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Smartglasses

AR Startup Brilliant Labs Secures $3M Seed Funding from Oculus & Siri Co-founders

From roadtovr

Brilliant Labs, an AR startup working to integrate AI into daily life, announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding which it will use to expand its team and invest in R&D for its open-source, AI-powered smartglasses.

The funding round was led by Brendan Iribe, co-founder of Oculus, Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri, Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, and Plug & Play Ventures, among others.

Founded in 2019, Brilliant Labs describes its design approach as “embodied intelligence.” Its one-eyed ‘Monocle’ smartglasses dev kit is an open-source device which began shipping in February 2023, offering up a single-lens design that’s supposed to clip onto existing eyewear. For now, Monocle boasts a six-hour battery life with a charging case, which includes fast charging technology.

Monocle | Image courtesy Brilliant Labs

Similar to Google Glass, Brilliant Labs’ Monocle serves up text via a single waveguide, doing things like letting you see important information while remaining present in the moment. Monocle also includes an embedded microphone, computer vision-ready camera, and hackable FPGA accelerator chip.

In addition to the latest funding round, Brilliant Labs also announced the launch of arGPT, the company’s first ChatGPT integration for Monocle, letting developers directly use the generative AI as well as build apps on top of arGPT.

“We believe that Generative AI is the key enabler for AR, so at Brilliant Labs, we’re building an open-source ecosystem to support developers and creatives reimagining the future, and Monocle is just the beginning. We’re excited to see what developers create with it,” said Bobak Tavangar, Founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs. “We’re thrilled to have the support of our investors as we usher in a new era of embodied intelligence – the intersection of AI and AR.”

Other investors in its seed funding round include Steve Sarowitz, founder of Paylocity and Chairman of Wayfarer Studios, Nirav Patel, former core team member at Oculus and founder of Framework, Francisco Tolmasky, member of the original iPhone team, and Moveon Technologies.

Want to know the difference between smartglasses and AR glasses? Check out our primer on what’s what (and why everyone is confused).

Google Discontinues Glass Enterprise Edition Smartglasses

From roadtovr

Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, the company’s work-focused version of its iconic but once maligned smartglasses, is being discontinued.

Google says in a device support FAQ that, starting March 15th, it will no longer sell Glass Enterprise 2, adding that it will only support the device until September 15th, 2023.

While the company says it’s not pushing out any more software for Glass Enterprise Edition after that date, however its most recent system images will remain publicly available until at least April 1st, 2024.

Launched in 2017, Google Glass for enterprise was a revival of sorts, as the company had ceased production of the storied device in 2015.

Google Glass Explorer Edition | Image courtesy Alphabet

Starting in 2012, the company was hoping to seed the device among prosumers with its Glass Explorer Editions, although public backlash spawned the term “glasshole,” putting a severe dent in Google’s ambitions to launch a more consumer-focused version of the device.

Google hasn’t explained why it’s killing off Glass for enterprise. In response to PC Mag, a Google spokesperson left this comment:

“For years, we’ve been building AR into many Google products and we’ll continue to look at ways to bring new, innovative AR experiences across our product portfolio.”

To be fair, Google probably has bigger fish to fry, and the aging smartglasses platform may well be replaced sooner rather than later. Google said last summer it would be conducting real world tests of its early AR prototypes, emphasizing things like real-time translation and AR turn-by-turn navigation.

There’s also the issue of emerging competition. Apple’s upcoming mixed reality (MR) headset is rumored to arrive sometime in mid-2023, while Meta is prepping multiple generations of its MR Quest headsets.

Granted, these MR headsets probably won’t be the model workhorses, although many companies see MR headsets as a steppingstone in preparation for the sort of all-day AR glasses industry is hoping to commercialize in the near future.

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To be clear, Google Glass is a style of smartglass(es) and not an AR device as such; Glass provides a single heads-up display (HUD) that doesn’t place digital imagery naturally in the user’s perceived environment, like with HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap 2, but rather flatly projects the sort of useful information you might also see on a smartwatch. You can learn more about the differences between AR headsets and smartglasses here.