our newly launched awards celebrate global technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world and the resulting benefits for retailers, shoppers and employees.
Our 2025 winners will be those companies who not only recognise the potential of AI, but also make it usable in everyday work - resulting in more efficiency and innovation in all areas.
Winners will be announced at an evening event at The Barbican in Central London on Thursday, 3rd July.
This will kick off with a drinks reception in the stunning Conservatory, followed by a three course meal, and awards ceremony in the Garden Room.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence has sent shock waves across industries, from the technical to the creative. AI systems that can generate viable computer code, write news stories and spin up professional-looking graphics have inspired countless headlines asking whether they will take away jobs in technology, journalism and design, among many other fields.
And these new ways of doing work and making things raise another question: In the era of AI, what does it mean to be an inventor?
Among technologists who build digital tools or programs, it is increasingly common to use AI as part of design and development processes. But as deep learning models flex their technical muscles more and more, even highly skilled researchers who are using AI in their work have begun to express concerns about becoming obsolete.
There is much debate about whether AI can augment human creativity, but emerging data suggests that the technology can boost research and development where creativity typically plays an important role. A recent study by MIT economics doctoral student Aidan Toner-Rodgers found that scientists using AI tools increased their patent filings by 39% and created 17% more prototypes than when they worked without such tools.
While this study indicates that AI seemed to help humans be more productive, it also showed there was a downside: 82% of the surveyed researchers felt less satisfied with their jobs since implementing AI in their workflows. “I couldn’t help feeling that much of my education is now worthless,” one researcher said.
This emerging dynamic leads to a related question: If a scientist uses AI in order to build something new, does the output still qualify as an invention? As a legal scholar who studies technology and intellectual property law, I see the growing power of AI shifting the legal landscape.
Natural persons
In 2020, the United States Patent and Trademark Office refused to list the AI system DABUS, which purportedly designed a food container and a flashing emergency beacon, as an inventor on patent applications. Subsequent court rulings clarified that under current U.S. law, only humans can be listed as inventors, but they left open the question of whether inventions developed by scientists with the help of AI qualify for patent protection.
The concept of inventorship and legal protections for inventions have deep roots in the U.S. The Constitution explicitly protects the “exclusive rights” of authors and inventors “to their respective writings and discoveries,” reflecting the framers’ strong conviction that the state should protect and encourage original ideas.
U.S. law today defines an inventor as a natural person who has conceived of a complete and operative invention that can be used without extensive research or experimentation. An inventor must do more than follow routine instructions – they must make an intellectual contribution in producing something novel.
That contribution can be a key idea that sparks the invention or a crucial insight that turns the concept into a working product. If a person’s input is routine or just explains what’s already known, they are not an inventor.
Role of AI
To what extent can or should AI become part of the invention process? The release of AI applications such as ChatGPT in 2022 introduced the public to large language models and sparked renewed debate about whether and how AI should be used in the inventive process. That same year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard a case that tested whether AI could be named as an inventor on a patent application.
The court concluded that under U.S. law, inventors must be human beings. The ruling reaffirmed the idea that Congress intended to encourage human beings, not machines, to invent. This idea remains foundational to current patent policy.
In light of the court’s decision, in 2024 the United States Patent and Trademark Office updated its guidance to clarify the role of AI in the inventive process. The guidance reaffirms that an inventor must be human. However, the Patent and Trademark Office explained that the policy did not preclude inventors from using AI tools to assist in the research and development of inventions. This approach acknowledges how the rapid development of AI technologies has allowed researchers to make exciting breakthroughs.
Policymakers seem to understand that if the U.S. is to continue to lead the world in innovation, the mythology of a sole inventor toiling away in a garage and relying on pure intellect must evolve to account for the value of AI tools that research has proven make humans more productive.
Nevertheless, since only human beings can be named as inventors on a patent, current policy does not quite answer the question of who or what should get credit for doing the work. Despite a growing trend where researchers are expected to disclose whether they’ve used AI tools, for example in academic papers, the U.S. patent system makes no such demand.
Regardless of AI’s role in the research and development process, a U.S. patent will list only the names of human inventors so long as those humans made a significant contribution to the invention. As a result, current policy is not concerned with how to recognize the contributions of AI. AI is considered a tool like a microscope or a Bunsen burner.
Personal ingenuity in the age of AI
Given this shifting legal landscape, I see that U.S. innovation policy is at a crossroads. The Patent and Trademark Office’s guidance reaffirming human inventorship and simultaneously embracing AI as an innovation tool is only a year old. It is unclear how the Trump administration’s forthcoming action plan to “enhance America’s global AI dominance” will affect this guidance.
Some observers expect the rate of scientific discovery to increase dramatically with the assistance of AI tools. But if the majority of those same productive researchers enjoy their jobs less, is the act of inventing being encouraged as the framers envisioned?
Current U.S. policy attempts to strike a balance and recognize the concept of personal ingenuity, stemming from the principle that for an invention to be patented in the U.S., a human must have led the way. Yet the guidance also implicitly acknowledges that AI can lend a helping hand in modern research and development. Whether and how policymakers maintain this balance – and how leaders in industry and science respond – will help shape the next chapter of American innovation.
I like this chart set from Bloomberg that shows the top brands, ranked by market share in 2024. Faded lines show true estimates, and thicker lines in the foreground provide the trends. Tick labels are limited to the first column on the left to avoid busyness. Straightforward but effective.
In the U.S., we usually see BYD, an electric vehicle car brand, mentioned in the context of Tesla as the competition. But it doesn’t look like much of a competition. BYD has rapidly gained market share in China over the last five years.
Nvidia is working on a computer that combines AI, super-computing and quantum in one machine to rule them all. This will be born in the newly revealed Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC). made the for quantum computing fans from its GTC Global AI Conference today. One of the issues for quantum computing has been […]
The purpose of onomatopoeia is to imitate sounds with words, so you might expect the words for animal sounds to be similar across languages. For the Pudding, Vivian Li shows that this is not always the case.
Onomatopoeia offers a fascinating glimpse into the interaction between sound and language. The way humans mimic animal sounds reflects not only shared biological instincts but also distinct cultural filters. Although onomatopoeia intends to imitate faithfully, its differences are ultimately far from arbitrary. In trying to capture the same auditory essence, English interprets a pig’s sound as [ojŋk], yet Hungarian hears [røf], and Vietnamese hears [ʔut it]. Even among the three animals discussed, cats are more consistent in their sound interpretation, while pigs are more variable — whether because pigs’ vocalizations are innately more complex, or because they call upon different phonotactic rules.
All the words are clickable so that you can hear pronunciations for different languages. Colors indicate phone groups, such as nasal consonants and mid central vowels.
NVIDIA DGX Spark may look like a mini PC, but under the hood, it’s a powerful AI supercomputer based on the NVIDIA GB10 20-core Armv9 SoC with Blackwell architecture delivering up to 1,000 TOPS (FP4) of AI performance, and high memory bandwidth (273 GB/s) with 128 GB 256-bit LPDDR5x.
The GB10 SoC is equipped with ten Cortex-X925 cores, ten Cortex-X725 cores, a Blackwell GPU, 5th Gen Tensor cores, and 4th Gen RT cores. The system also features a 1 TB or 4TB SSD, an HDMI 2.1a video output port, 10GbE and WiFi 7 networking, and four USB4 ports.
NVIDIA DGX Spark specifications:
SoC – NVIDIA GB10
CPU – 20-core Armv9 processor with 10x Cortex-X925 cores and 10x Cortex-A725 cores
Architecture – NVIDIA Grace Blackwell
GPU – Blackwell Architecture
CUDA Cores – Blackwell Generation
5th Gen Tensor cores
4th Gen RT (Ray Tracing) cores
Tensor Performance – 1000 AI TOPS (FP4)
VPU – 1x NVENC, 1x NVDEC
System Memory – 128 GB 256-bit LPDDR5x with 273 GB/s memory bandwidth
Storage – 1 TB or 4 TB NVMe M2 SSD with self-encryption
Display – HDMI 2.1a port
Audio – HDMI multichannel audio output
Networking
10GbE RJ45 port
ConnectX-7 Smart NIC to connect two Spark DGX together with a speed of up to 200Gbps
WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3
USB – 4x USB4 Type-C ports
Power Consumption – 170 Watts
Dimensions – 150 x 150 x 50.5 mm
Weight – 1.2 kg
Bandwidth is critical for AI workloads, and NVIDIA further highlights that the GB10 superchip uses NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology to deliver a CPU+GPU-coherent memory model with 5x the bandwidth of fifth-generation PCIe.
The DGX Spark runs NVIDIA DGX OS based on Ubuntu 22.04 and the company says the system supports the NVIDIA Cosmos Reason world foundation model and NVIDIA GR00T N1 robot foundation model. The NVIDIA AI platform includes tools, frameworks, libraries, and pre-trained models to allow developers to prototype, fine-tune, and inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek, Meta, Google, and others with up to 200 billion parameters locally. But you can work on even larger models, as the NVIDIA Connect-X Networking can connect two NVIDIA DGX Spark systems to work with AI models up to 405 billion parameters.
Developers can reserve a DGX Spark in the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain through partners such as ASUS, Dell, or HP. The price should be around $3,000 to $4,000 and the system will become available in May. More details can be found on the product page and the announcement which also includes the much larger DGX Station which looks like a desktop PC and delivers “data-center-level performance”.
Safety is Volvo's big thing. From three-point seatbelts to side-impact protection to blind-spot monitoring and much more, the Swedish automaker focuses its innovation on making its cars safer rather than faster around the Nürburgring. (Although in the past, it has set records there too.) As part of its efforts, Volvo has collected data from tens of thousands of car crashes, which it's now leveraging in virtual worlds to put simulated cars and SUVs through the wringer with the help of something amusingly named "Gaussian splatting."
"We've been visiting crash sites since the '70s. We've been recording event data from a fleet of cars for many, many years," said Alwin Bakkenes, head of global software engineering at Volvo Cars. "And all of those data points have actually helped us create safety innovations... from the three-point safety belt to whiplash protection systems and now also, as we're introducing in the ES90, a function called 'lidar AS,' which helps the car steer away from vulnerable road users in the dark," he said.
Like some others in the industry, Volvo is an early adopter of the software-defined vehicle, or SDV. As a quick refresher, SDVs are clean-sheet designs in terms of their electronic architecture. Instead of dozens or even a hundred discrete black boxes, each with its own hardware and running its own software, each doing a discrete job (like controlling the air conditioner or managing traction control), four or five powerful central computers take over those roles, overseeing domains like infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems, handling and powertrain, and interior comfort.
À l'heure où l'industrie et les scientifiques travaillent sur des robots hybrides, mêlant acier ou plastique et muscles synthétiques, cette dernière partie pose encore problème. Ces muscles artificiels ne peuvent tirer que dans une direction, limitant ainsi les mouvements des humanoïdes. Mais ça, c'était avant !Révolution robotique : l'alliance...
Stability AI has released a new AI model, Stable Virtual Camera, that the company claims can transform 2D images into “immersive” videos with realistic depth and perspective. Virtual cameras are tools often used in digital filmmaking and 3D animation to capture and navigate scenes in real time. With Stable Virtual Camera, Stability sought to add […]
In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized.
Rather than assembling a rocket out of smaller printed parts, they imagined the entire rocket being produced on a huge printer. Once the methodology was perfected, they believed rockets could be printed faster and cheaper than they could be traditionally assembled. What’s more, in the far future, Relativity might even be able to produce rockets off-world in fully automated factories. It was a bold idea, to be sure. But then, landing rockets on a barge in the middle of the ocean once seemed pretty far fetched as well.
An early printed propellant tank.
Of course, printing something the size of an orbital rocket requires an exceptionally large 3D printer, so Relativity Space had to built one. It wasn’t long before the company had gotten to the point where they had successfully tested their printed rocket engine, and were scaling up their processes to print the vehicle’s propellant tanks. In 2018 Bryce Salmi, then an avionics hardware engineer at Relatively Space, gave a talk at Hackaday Supercon detailing the rapid progress the company had made so far.
Just a few years later, in March of 2023, the Relativity’s first completed rocket sat fueled and ready to fly on the launch pad. The Terran 1 rocket wasn’t the entirely printed vehicle that Ellis and Noone had imagined, but with approximately 85% of the booster’s mass being made up of printed parts, it was as close as anyone had ever gotten before.
The launch of Terran 1 was a huge milestone for the company, and even though a problem in the second stage engine prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, the flight proved to critics that a 3D printed rocket could fly and that their manufacturing techniques were sound. Almost immediately, Relativity Space announced they would begin work on a larger and more powerful successor to the Terran 1 which would be more competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Now, after an administrative shakeup that saw Tim Ellis replaced as CEO, the company has released a nearly 45 minute long video detailing their plans for the next Terran rocket — and explaining why they won’t be 3D printing it.
Meet the New Boss
For the mainstream press, the biggest story has been that former Google chief Eric Schmidt would be taking over as Relativity’s CEO. Tim Ellis will remain on the company’s board, but likely won’t have much involvement in the day-to-day operation of the company. Similarly, co-founder Jordan Noone stepped down from chief technology officer to take on an advisory role back in 2020.
Eric Schmidt
With the two founders of the company now sidelined, and despite the success of the largely 3D printed Terran 1, the video makes it clear that they’re pursuing a more traditional approach for the new Terran R rocket. At several points in the presentation, senior Relativity staffers explain the importance of remaining agile in the competitive launch market, and caution against letting the company’s historic goals hinder their path forward. They aren’t abandoning additive manufacturing, but it’s no longer the driving force behind the program.
For his part, The New York Times reports that Schmidt made a “significant investment” in Relativity Space to secure controlling interest in the company and his new position as CEO, although the details of the arrangement have so far not been made public. One could easily dismiss this move as Schmidt’s attempt to buy into the so-called “billionaire space race”, but it’s more likely he simply sees it as an investment in a rapidly growing industry.
Even before he came onboard, Relativity Space had amassed nearly $3 billion in launch contracts. Between his considerable contacts in Washington, and his time as the chair of the DoD’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board, it’s likely Schmidt will attempt to put Relativity the running for lucrative government launches as well.
All they need is a reliable rocket, and they’ll have a revenue stream for years.
Outsourcing Your Way to Space
In general, New Space companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab have been far more open about their design and manufacturing processes than the legacy aerospace players. But even still, the video released by Relativity Space offers an incredibly transparent look at how the company is approaching the design of Terran R.
One of the most interesting aspects of the rocket’s construction is how many key components are being outsourced to vendors. According to the video, Relativity Space has contracted out the manufacturing of the aluminium “domes” that cap off the propellant tanks, the composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) that hold high pressure helium at cryogenic temperatures, and even the payload fairings.
This isn’t like handing the construction of some minor assemblies off to a local shop — these components are about as flight-critical as you can possibly get. In 2017, SpaceX famously lost one of their Falcon 9 rockets (and its payload) in an explosion on the launch pad due to a flaw in one of the booster’s COPVs. It’s believed the company ultimately brought production of COPVs in-house so they could have complete control of their design and fabrication.
Unpacking a shipment of composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) for Terran R
Farming out key components of Terran R to other, more established, aerospace companies is a calculated risk. On one hand, it will allow Relativity Space to accelerate the booster’s development time, and in this case time is very literally money. The sooner Terran R is flying, the sooner it can start bringing in revenue. The trade-off is that their launch operations will become dependent on the performance of said companies. If the vendor producing their fairings runs into a production bottleneck, there’s little Relativity Space can do but wait. Similarly, if the company producing the propellant tank domes decides to raise their prices, that eats into profits.
For the long term security of the project, it would make the most sense for Relativity to produce all of Terran R’s major components themselves. But at least for now, the company is more concerned with getting the vehicle up and running in the most expedient manner possible.
Printing Where it Counts
Currently, 3D printing a tank dome simply takes too long.
In some cases, this is where Relativity is still banking on 3D printing in the long term. As explained in the video by Chief Technology Officer Kevin Wu, they initially planned on printing the propellant tank domes out of aluminum, but found that they couldn’t produce them at a fast enough rate to support their targeted launch cadence.
At the same time, the video notes that the state-of-the-art in metal printing is a moving target (in part thanks to their own research and development), and that they are continuing to improve their techniques in parallel to the development of Terran R. It’s not hard to imagine a point in the future where Relativity perfects printing the tank domes and no longer needs to outsource them.
While printing the structural components of the rocket hasn’t exactly worked out as Relativity hoped, they are still fully committed to printing the booster’s Aeon R engines. Printing the engine not only allows for rapid design iteration, but the nature of additive manufacturing makes it easy to implement features such as integrated fluid channels which would be difficult and expensive to produce traditionally.
Printing an Aeon R engine
Of course, Relativity isn’t alone in this regard. Nearly every modern rocket engine is using at least some 3D printed components for precisely the same reasons, and they have been for some time now.
Which in the end, is really the major takeaway from Relativity’s update video. Though the company started out with an audacious goal, and got very close to reaching it, in the end they’ve more or less ended up where everyone else in aerospace finds themselves in 2025. They’ll use additive manufacturing where it makes sense, partner with outside firms when necessary, and use traditional manufacturing methods where they’ve proven to be the most efficient.
It’s not as exciting as saying you’ll put the world’s first 3D printed rocket into space, to be sure. But it’s the path that’s the most likely to get Terran R on the launch pad within the next few years, which is where they desperately need to be if they’ll have any chance of catching up to the commercial launch providers that are already gobbling up large swaths of the market.
Are you using a desk mouse like some kind of… normal computer user? Why, beg the heavens? For you could be using an air mouse, of your very own creation! [Misfit Maker] shows the way. Check out what he made in the video below.
An air mouse is a mouse you use in the air—which creates at least one major challenge. Since you’re not sliding along a surface, you can’t track the motion by mechanical friction like a ball mouse or by imaging as in an optical mouse. Instead, this build relies on a gyroscope sensor to track motion and translate that into pointer commands. The build relies on an ESP32-C3 as the microcontroller at the heart of things. It communicates with an MPU6050 gyroscope and accelerometer to track motion in space. It then communicates as a human interface device over Bluetooth, so you can use it with lots of different devices. The mouse buttons—plus media control buttons—are all capacitive touch-sensitive, thanks to an MPR121 touch sensor module.
There’s something neat about building your own tools to interface with the machines, almost like it helps meld the system to your whims. We see a lot of innovative mouse and HID projects around these parts.
AI has changed the game. Retail Express offers next generation tools that help retailers buy smarter, keep suppliers happy, and create a customer experience like no other.
Standing out in today’s fast paced retail environment requires more than just meeting customer demands. It requires agility, precision, and the ability to outpace the competition, even when dealing with the constant balancing act of pricing, inventory, promotions, and managing supplier relationships. Retail Express’ retail management solutions have AI at their heart, and offer a truly modern way for retailers to gain an advantage in a fast-advancing market.
Our modular platform brings algorithmic retailing to life, helping you take advantage of centralised planning, analytics and insights which enable smarter, faster and more profitable decisions. Optimise every part of a go-to-market strategy through AI tools which aid with dynamic pricing, supplier collaboration, and managing promotional activity. Overcome the barriers holding your business back: retail’s big questions remain, but the answer is now at hand.
Selling smarter by using AI
Take the complexities of driving revenue growth, not just a task of balancing regular and promotional sales but one of truly understanding customers’ needs and desires. AI offers retailers insights and foresight supported by the truth: real-time analytics can draw from a retailer’s data, from their competitors’ activities, and from the market at large to eliminate guesswork and paint a precise picture of pricing, timing, product selection and sales channels.
Retail Express can help you act fast. Revenue driving dynamic pricing tools help capture sales at peak demand or strategically adjust to increase sales volumes. Suppliers are equally happy: with AI, retailers can bolster joint business planning, offering vendors insights into trade funding, the effectiveness of promotions they’re involved in, and opportunities for negotiation. AI tools essentially unlock brand new revenue streams, boost existing revenue opportunities, and reduce the risk of unnecessary discounting.
Maximising margins with advanced insights
Remaining competitive on the knife edge of modern operating margins is incredibly difficult. Algorithmic retailing using AI offers opportunities to improve margins through efficiency, automation, and smarter decision-making, all while ensuring business wide strategic consistency. It’s a path to joined up thinking which offers a leg up to every area of a retail business.
Safely automating price adjustments enables a dynamic response to fluctuations in cost, demand, or tricky moves from competitors; demand forecasting not only helps build a promotional calendar with impact, but it also allows retailers to do so without the fear of over- or under-stocking. AI retailing tools work with real-time sales data and external factors like seasonality and market trends to help keep everything optimal, improving supply chain efficiency and vastly reducing waste.
Making the right moves to improve customer experience
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and modern shoppers have high expectations. Whether they know it or not, customers look for personalised, seamless and efficient shopping experiences - and AI can help retailers understand their customers perfectly to deliver exactly the right experience. AI can help curate advanced assortments, and offer the foresight to prepare for rising demand and meet customer expectations head on.
In fact, Retail Express can help you discover everything from the broad to ultra-granular. Insights into customer purchase history help with personalised promotions that deliver against promotion targets. Targeted incentives increase conversion rates, removing the need for mass discounting, while demand forecasting tools remove key customer frustrations like out-of-stock items - improving trust and keeping customers coming back. and reducing the potential of missed sales.
Taking the next step
The future of retail is powered by AI. And not just the future: the data, analytics and insights of advanced artificial intelligence are already helping many of the world’s largest retailers to drive greater revenue, protect their margins, and enhance the experience for their customers. Those that have embraced AI have gained a significant competitive advantage. Don’t get left behind - Retail Express is ready to help you integrate your business with the next generation of retailing tools.
Retail Express is a leading provider of merchandising solutions and services for retail, wholesale and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. It uses its deep industry understanding and expertise to provide business solutions that meet the evolving needs of merchandising and category management departments delivering improved productivity and enhanced financial results.
Through its AI powered end-to-end Intelligent Merchandising™ solution, Retail Express addresses the complex problems of advertising, marketing, promotions and pricing in retail, providing one version of the truth across the organisation and departments.
Retail Express operates out of Leeds, UK, across Europe, North America and Australia.
À Barcelone, les habitants ont pu tester une innovation futuriste en matière de transport. Un minibus autonome, développé par Renault en partenariat avec WeRide, circule actuellement dans le centre-ville. Sans chauffeur, ce véhicule suit un itinéraire précis de 2,2 km. Ceci en desservant quatre arrêts stratégiques. L'objectif est simple : démontrer que les bus autonomes peuvent s'intégrer en toute sécurité dans la circulation urbaine.
D'ailleurs, ce n'est pas la première fois que ce prototype est présenté. Il avait déjà été dévoilé à Roland-Garros l'an dernier. Cependant, sa mise en situation réelle à Barcelone permet d'évaluer concrètement son efficacité dans un environnement urbain. De plus, d'autres essais sont prévus à Valence, en France, ainsi qu'à l'aéroport de Zurich. Ces initiatives marquent une avancée importante pour le développement des transports autonomes en Europe.
Une technologie avancée au service des usagers
Ce minibus électrique impressionne par ses capacités techniques. Doté de 10 caméras et de huit lidars, il détecte son environnement et réagit aux obstacles en temps réel. Grâce à ces capteurs, il freine avant de changer de voie et s'adapte à la densité du trafic. De plus, il peut parcourir jusqu'à 120 km sans recharge et atteindre une vitesse de 40 km/h. Une autonomie suffisante pour répondre aux besoins des trajets urbains.
Ainsi, les passagers ont pu profiter d'une expérience inédite, gratuite et sécurisée. Pour certains, voir ce bus circuler seul était presque irréel. Pau Cugat, un étudiant de 18 ans, a comparé ce testà une rencontre entre le passé et le futur. Son étonnement reflète bien l'impact de cette innovation sur le public. Les réactions des autres usagers ont d'ailleurs été diverses : entre fascination, curiosité et parfois scepticisme, chacun réagit différemment face à cette avancée technologique.
Alors que les États-Unis et la Chine investissent massivement dans la conduite autonome, l'Europe reste en retard sur ce marché. Renault veut donc accélérer la transition et prouver que cette technologie est viable pour les transports en commun du futur. Comme l'explique Patrick Vergelas, responsable des projets de mobilité autonome chez Renault, ce projet vise à préparer l'Europe à intégrer ces solutions innovantes.
Dans plusieurs métropoles, les véhicules sans chauffeur commencent déjà à faire partie du paysage urbain. Des taxis autonomes circulent à San Francisco, tandis que Tokyo teste également ces nouvelles technologies. Barcelone devient ainsi une vitrine pour cette évolution. Cela prouve que les minibus autonomes peuvent s'adapter aux contraintes des grandes villes européennes.
Une avancée prometteuse pour les transports publics
L'expérimentation se déroule sans incident, selon les autorités de Barcelone. Aucun accident n'a été signalé depuis le début des essais. Ce qui renforce la crédibilité du projet. De plus, l'absence d'émissions polluantes en fait une solution écologique pour l'avenir des transports urbains.
Cependant, l'adoption massive de ces bus autonomes nécessitera encore des ajustements, notamment en termes de réglementation et d'acceptation du public. Mais une chose est certaine : ce test à Barcelone montre que le futur des transports publics est en marche, et il pourrait arriver plus vite qu'on ne le pense.
There's a new twist in the hunt for dark matter, the invisible substance believed to make up 85 percent of all the mass in the universe: it may actually be way lighter.
In a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of researchers propose a new form of the hypothetical substance that's lower in mass compared to other dark matter candidates, which could explain a mysterious phenomenon at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, in a region called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ).
"At the center of our galaxy sit huge clouds of positively charged hydrogen, a mystery to scientists for decades because normally the gas is neutral," said study co-lead author Shyam Balaji at King's College London in a statement about the work. "So, what is supplying enough energy to knock the negatively charged electrons out of them?"
"The energy signatures radiating from this part of our galaxy suggest that there is a constant, roiling source of energy doing just that," Balaji added, "and our data says it might come from a much lighter form of dark matter than current models consider."
While scientists have extensive evidence that dark matter exists, determining what it is and where it resides remains one of the biggest questions in physics, with theories ranging from parallel universes to primordial black holes. But one of the original and still leading explanations for dark matter is that it comprises a type of nearly undetectable particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs.
As the moniker suggests, WIMPs don't interact strongly with other particles, including light, but are massive enough that they would clump together in the way that astronomers have observed galaxies and other cosmic structures do — which dark matter, through its gravitational influence, is hypothesized to govern the shapes of from the shadows.
But perhaps there's more than one form of it that's less massive than WIMPs, as the researchers suggest. The thinking goes that in the extremely dense environment of the CMZ, these lighter dark matter particles would be constantly colliding and destroying each other upon impact, and subsequently releasing energy. This is a process known as annihilation, and the energy it liberates would then ionize nearby hydrogen gas.
Conversely, the researchers argue that WIMPs and other proposed dark matter particles like axions don't undergo enough annihilation to ionize hydrogen to the extent observed in the CMZ. Nor can the phenomenon be explained by cosmic rays, powerful beams of energetic particles that zip throughout the universe at nearly the speed of light.
"The biggest problem this model helps solve is an excess of ionization in the CMZ," Balaji told Space.com. "Cosmic rays, the usual culprits for ionizing gas, don't seem to be strong enough to explain the high levels of ionization we observe."
There's still a lot of work to be done before the idea gains more steam. But if the theory holds true, Balaji says, we'd have an "entirely new way" to study dark matter rather than just its gravitational influence; now, we could observe the ionization it causes in gases.
"Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in physics, and this work shows that we may have been overlooking its subtle chemical effects on the cosmos," Balaji told Space.com.
A researcher has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing observations taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
While analyzing images for the telescope's Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), Kansas State University associate professor of computer science Lior Shamir found that out of the 263 galaxies examined, two thirds of them rotated clockwise, while only a third rotated counterclockwise, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This challenges the assumption that any given universe would have half of them spinning one way, with the rest spinning counter to that, according to a press release about the discovery.
"It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," said Shamir in a statement. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole."
The findings add credence to an existing, Russian doll-like theory called "Schwarzschild cosmology," which suggests that our galaxy is trapped within a black hole, which in turn is located inside another universe.
As Space.com reports, this would imply that other observed black holes could be wormholes, otherwise known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, to other universes, which are unobservable to us due to the black holes trapping light within them.
"I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole," University of New Haven theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, who champions the theory that we're surrounded by doorways to other universes and wasn't involved in the research, told Space.com. "A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry."
"The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed," he added.
But Shamir's findings still leave the possibility that the Milky Way's own rotation could have influenced the galaxies' unusual distribution of spin rotation.
Since the Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way, researchers expect light from galaxies rotating in the opposite direction to be brighter, causing the discrepancy in the JADES observations, Shamir suggests.
In other words, the velocity at which the Milky Way rotates may be influencing our celestial measurements, which had previously been considered negligible.
"If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," he said in the statement. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
Biohybrid robots work by combining biological components like muscles, plant material, and even fungi with non-biological materials. While we are pretty good at making the non-biological parts work, we’ve always had a problem with keeping the organic components alive and well. This is why machines driven by biological muscles have always been rather small and simple—up to a couple centimeters long and typically with only a single actuating joint.
“Scaling up biohybrid robots has been difficult due to the weak contractile force of lab-grown muscles, the risk of necrosis in thick muscle tissues, and the challenge of integrating biological actuators with artificial structures,” says Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the Tokyo University, Japan. Takeuchi led a research team that built a full-size, 18 centimeter-long biohybrid human-like hand with all five fingers driven by lab-grown human muscles.
Keeping the muscles alive
Out of all the roadblocks that keep us from building large-scale biohybrid robots, necrosis has probably been the most difficult to overcome. Growing muscles in a lab usually means a liquid medium to supply nutrients and oxygen to muscle cells seeded on petri dishes or applied to gel scaffoldings. Since these cultured muscles are small and ideally flat, nutrients and oxygen from the medium can easily reach every cell in the growing culture.
With the help of mRNA technology proven effective during the COVID pandemic, researchers are now closer than ever to creating viable cancer vaccines.
In an interview with Wired, Lennard Lee, an oncologist with the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) working on mRNA cancer vaccines, says he believes the groundbreaking research may prove to be a "silver lining" in the brutal COVID-19 pandemic.
Before COVID, as Lee told the magazine, "cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research."
"Pretty much every clinical trial had failed," the NHS oncologist said. "With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible."
As with mRNA COVID vaccines, the logistics of these potential new cancer inoculations work by "giving the body instructions" to fight troublesome cells, as Lee detailed, ultimately providing the immune system with a how-to manual on fighting cancer.
"Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward," he told Wired. "Same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient."
Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach taken with the widespread usage of mRNA COVID jabs, however, these new cancer vaccines will be personalized for each individual cancer patient.
"In the current trials," Lee elucidated, "we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer."
"That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else," he recounted to the magazine. "It’s like science fiction."
According to Lee, breakthrough cancer vaccine innovation came on the heels of the UK's rapid infrastructure-building during the COVID pandemic, which saw the country "open and deliver clinical trials" much faster than anyone would have expected.
As COVID began winding down in 2022, Lee and his colleagues set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, a post-pandemic pet project that segued mRNA research into the arena of oncology. Not long after, "the dominoes started falling very quickly" as that project and others around the world rapidly progressed towards cancer vaccines. One NHS trial seeking to stop skin cancer from coming back was completed a year early — something that's "completely unheard of," Lee said.
The NHS oncologist told Wired that the results from that trial should come out by the end of this year or the beginning of 2026. If it was successful, Lee told Wired, he and his team "will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine — an impressive feat indeed, especially this soon after the technology was deployed at scale during the pandemic.
Quest's highly anticipated "Passthrough Camera API" is now available for all developers to experiment with, though they can't yet include it in store app builds.
The new capability was announced at Meta Connect 2024 in September as coming this year. Now it's here, as an experimental release for Quest 3 and Quest 3S. That means any developer can experiment with it, and even distribute APKs using it on platforms like SideQuest, but they can't yet include it in Meta Horizon Store apps. Meta has taken this approach for new APIs multiple times in the past, and typically makes the feature available for use in store apps within a few months at most.
Select developers have had early access to experiment with the capability for a while now, and Meta will host Niantic, Creature, and Resolution to discuss it at GDC next week.
What Is Passthrough Camera Access?
While headsets like Quest 3 use cameras to let you see the real world, until now only the system software got raw access to these cameras. Third-party developers could use passthrough as a background, sure, but they didn't actually get access to it. They instead got higher-level data derived by the system, such as hand and body skeletal coordinates, a 3D mesh of your environment with bounding boxes for furniture, and limited object tracking capabilities. That meant they couldn't run their own computer vision models, which severely limited the augmentation capabilities of these headsets.
The exception was that on visionOS 2, Apple gives enterprise companies raw access to Vision Pro's passthrough cameras for non-public internal apps, but this requires a special licence from Apple and is restricted to "in a business setting only".
For the "Passthrough Camera API" to work, you as the user need to grant the app permission to access your headset cameras, just as you would the microphone. If granted, the app gets access to the forward-facing color cameras, including metadata like the lens intrinsics and headset pose, which it can leverage to run custom computer vision models.
Examples of how apps could use this include scanning and tracking QR codes, detecting a game board on a table to add virtual characters and objects to it, detecting physical objects for enterprise guide experiences, or integrating the visual AI functionality of cloud-hosted large language models (LLMs). Developers are only limited by which real-time computer vision models can run on the XR2 Gen 2 chipset performantly, or which cloud-hosted image models they're willing to pay for.
Meta software engineer Roberto Coviello's QuestCameraKit samples.
The passthrough camera stream is provided to the app with up to 1280×960 resolution per camera at 30FPS, with a stated latency of 40-60 milliseconds. That means it isn't suitable for tracking fast moving objects, such as custom controllers, nor for discerning fine features like small text.
Technically, at a base level, there is no specific Meta Quest Camera Passthrough API, nor is it an extension to OpenXR. Developers do need to request a Horizon OS specific Headset Cameras permission, but otherwise Quest's passthrough camera access leverages Android's existing Camera2 API to also return the headset pose, obtained with OpenXR, and the Camera2 API is what developers of custom engines, or source code for Unreal or Godot, use for it. This also means the same code should work on Google's upcoming Android XR platform, set to debut in Samsung's standalone headset, with only the permission request being different.
For Unity, developers can easily access the cameras through Unity's WebCamTexture API, which is how they already access phone, tablet, and PC cameras and webcams in the engine. A limitation here, however, is that Unity's WebCamTexture API only supports one camera at a time, not both.
Walkthrough from Meta software engineer Roberto Coviello.
Interested developers can find Quest passthrough camera access documentation here: Unity / Native Android.
Meta has published five official Unity samples on GitHub: CameraViewer, CameraToWorld, BrightnessEstimation, MultiObjectDectection, ShaderSample. Meta software engineer Roberto Coviello has separately published QuestCameraKit on GitHub, a collection of five further samples: Color Picker, Object Detection with Unity Sentis, QR Code Tracking with ZXing, Frosted Glass Shader, and OpenAI vision model.
In decades past, as the effects of climate change slowly became undeniable, some looked to the super-rich — the billionaires with enough cash to really make a splash — for solutions.
By the early 2020s, billionaires had positioned themselves as the masters of climate change policy, taking advantage of their great fortunes to become indispensable to environmentalism.
Now, however, many of those same billionaires are pulling support at an alarming rate. And Bill Gates — Microsoft founder, sixth richest man in the world, and alleged sex pest — is the latest among them.
New reporting by Heatmap is signaling the end of a "major chapter in climate giving," as Breakthrough Energy — Gates' climate change nonprofit — has locked the doors on its policy and advocacy office, laying off dozens of employees throughout Europe and the US.
Breakthrough's lobbying was central to advancing climate policy through legislation championed by the Biden administration, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Though the billionaire's for-profit green energy investments at companies like Arnergy and Mission Zero Technologies remain in place, Breakthrough's belt-tightening will very likely end the nonprofit's grant writing efforts. That's a major blow to climate nonprofits, and further evidence that, for all their feel-good bluster, the mega-rich never forget their bottom line.
Ever since billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump won his second presidential election, tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and of course Elon Musk have made no bones about shedding their progressive skin and embracing the new administration.
Gates, too, is cozying up to the returning president. In early January, the Microsoft founder spent three hours dining with his fellow billionaire, telling the Wall Street Journal he was "frankly impressed" by Trump's grasp on the issues dear to him.
Though many no doubt feel betrayed by what seems like a sudden rightward turn, billionaires like Gates have always behaved like wolves in sheep's clothing, prioritizing their fortunes above all.
For example, Gates was heavily involved in establishing the Global Fund, a privately-funded rival to the World Health Organization. While the Global Fund did improve global vaccination rates, the cost of basic medicines skyrocketed thanks to his introduction of for-profit actors into global health efforts — another sector made to rely on the generosity of billionaires.
Geniatech’s latest AI-powered industrial ARM box PC integrates the NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor with Kinara’s Ara-2 AI accelerator, offering up to 40 TOPS of AI computing power. This fanless, industrial-grade solution is designed for edge AI applications, providing an alternative to high-cost desktop AI workstations. It supports large AI models with billions of parameters, making it a powerful tool for on-device inference and processing without relying on cloud-based APIs. The device is showcased at Embedded World 2025, emphasizing its capability to run models like DeepSeek and LLaMA while maintaining data privacy. For more details, visit: https://www.geniatech.com/embedded
The system-on-chip (SoC) combines a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with an additional Cortex-M7 core, ensuring efficient processing for AI workloads. The integrated neural processing unit (NPU) within the i.MX 8M Plus delivers 2.3 TOPS of AI acceleration, while Kinara’s Ara-2 extends this capability to 40 TOPS, significantly boosting inference speed. This setup allows developers to deploy AI applications directly at the edge, reducing latency and operational costs.
With up to 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM for the Kinara Ara-2 AI accelerator and 8GB to 16GB LPDDR4 for the i.MX 8M Plus, the system supports memory-intensive AI tasks. Storage options include 32GB eMMC, expandable to 256GB, ensuring ample space for large AI models and datasets. Video processing capabilities include 1080p60 HEVC, H.265, and VP9 decoding, alongside HDR ISP support for high-quality imaging applications.
The device’s connectivity features include dual Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, and GPS support, making it adaptable to various industrial and AI-driven IoT environments. Video output is handled through HDMI and LVDS, with additional interfaces including USB 3.0, RS232, CAN, and MIPI CSI for camera integration. This wide range of I/O options enables deployment in smart surveillance, industrial automation, and other AI-driven edge computing applications.
Unlike traditional AI computing solutions requiring high-end GPUs, Geniatech’s embedded system provides a cost-effective and energy-efficient alternative. With its easy-to-install software and over-the-air update capabilities, the system ensures continuous improvements and access to the latest AI models. The focus on local processing enhances privacy by keeping data on the device rather than relying on cloud services.
As AI adoption continues to grow, Geniatech is actively exploring future developments, including support for larger AI models, potentially reaching 32 billion parameters. This commitment to scalability positions the company as a key player in industrial AI, addressing the increasing demand for edge AI computing solutions.
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Today, I want to discuss one of the XR technologies that has been getting more hype lately: smartglasses. I want to start my analysis with what I’ve seen at CES and then go beyond that and discuss what I envision for the future of this technology.
Smartglasses at CES
In the XR area (and beyond), smartglasses were one of the most popular technologies at CES. There were so many smartglasses and technologies related to smartglasses (e.g. waveguide systems) that I couldn’t try them all. For instance, it’s a pity that I’ve not been able to try the Halliday glasses. But still, I managed to get my hands on a few interesting devices.
Lightweight glasses
The first lightweight (AI) smartglasses that I tried there have been Rokid Glasses, the latest device by Rokid, one of the leading companies in AR. These are very lightweight smartglasses that have speakers, a monochrome green waveguide display for notifications and small texts, and a camera to shoot photos and videos. They have a companion app through which you can manage them and thanks to this you can also have connectivity to an AI agent and other AI services. Here you can see some photos I’ve taken of the product:
I liked the fact that Rokid glasses were very lightweight and also stylish. This is because the glasses are built in collaboration with Swedesh eyewear manufacturer BOLON… which is one of the brands of the EssilorLuxottica group.
These glasses look pretty cool. My face is not as cool as the glasses, though
They were also doing their job pretty well: I tried to have a conversation with one of the Rokid employees there, with her speaking Chinese and I speaking English (and also a bit Chinese), and I could see the translation of what she was saying written in green in front of my eyes.
You can see the glasses in action in this video by Tyriell Wood
The companion app also allowed me to speak with an AI assistant and also had some fitness-oriented features that I had not tried. But I have tried to shoot some photos and videos: they are recorded on the glasses and then can be moved on the phone through the companion app. The quality of the recorded media is not fabulous, but it’s ok. All the time, the screen was just green, but the color was quite vivid (the glasses have like 1000 nits), so the text was very readable.
Through-the-lenses of Rokid Glasses
I liked the glasses by Rokid: they were lightweight, fashionable, the screen was readable, and they were able to do few things and do them well. They were not perfect, but good for the current status of the technology.
Specifications of Rokid AR glasses
Fast forward a few days, the last glasses that I tried at CES were the ones by LAWK, which is another Chinese brand. They featured a display showing notifications and green text and they allowed me to speak with an AI, have live translation between English and Chinese, and shoot photos and videos. If this sounds familiar to you, it is because you’ve read the same things in this article, 10 lines ago. Long story short, many of the smartglasses were just clones the one of the other, just with a different design. LAWK ONE, the device currently available on the website of the company, is anyway much bulkier than the Rokid glasses, also because it is targeted at people doing sports, like cycling on a bike.
LAWK ONE glasses
I can confirm that also in this case, the glasses were working, with the translation service doing its job. I was not a big fan of the look and feel, though, especially because the frames were pretty big.
Me wearing the LAWK ONE smartglasses
LAWK had also a new model of glasses that were as lightweight as Rokid’s and I could put them on my face and see they were pretty comfortable, even if not as stylish as the ones designed by BOLON for Rokid.
LAWK’s more lightweight glasses
I could not turn them on because the guy at the booth told me “They have the same features as the others you tried, no need to turn them on”. So my review on them will basically be “Trust me, dude”.
They work. Probably.The companion app for LAWK smartglasses
I’ve already written an article about my hands-on with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. But summarizing my experience with them: I’ve found them stylish and comfortable, the speakers were loud and clear, the videos and photos taken were good, and I was intrigued by the potentialities of the AI features. Even if they had no display, they were still able to deliver a lot. Still, the demo with them was about… photos and videos, live translation, and AI.
Me being very classy with my suit and the Ray-Ban Meta glasses
There were some private rooms by Google and Samsung at CES and surely they were demoing Android XR to close partners. Unluckily I’ve never been able to try an Android XR device. But from what I’ve read in the various magazines when they broke the news about this new operating system, the demos of the Android smartglasses prototypes were about live translation, AI, photos, and videos. I guess you’re not surprised by it.
The only official image about Project Moohan (Image by Google)
I also had a quick hands-on with the TCL RayNeo X3 Pro. What impressed me about these glasses is that the display had colors. It was not green, it was RGB and could show also 2D icons of the various applications. And the visuals were also pretty bright: with 2500 nits they should theoretically work also outdoors. The FOV was the usual small one typical of the smartglasses. And the processor was a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR-1. All of this was in a form factor which was still rather small and comfortable to wear. I’m not surprised that many journalists attending MWC praised this device (e.g. in this article or this other one). The fun thing is that if you read the articles from MWC, you will discover that the main use case that the journalists have tried was AI translation from Chinese to English. Ah and there were also photos and videos of course.
TCL RayNeo X3 Pro
I liked the use of RGB colors on the display because it allowed the glasses to have an interface that was prettier. And the glasses were not much bigger than the competition. But they were more expensive.
Also these glasses didn’t look that bad on my face, after all
Since most smartglasses were basically the same thing, after a while I even stopped trying them. I read so many translations from Chinese to English that I became fluent in Mandarin.
Ah, I’ve also shot some pictures at the Vuzix booth, let me share them with you:
Vuzix booth at CESOf course I’ve also taken a selfie with the Vuzix glasses!
My vision for lightweight smartglasses
I have mixed feelings about the hype for smartglasses. On one side, I understand it: thanks to the advancements in technology, it is now finally possible to have a tech wearable that looks cool on your face. You can wear smartglasses and not looking like a weird dork, but just a person wearing glasses. I pretty enjoyed trying them and taking selfies with them. I also think that they are useful because they will allow us to connect with AI in our everyday tasks: when we wear these glasses, the AI can see what we are seeing and suggest us what to do. This can be very useful, and potentially also life-changing.
On the other side, I think we should be cautious. First of all, the hype for smartglasses has stemmed from the success of Ray-Ban Meta, but it seems people are not considering that Ray-Ban had huge merits in this success story. Ray-Ban Meta are Ray-Ban glasses, so they are cool, they are stylish, they make you wear a famous brand. They are distributed by Essilorluxottica in all its glasses shops, so you can enter a shop to buy some sunglasses, and you can come out with sunglasses that beyond being cool sunglasses can also shoot photos and videos. Ray-Ban Meta is enhanced eyewear, the other devices I have tried are tech products. Yes, technically they are the same, but they are sold in a way that makes a difference. Plus Ray-Ban Meta is a product, a finished and polished one: many demos of the other smartglasses I tried had issues, while Ray-Ban Meta worked like a charm. Plus the Meta showcase booth was amazing and also had a very cool case for every one of the glasses. That’s why even if Meta glasses lacked a screen that instead the other glasses were having, I still consider them a better product than the other smartglasses I’ve tried.
Trying on Meta Glasses and their AI features
Then I think we should talk about the use cases. I don’t wear glasses, so to make me put something in my face for hours, you should give me a strong reason. And live translation from Chinese to English is not one: as much as I travel a lot to China, I don’t need it every day of my life. I’m someone who travels a lot, but most people travel less than me, so translation services are pretty useless to them. No one needs to do translations every day. Taking photos and videos from your point of view is nice. Regarding fitness, I don’t think I would ever run with glasses not made for sports. Long story short, I don’t understand why I should buy them. This is the same problem that smartwatches had in the beginning, until they found their purposes, like in the healthcare and fitness sectors. I don’t think we have a killer use case for smartglasses yet.
You may counter my argument by saying that if there are no clear use cases, then why are people buying the Ray-Ban Meta? Well, people buying a Ray-Ban Meta are entering an eyewear shop because they already want to buy glasses. So they already have a need. And if they can choose between cool Ray-Ban glasses and cool Ray-Ban glasses with extra features, they buy the second one, of course. This is different than waking up one day and going to the Rokid website and buying smartglasses. Hugely different. To do that, I have to feel the need to buy smartglasses, and currently, I don’t have it. Sure, we’ll get there, it is a matter of time, I’m just saying that TODAY I’m not as hyped about smartglasses as other people are, because I don’t see a reason why someone who doesn’t need glasses should wear them every day. But I’m surely positive about the future.
One last thing about use cases and usability: I think one big issue with these glasses is that they are not programmable. Apart from a few ones, like Brilliant Labs Frame, most of these glasses just work with their companion app and deliver the features implemented by the manufacturer (which means the translation between Chinese and English…). I wonder when these glasses, and in particular Meta Ray-Ban, will allow developers to create applications for them. This would be good for developers who can so have a new source of revenue in a growing market and would be good for manufacturers because developers could envision new use cases, possibly not related to translation. This could be a good boost for the ecosystem. That’s why I was pretty intrigued by the idea of AugmentOS to offer an SDK to develop your application once and let it run on different smart glasses.
XREAL, Lenovo, and the virtual screens
Beyond the AI smartglasses, there is another category of smartglasses that is kinda popular and it is the one delivering one or multiple virtual screens to the user. At CES I tried a few devices in this sense, one being the glasses from Lenovo, that were connected to a gaming console…
They look a bit like sunglasses for policemen
…. and another one being the XREAL One Pro, which can be connected both to your phone and your PC. XREAL was one of the booths with the most visitors in the XR area, and for a reason: in these years they managed to establish themselves as one of the best brands for what concerns stylish AR glasses and smart glasses.
XREAL One Pro is a very interesting device: it is quite lightweight (even if not as much as the AI smartglasses) and can show you a big virtual version of your laptop screen. Through the buttons on the frames, you can configure a few options and for instance, decide if you want this virtual screen always attached to your eyes (0 DOF) or to stay fixed in a position in front of you (3 DOF). You can also decide if to keep the classical aspect ratio of your display or have an ultra-wide one. The colors of the display were pretty crisp and the text of the virtual screen in front of me was very readable. These glasses have two clear use cases: one is media consumption, so watching Netflix on a big screen in front of you; and the other one is productivity, which is letting you do your work on a big screen, which is great, especially for people working with multimedia.
Xreal One Pro glasses
My friend Tyriel Wood, who attended the CES with me, told me that he likes this kind of device and they are already pretty useful for him. We are at a stage where they can already be used in productivity. After my hands-on, I’m almost convinced about this piece of hardware, with my three only problems being the FOV, the connected hardware, and the eye fatigue.
XREAL did a great job in making the FOV as large as possible with its 57°. But still, when I was looking at the ultrawide virtual screen, I felt I could not see the whole screen from my glasses, but some tiny lateral parts were missing. We need more FOV so that I don’t have to turn my head to see the different portions of the virtual screen.
I look pretty cool with the XREAL One Pro on
Regarding the connected hardware, my problem is finding a setup that lets me work on the go. For me, it would be ideal if I could just carry some smartglasses, a small keyboard with a touchpad (like the ones of tablets), my phone, and be able to work from everywhere (e.g. the planes, the buses, etc…), without having to carry the big weight and dimensions of my laptop. Having a widescreen on my desk would be good, but instead of buying an XREAL One Pro, I could buy an extra monitor for much less money. But if a future evolution of XREAL One Pro could give me a working station from everywhere, without having to take with me a big bag every time, I would insta-buy it. In fact, I loved the demo of the XREAL Air 2 Ultra because they made me try the glasses with a keyboard and a phone.
This is how I imagine I could work in the future
Regarding eye fatigue, I can not comment on the long-term usage of these glasses, because I’ve tried them only for a few minutes, but I wonder how would I feel after having worn them for 12 hours a day. If I had to make a bet, I would say they stress the eyes more than a standard display, but I can not be sure of that until XREAL sends me one (XREAL people, if you are reading this, send me your glasses!)
In any case, I think this type of device is already pretty nice and useful for some use cases. If the FOV was bigger, it would be even better.
XREAL Air 2 Ultra
Ted Schilowitz trying XREAL Air 2 Ultra glasses
The last type of device I want to talk about is the XREAL Air 2 Ultra, which is 6 DOF glasses. It’s good to see that XREAL is back to doing 6 DOF glasses and I have to say the device is pretty good. The glasses can show 3D objects in the environment around you, with bright colors and a decent FOV. They work being connected to the phone, so they can not render very heavy scenes. I’ve tried also the hand tracking and found it to be ok, but not as advanced as the one from Meta or Ultraleap.
The road to AR devices
Meta Orion glasses (Image by Meta)
I wanted to mention my brief hands-on with the XREAL Air 2 Ultra because I think that in the end, 6DOF AR glasses are the endgame for all the devices I have described in this article. AI smart glasses, and glasses for virtual screens, are all simplified versions of glasses that take care of a specific use case for an affordable price. But the final mission is having a device that can do all that these glasses can do, and even more: of course, I’m talking about 6DOF glasses that can understand the environment around us and render both 3D and 2D objects.
Unluckily, the technology today is not ready to make the AR glasses of our dreams, and in fact, the most advanced glasses we know about, Meta Orion, cost more than $20K to manufacture. But I’m a big believer we’ll get there, and in the meanwhile, all the various smartglasses that are being sold will be useful to find use cases for which people want to put some glasses on their face and to make wearing tech glasses more socially acceptable. Hopefully, this period will also be useful in understanding how to guarantee privacy to the users who are wearing glasses with cameras, but I’m not sure this will happen, unluckily.
A fun moment at CES
Since I like to always add a touch of humor to my posts, let me tell you something weird that happened when I visited the booth of a Chinese manufacturer of smartglasses. After I had tried the device, including the usual photo-taking and AI translation, I asked the guy at the booth. “What’s the price of this?” and he answered something like “58 grams” I was pretty confused, so I asked again “What’s the price?” And he answered this time. “Europe, USA” I was getting pretty confused… it was like a slot machine that every time was given me a random sentence in English in return, so I asked again. “What’s the price, the cost, money?” And he started looking at the sky as if he hoped the Gods may tell him the right answer. Considering that he stood still like this for 5 seconds, I guess the Gods were busy doing something else. In the end, I had really enough so I went into full Chinese mode and asked “多少钱?” to which he answered me 400$ and then said a lot of things speaking in Chinese superfast I couldn’t understand (and to which I was tempted to answer with “58 grams”).
I have a question for this guy: I understand that ...
This week, Vuzix Corporation noted a major uptick in its hardware sales and adoption. This follows a period in 2024 when 2023’s third-quarter figures dropped due to lower sales of the M400 product in key areas like Asia.
However, Xander is significantly reordering Vuzix Shield AR smart glasses that are helping to continue an upward tick for the veteran’s enterprise XR hardware vendor, which appeared to kick into action following the Q2 drop.
The Vuzix Shield provides a hardware framework to enable Xander to drive support and increase customer interest in its XanderGlasses solution, a patient care solution that allows users with auditory disorders to leverage real-time informatory AR captions to support everyday tasks.
The XanderGlasses solution leverages Vuzix brand AR smart glasses technology to enable the focused solution, with Alex Westner, Co-Founder and CEO of Xander, noting:
With 48 million people in the U.S. experiencing hearing loss, a number that continues to rise, XanderGlasses empower individuals to ‘see’ what others are saying. Our team has worked closely with individuals at all stages of hearing loss to develop a simple and reliable solution that meets real-world needs.
Xanderglasses transforms the Vuzix Shield hardware into a device ready for this specific healthcare need. Xander gained recognition for its product as the CES 2024 Innovation Award Honoree in the category of Accessibility & Aging Tech.
“As hearing loss affects a growing segment of the global population, including veterans, those exposed to prolonged noise, and ageing individuals, innovative solutions like XanderGlasses can make a significant impact,” remarked Paul Travers, President and CEO of Vuzix.
Vuzix Surges in the AR Market
The news comes during a much-needed period of growth for Vuzix. Travers noted that “by combining Vuzix Shield smart glasses with Xander’s powerful embedded voice captioning software, we are addressing a significant need,” creating further demand for its hardware portfolio, “we look forward to supporting Xander as they scale their solution this year and beyond.”
Last year’s Q2 financial report included total revenues decreasing by a staggering 77 percent to approximately $1.1 million. In comparison, the previous year’s revenue was about $4.7 million. Additionally, Vuzix reported an annual gross loss of $0.3 million for Q2 2023.
Since this staggering return, Vuzix has experienced a strong upturn, showing the drop was a mere blip. Moreover, interest in AR smart glasses continues to rise.
Vuzix has significantly expanded its collaboration with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which broadens the deployment of its M400 workplace AR smart glasses within the governmental organization.
Additionally, Vuzix introduced AugmentOS, a specialized operating system designed for immersive human-computer interfaces in workplace settings. This operating system is now available for Vuzix’s product line, enabling both end-users and developers to utilize products such as the Z100 smart glasses, which incorporate AI functionality.
In 2025, Vuzix is experiencing notable success, and with the AR smart glasses market booming, the company is gaining impressive momentum.
At Embedded World 2025, Geniatech unveiled a groundbreaking 31.5-inch ePaper display, marking a significant advancement in ePaper technology. This large-format display integrates a specialized algorithm to enable smooth motion and fast refresh rates, making it one of the first ePaper screens capable of displaying video content. The development of this technology has been highly anticipated for decades, as traditional ePaper has struggled with slow refresh rates. Now, with Geniatech’s innovation, dynamic content can be displayed with impressive clarity and fluidity. https://www.geniatech.com/epaper-digital-signage/
One of the standout features of this display is its ability to render partial refreshes, allowing for rapid content updates without requiring a full-screen refresh. This makes it ideal for applications such as digital signage, public information displays, and outdoor advertising, where frequent updates are needed. The technology behind this display leverages FPGA-based processing to optimize refresh performance, overcoming the limitations of conventional ePaper solutions.
The reflective nature of ePaper ensures excellent visibility in various lighting conditions, including direct sunlight, making it particularly suitable for outdoor applications. Unlike traditional LCD or OLED screens, which rely on backlighting, this display utilizes ambient light to create high-contrast images, ensuring readability while reducing power consumption. This ultra-low power requirement makes it a strong candidate for energy-efficient digital signage solutions.
Geniatech’s approach to ePaper also focuses on sustainability. With minimal energy use and a display design engineered for longevity, it aligns with industry efforts to reduce electronic waste and power consumption. Businesses looking to implement digital signage with lower environmental impact will find this solution appealing, as it offers both performance and efficiency without compromising on readability.
The sharpness and responsiveness of this display make it particularly effective in scenarios where static and motion content need to coexist. For example, retail environments can use it for dynamic pricing updates, real-time promotional content, and interactive wayfinding displays. Similarly, transportation hubs could deploy it for up-to-date scheduling and route information.
Geniatech anticipates that this 31.2-inch ePaper display will enter mass production within the next two months. The combination of video playback capability, energy efficiency, and outdoor readability positions it as a transformative solution for businesses and organizations seeking innovative display technologies. As more industries explore ePaper for dynamic content, this breakthrough could reshape the landscape of digital signage.
Check out all my Embedded World 2025 videos in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7xXqJFxvYvjgUpdNMBkGzEWU6YVxR8Ga
This video was filmed using the DJI Pocket 3 ($669 at https://amzn.to/4aMpKIC using the dual wireless DJI Mic 2 microphones with the DJI lapel microphone https://amzn.to/3XIj3l8 ), watch all my DJI Pocket 3 videos here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7xXqJFxvYvhDlWIAxm_pR9dp7ArSkhKK
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Google is reportedly set to acquire Canada-based eye-tracking startup AdHawk Microsystems Inc., something that would strengthen the company’s ongoing foray into XR headsets and glasses.
As reported by Bloomberg’sMark Gurman, Google is allegedly acquiring AdHawk for $115 million, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The deal is said to include $15 million in future payments based on the eye-tracking company reaching performance targets. While the acquisition is purportedly slated to conclude this week, a deal still hasn’t been signed, leaving some room for doubt. Furthermore, should the deal go through, the report maintains AdHawk’s staff will join Google’s Android XR team.
This isn’t the first time AdHawk has flirted with an acquisition by a key XR player. In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company was in the final stages of an acquisition by Meta.
Notably, AdHawk is best known for its innovations in eye-tracking, which replaces traditional cameras with micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), which is said to result in faster processing and reduced power consumption—two things highly prized by AR and smart glasses creators today.
Image courtesy AdHawk Microsystems Inc.
Its flagship product, the MindLink glasses, is a research-focused device that is meant to connect eye movements with neurological and ocular health, human behavior, and state of mind, the company says on its website. Additionally, the company offers its camera-free eye-tracking modules for researchers working with VR devices, such as Meta Quest.
While neither Google nor AdHawk have commented on report, Google is ramping up its XR division to compete with the likes of Meta and Apple.
In December, Google announced Android XR, marking a decisive shift for the company’s XR efforts, as the company is bringing a ‘full fat’ version of Android to headsets for the first time, which not only includes XR-specific apps but also the full slate of Android content. Android XR is ostensibly set to debut on Samsung’s Project Moohan mixed reality headset, which still has no release date or price.
Then, in January, Google announced the acquisition of a number of HTC’s XR engineers, a deal amounting to $250 million. At the time, Google said HTC veterans would “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”
In addition to supporting its Android XR software efforts, the acquisition of a novel eye-tracking startup would also prove valuable in the company’s internal XR hardware efforts, which has been nothing short of fragmented over the years.
Un actionnaire minoritaire d'Ubisoft lance un appel à la protestation contre la gestion actuelle de l'entreprise, après plusieurs années de résultats décevants et d'incertitudes financières.
Après avoir fait sensation auprès du public et des artistes à Las Vegas, le concept spectaculaire de la Sphere s’apprête à évoluer pour s’adresser à un public plus large et à diversifier les expériences proposées.
Constituant une véritable révolution technologique, l’Intelligence Artificielle (IA), et plus particulièrement l’IA générative, impacte désormais la gestion de contenu au sein des entreprises, redéfinissant notamment les pratiques des secteurs du luxe et du retail. En s’intégrant progressivement aux plateformes de gestion de contenu, ces technologies offrent des opportunités inédites pour optimiser les processus internes et enrichir l’expérience client. Décryptage.
Ce n’est pas un hasard si l’IA générative fait désormais partie intégrante des stratégies digitales des entreprises du luxe et du retail. Louis Vuitton, Dior ou encore Estée Lauder font partie des premiers à s’être emparés de cette technologie, l’intégrant notamment dans le développement d’agents conversationnels au service de l’expérience client.
