spatialcomputing.info

I never heard back from the mods so delete this if it isn’t allowed.

Hi, I’m a student at the University of Michigan and I run an XR student organization there called the Alternate Reality Initiative. Every year we hold a conference, called the XR Midwest Conference, which is taking place online with Zoom this year. The conference highlights XR innovators in the Midwest region of the United States. The conference takes place this Sunday, April 5th and will have speakers throughout the day, going from around 10am – 5pm EDT. It is completely free to register for and I hope to see you there!

Register with this link: https://us04web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8015855155285/WN_mGDRx8NSTwWca37_5neGYA

While Google is obviously good at producing technology, their holistic product strategy towards their goal of ambient computing is incredibly behind. You know who has the most AR phones, smartwatches, and wireless earbud market share? Apple. Google has dropped the ball on ALL of those things, which makes it kind of hilarious that they talk about ambient computing already, meanwhile they only just bought FitBit (ie are yet to turn them into Google devices) and don’t even have wireless earbuds available yet, let alone ones with noise canceling.

Google probably bought FitBit to try and get larger market share of people’s wrists.

There’s no one you can buy to compete with Apple in the smart hearables space right now. Sony? Bose? HK? They all make headphones, not hearables.

So, they are behind on the hardware. Fine. That’s to be expected, and they’re working towards it. But given that, they might want to really build a huge moat/lead in the race to build, maintain, own and regulate an AR Cloud. Niantic just bought 6D, and Niantic’s last round had them valued at $4B. If you really believe that AR is the next computing platform, then I think it would make sense to spend the money to acquire Niantic now. Maybe they’re trying.

Caveat – I am not saying I want this to happen, this is just a discussion on whether or not you think it would be in Google’s interest to pursue this strategy. I think many of us are thrilled to see the continued growth of a newcomer in this space. I know Matt from 6D is often here on the forums, so feel free to say hi even though I doubt you can comment much on this particular post 🙂

Right now with no AR Cloud it’s not like I’m going to randomly pull my phone out to explore some cool AR concept. It’s either functional (ruler, room mapping), or games/activities/experiences that I would probably enjoy more with a bigger screen of a tablet, given that both the phone and tablet require your hands anyway.

https://spase.io/converter

I work in 3D commerce and have found it frustrating trying to create USDZ files without a Mac. I created an online tool to make this easier and I hope it helps if you’re having the same problem.

Currently it only takes glTF as input (in packed .glb format, because that’s the immediate use for my work), but I’ll add more file formats in the future. Let me know if you have any issues/thoughts/suggestions!