augmented reality
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Jio Platforms backs SF-based AR gaming startup Krikey
Jio Platforms, the biggest telecom operator in India and which has raised over $20 billion from Facebook, Google and other high-profile investors this year, is leading a financing round of a San Francisco-based startup that develops augmented reality mobile games.
Jio has led the Series A fundraise of Krikey, founded by sisters Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram, the Indian firm said on Wednesday. They did not disclose the size of Krikey’s Series A round, but Jio said Krikey has raised $22 million to date.
Krikey has previously not disclosed any financing rounds, according to their listings on Crunchbase, CBInsights and Tracxn. Jio also did not share who else participated in Krikey’s new round.
As part of the announcement, Krikey has launched Yaatra, a new AR game that invites users to step in an action-adventure story to defeat a monster army. “Using weapons such as the bow and arrow, chakra, lightning and fire bolts, players can battle through different levels of combat and puzzle games,” Krikey said.
Jio subscribers in India will get exclusive access to a range of features in Krikey, available on Android and iOS, including a 3D avatar, and entry to some game levels and weapons. Jio said Yaatra game would also be made available to JioPhone feature-phone users.
Krikey has developed two additional games, including Gorillas, a game the startup developed in partnership with Ellen DeGeneres’s wildlife foundation.
“We believe AR has a huge potential in not just gaming but in many other industries to disrupt the way people interact with the world around them. We are very excited to use the phone as the window back into the natural world and hope that people’s experiences in empathising with birds and guerrillas and different ecosystems will encourage them to start to take real-world conservation behaviour changes,” said Jhanvi in an interview with Cheddar last year.
“Our vision with Krikey is to bring together inspiration and reality in an immersive way. With augmented reality, we are able to bring fantasy worlds into your home, straight through the window of your mobile phone,” said Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram in a joint statement today. They have previously participated in Apple’s female entrepreneur camp.
In a statement, Akash Ambani, director of Jio, said, “Krikey will inspire a generation of Indians to embrace Augmented Reality. Our vision is to bring the best experiences from across the world to India and the introduction of Yaatra is a step in that direction. Augmented Reality gaming takes the user into a world of its own, and we invite every Jio and non-Jio user to experience AR through Yaatra.”
Jio has previously acquired music streaming service Saavn (which has since been rebranded to JioSaavn), and Haptik, a startup that develops conversational platforms and virtual assistants.
We have reached out to Jio and Krikey for more details.
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HBO releases a wellness-focused AR app to promote ‘His Dark Materials’
With the second season of “His Dark Materials” premiering on HBO on November 16, the network has partnered with creative studio Framestore to create a new iOS and Apple Watch app called His Dark Materials: My Daemon.
The free app gives fans of the show (and the Philip Pullman novels on which the show is based) a chance to interact with their very own “daemons” — the magical animal companions that serve as an extension of characters’ souls.
“It’s a really great opportunity to give users and fans of the show the opportunity to have a daemon companion that’s personalized to them,” said Christine Cattano, Framestore’s global head of VR. “And what better way to do that than on your phone, which is a constant companion to us all?”
Users are assigned a daemon after taking a simple quiz consisting of questions like “day or night?” and “above or below?” They can then interact with the daemon by providing basic updates on their current state (like whether they’re feeling focused or distracted). Based on those updates, the daemon will recommend tasks tied to physical and emotional wellness, like going for a walk or a run, or watching a movie.
As users perform more wellness tasks, their daemon becomes happier and healthier. The app also allows users to go on “journeys,” where they perform a series of (again, wellness-focused) tasks that are tied to the activities of characters on the show.
Image Credits: HBO/Framestore
His Dark Materials: My Daemon will learn more about your activities by integrating with Apple Health and Spotify. And it incorporates augmented reality by allowing you to watch animations where you daemon interacts with the world around you. You’ll be able to share your companion interactions on social media, as well.
HBO’s vice president of program marketing Emily Giannusa noted that the original plan was for “large, real world activations.” After all, Framestore didn’t just work on visual effects for the actual “His Dark Materials” show. It also collaborated with HBO to develop “Beyond the Wall,” a virtual reality experience tied to “Game of Thrones,” as well as the Magic Leap GoT experience called “The Dead Must Die,” which were both available via installations in flagship AT&T stores. (AT&T owns HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia.)
But given the pandemic and the need for social distancing, HBO and Framestore knew they had to take a different approach, so Giannusa said they came up with something that could “delight [fans] while they’re at home” — and that should reach a much larger audience in the process.
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7 investors discuss augmented reality and VR startup opportunities in 2020
For all of the investors preaching that augmented reality technology will likely be the successor to the modern smartphone, today, most venture capitalists are still quite wary to back AR plays.
The reasons are plentiful, but all tend to circle around the idea that it’s too early for software and too expensive to try to take on Apple or Facebook on the hardware front.
Meanwhile, few spaces were frothier in 2016 than virtual reality, but most VCs who gambled on VR following Facebook’s Oculus acquisition failed to strike it rich. In 2020, VR did not get the shelter-in-place usage bump many had hoped for largely due to supply chain issues at Facebook, but VCs hope their new cheaper device will spell good things for the startup ecosystem.
To get a better sense of how VCs are looking at augmented reality and virtual reality in 2020, I reached out to a handful of investors who are keeping a close watch on the industry:
- Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
- Tipatat Chennavasin, The Venture Reality Fund
- Brianne Kimmel, Work Life Ventures
- Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX
- Brayton Williams, Boost VC
- Greg Castle, Anorak Ventures
Some investors who are bullish on AR have opted to focus on virtual reality for now, believing that there’s a good amount of crossover between AR and VR software, and that they can make safer bets on VR startups today that will be able to take advantage of AR hardware when it’s introduced.
“Besides Pokémon Go I don’t think we have seen the engagement numbers needed for AR,” Boost VC investor Brayton Williams tells TechCrunch. “We believe VR is still the largest long-term opportunity of the two. AR complements the real world, VR creates endless new worlds.”
Most of the investors I got in contact with were still fairly active in the AR/VR world, but many still disagreed whether the time was right for VR startups. For Jacob Mullins of Shasta Ventures, “It’s still early, but it’s no longer too early.” While Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX says that the market is “sadly not happening yet,” Facebook’s Quest headsets have shown promise.
On the hardware side, the ghost of Magic Leap’s formerly hyped glory still looms large. Few investors are interested in making a hardware play in the AR/VR world, noting that startups don’t have the resources to compete with Facebook or Microsoft on a large-scale rollout. “Hardware is so capital intensive and this entire industry is dependent on the big players continuing to invest in hardware innovation,” General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos tells us.
Even those that are still bullish on startups making hardware plays for more niche audiences acknowledge that life had gotten harder for ambitious founders in these spaces, “the spectacular flare-outs do make it harder for companies to raise large amounts with long product release horizons,” investor Tipatat Chennavasin notes.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
What are your general impressions on the health of the AR/VR market today?
We’re seeing some progress in VR and some of that is happening because of the Oculus ecosystem. They continue to improve the hardware and have a growing catalog of content. I think their onboarding and consumption experience is very consumer-friendly and that’s going to continue to help with adoption. On the consumer side, we’re seeing some companies across gaming, fitness and productivity that are earning and retaining their audiences at a respectable rate. That wasn’t happening even a year ago so it may be partially a COVID lift but habits are forming.
The VR bets of several years ago have largely struggled to pan out, if you were to make a startup investment in this space today what would you need to see?
Companies to watch are the ones that are creating cool experiences with mobile as the first entry point. Wave VR, Rec Room, VRChat are making it really easy for consumers to get a taste of VR with devices they already own. They’re not treating VR as just another gaming peripheral but as a way to create very cool, often celebrity-driven, content. These are the kinds of innovations that makes me optimistic about the VR category in general.
Most investors I chat with seem to be long-term bullish on AR, but are reticent to invest in an explicitly AR-focused startup today. What do you want to see before you make a play here?
In both AR/VR, a founder needs to be both super ambitious but patient. They’ll need to be flexible in thinking and open to pivoting a few times along the way. Product-market fit is always important but I want to see that they have a plan for customer retention. Fun to try is great, habit-forming is much better. Gaming continues to do pretty well as a category for VC dollars but it’d be interesting to see more founders look at making IRL sports experiences more immersive or figuring out how to enhance remote meeting experiences with VR to fix Zoom fatigue.
There have been a few spectacular flare-outs when it comes to AR/VR hardware investments, is there still a startup opportunity in AR/VR hardware?
Hardware is so capital intensive and this entire industry is dependent on the big players continuing to invest in hardware innovation. Facebook and Microsoft seem to be the main companies willing to spend here while others have backed away. If we expand our thinking for a minute, maybe the first real mainstream breakthrough AR/VR consumer experience isn’t visual. For VR, it might be the mobile experiences. For AR maybe AirPods or AirPod-like devices are the right entry point for consumers. They’re in millions of people’s ears already and who doesn’t want their own special-agent-like earpiece? That’s where founders might find some opportunity.
Tipatat Chennavasin, The Venture Reality Fund
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Accessibility’s nextgen breakthroughs will be literally in your head
Jim Fruchterman is the founder of Tech Matters and Benetech, nonprofit developers of technology for social good.
More posts by this contributor
Predicting the future of technology for people with visual impairments is easier than you might think. In 2003, I wrote an article entitled “In the Palm of Your Hand” for the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness from the American Foundation for the Blind. The arrival of the iPhone was still four years away, but I was able to confidently predict the center of assistive technology shifting from the desktop PC to the smart phone.
“A cell phone costing less than $100,” I wrote, “will be able to see for the person who can’t see, read for the person who can’t read, speak for the person who can’t speak, remember for the person who can’t remember, and guide the person who is lost.” Looking at the tech trends at the time, that transition was as inevitable as it might have seemed far-fetched.
We are at a similar point now, which is why I am excited to play a part of Sight Tech Global, a virtual event Dec. 2-3 that is convening the top technologists to discuss how AI and related technologies will usher in a new era of remarkable advances for accessibility and assistive tech, in particular for people who are blind or visually impaired.
To get to the future, let me turn to the past. I was walking around the German city of Speyer in the 1990s with pioneering blind assistive tech entrepreneur Joachim Frank. Joachim took me on a flight of fancy about what he really wanted from assistive technology, as opposed to what was then possible. He quickly highlighted three stories of how advanced tech could help him as he was walking down the street with me.
- As I walk down the street, and walk by a supermarket, I do not want it to read all of the signs in the window. However, if one of the signs notes that kasseler kipchen (smoked porkchops, his favorite) are on sale, and the price is particularly good, I would like that whispered in my ear.
- And then, as a young woman approaches me walking in the opposite direction, I’d like to know if she’s wearing a wedding ring.
- Finally, I would like to know that someone has been following me for the last two blocks, that he is a known mugger, and that if I quicken my walking speed, go fifty meters ahead, turn right, and go another seventy meters, I will arrive at a police substation!
Joachim blew my mind. In one short walk, he outlined a far bolder vision of what tech could do for him, without bogging down in the details. He wanted help with saving money, meeting new friends and keeping himself safe. He wanted abilities which not only equaled what people with normal vision had, but exceeded them. Above all, he wanted tools which knew him and his desires and needs.
We are nearing the point where we can build Joachim’s dreams. It won’t matter if the assistant whispers in your ear, or uses a direct neural implant to communicate. We will probably see both. But, the nexus of tech will move inside your head, and become a powerful instrument for equality of access. A new tech stack with perception as a service. Counter-measures to outsmart algorithmic discrimination. Tech personalization. Affordability.
That experience will be built on an ever more application rich and readily available technology stack in the cloud. As all that gets cheaper and cheaper to access, product designers can create and experiment faster than ever. At first, it will be expensive, but not for long as adoption – probably by far more than simply disabled people – drives down price. I started my career in tech for the blind by introducing a reading machine that was a big deal because it halved the price of that technology to $5,000. Today even better OCR is a free app on any smartphone.
We could dive into more details of how we build Joachim’s dreams and meet the needs of millions of others of individuals with vision disabilities. But it will be far more interesting to explore with the world’s top experts at Sight Tech Global on Dec. 2-3 how those tech tools will become enabled In Your Head!
Registration is free and open to all.
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Nintendo’s latest trick is turning the Switch into an RC controller for an AR Mario Kart game
Nintendo never ceases to surprise with a seemingly infinite number of ways of transforming its most beloved IP. Hot on the heels of some truly impressive Super Mario Bros. Lego kits comes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The new toy is a clever mashup of real-life RC cars the Nintendo Switch.
Image Credits: Nintendo
The hybrid portable gaming system utilizes cameras on-board the Mario and Luigi karts to offer an on-screen augmented reality first-person racing experience. There’s a teaser video out now, highlighting the game:
Get ready to experience the fun of Mario Kart in the real world! Use your #NintendoSwitch to control a physical Kart & race through custom courses set up in your home! Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is available in a Mario or Luigi set, and launches on 10/16.
pic.twitter.com/dydiND46ad
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) September 3, 2020
As you can see, it offers a familiar Mario Kart feel overlayed on top of your home. There’s a pretty simple set-up process involved, with the user spacing out a series of gates to create a circular course — think of it like a far more fun version of setting up Roomba boundaries. Right now there are only two characters available — Mario and Luigi — each priced at $100. But up to four players can compete with the in-person mode.
Image Credits: Nintendo
From the videos, at least, it looks like a pretty rich experience right out of the box, combining real-world obstacles with familiar characters and environments like snowy levels and Piranha Plant-filled jungles.
Each kit includes one racer, four gates and two sign boards. They go up for pre-order soon and start shipping October 16.
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Microsoft’s Seeing AI founder Saqib Shaikh is speaking at Sight Tech Global
When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Saqib Shaikh on stage at BUILD in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer’s “passion and empathy,” which Nadella said, “is going to change the world.”
That assessment was on the mark because Shaikh went on to co-found the mobile app Seeing AI, which is a showcase for the power of AI applied to the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify persons and their demeanor, read documents (including handwritten ones), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user discover the position of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since launch nearly three years ago, and today it works in eight languages.
It’s exciting to announce that Shaikh will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-related, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The show, which is a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired Silicon Valley, launched recently on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Pre-register here.
Shaikh lost his vision at the age of 7, and attended a school for blind students, where he was intrigued by computers that could “talk” to students. He went on to study computer science at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. “One of the things I had always dreamt of since university,” he says, “was something that could tell you at any moment who and what’s going on around you.” That dream turned into his destiny.
After he joined Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft’s annual, week-long hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to develop the idea of applying AI in ways that could help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh’s full-time job at Microsoft. The company’s Cognitive Services APIs have been critical to his work, and he now leads a team of engineers who are leveraging emerging technology to empower people who are blind.
“When it comes to AI,” says Shaikh, “I consider disabled people to be really good early adopters. We can point to history where blind people have been using talking books for decades and so on, all the way through to OCR text-to-speech, which is early AI. Today, this idea that a computer can look at an image and turn it into a sentence has many use-cases but probably the most compelling is to describe that image to a blind person. For blind people this is incredibly empowering.” Below is a video Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project.
The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that taps various AI technologies in ways that produce an almost “intelligent” experience. Seeing AI doesn’t just read the text, for example, it also tells the user how to move the phone so the document is in the viewfinder. It doesn’t just tell you there are people in front of you, it tells you something about them, including who they are (if you have named them in the past) and their general appearance.
At Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will unfold in a world more richly enabled by cloud compute, low latency networks and ever more sophisticated AI algorithms and data sets.
To pre-register for a free pass, please visit Sight Tech Global.
Please follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.
Sponsors are welcome, and there are opportunities available ranging from branding support to content integration. Please email sponsor@sighttechglobal.com for more information.
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Report: Apple quietly acquired Israel’s Camerai, formerly Tipit, a specialist in AR and camera tech
Apple is well known for picking up smaller startups on the hush-hush to augment its business, and today news leaked out about the latest of these… nearly two years after the fact. Sometime between 2018 and 2019, the iPhone giant reportedly acquired and shut down Camerai, an augmented reality and computer vision company based out of Israel, which used to be called Tipit.
The news was first reported earlier today by Israeli newspaper Calcalist, and we have reached out to ask Apple directly about it. In the meantime, Jonathan (Yehonatan) Rimon, who had been Camerai’s CEO and co-founded the company with Moty Kosharovsky, Erez Tal and Aaron Wetzler, declined to comment one way or the other on the report when we contacted him directly about it. A separate source confirmed the story to us. We’ll update as we learn more.
Calcalist said that the startup sold for several tens of millions of dollars. From being founded in 2015, Camerai had raised around $5 million — including a $2.5 million round in 2017 and another unreported $2.5 million in 2018 — with investors including the Atooro Fund and another called the SKO Fund.
It seems that the acquisition came on the heels of multiple approaches from a number of companies at a time when AR was arguably at a peak of hype and many big tech companies wanted a piece of the action. (Recall that 2018 was the year when Magic Leap raised nearly $1 billion in a single round of funding.) Back in 2018, we heard rumors that those approaching and looking at the startup included Apple, Samsung and Alibaba.
The Calcalist report said that Camerai employees joined Apple’s computer vision team, and that the company’s technology has been incorporated into Apple products already. It’s not clear specifically where and when, but recall that both iOS 13 and iOS 14 have featured big software updates to the camera.
Camerai had built an SDK and specifically a range of software-based AR tools to help edit and use camera-made images in more sophisticated ways,
Its tech included the ability to detect different objects in the picture, and outline them with precision to alter them cosmetically; the ability to outline and apply filters across the whole image; a “skeleton tracking” neural network API that could detect and draw body joints in real time overlaid on a picture of a human; and its own version of selective focus for enhanced portrait modes (remember this was 2018 and this was not standard on phones at the time). Camerai’s site is shut down, but here are some screenshots of how it all looked, pulled from the Internet Archive:
Camerai’s acquisition underscores a couple of interesting, and ongoing, trends.
The first of these is in the development of smartphone technology, particularly around cameras. Some of the more interesting innovations in smartphone camera technology have come not out of improvements in hardware, but software, where the application of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence can mean that an existing combination of sensor, lens and on-phone and cloud processors produce a better and more technically dynamic picture than before.
At a time when smartphone replacement cycles have really slowed down and we are seeing also slower innovation on hardware, bolting on talent and tech created outside the phone companies is one way to gain a competitive edge.
(Separately, I wonder if making cutting-edge technology software-based also means that there could be scope in the future for paid updates to older phone models, which could mean more incremental revenues from consumers that don’t want to invest incompletely new devices.)
The second trend that this deal underscores is how Israel remains fertile ground for bigger companies on the hunt to pick up and bolt on technology, and that the secretive approach is likely to remain for some time to come.
“In Israel there are over 350 global corporate companies, from 30 countries, who search for local innovation. Some of them like Apple, MS, Google, even have local R&D [operations],” said Avihai Michaeli, a Tel Aviv-based senior investment banker and startup advisor. “Those global companies look mainly for tech which could serve as its competitive edge. It is not the first time that an acquired startup is asked not to publish it was acquired, nor talk about it.”
Other acquisitions that Apple has made in Israel have included camera module maker LinX, semiconductor startup Anobit and 3D sensor company PrimeSense.
We’ll update this post as we learn more.
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Augmented reality startup Mira announces $10M more in funding from Sequoia and others
The last few years haven’t proven too friendly to hardware companies in the augmented reality world. Enterprise-centric efforts like ODG, Daqri and Meta flared out, Magic Leap raised massive amounts of cash only to scale back its dreams this year in the face of looming disaster and just about every other hardware player has suffered some form of an identity crisis. As someone who covers the space closely, this has led me to keep an eye on companies I’ve covered that seem to have been a bit quiet.
Over the past three years, every few months or so, I’d check in on the AR startup Mira just to see if they had any updates. I met with them in 2017 after they announced they’d raised funding from Sequoia, notable as one of that firms few public AR/VR investments. Back then, Mira pitched its device as a Google Cardboard for AR, something that could give people a lightweight introduction to the world of augmented reality. They teased both workplace and at-home use cases, but there was an early skew toward approaching developers building consumer apps.
Over on Extra Crunch, read about why the first wave of AR hardware companies died and what the next generation of startups need to do to succeed.
The company has been keeping a pretty low profile since it publicly launched in 2017, but they’re finally ready to give some updates.
Mira now tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised about $10 million worth of funding over a few top-ups, which the team is collectively deeming as a seed extension round. Sequoia and SF-based Happiness Ventures led these financings, of which the startup did not break out the specific terms. The team has now raised just under $13 million to date. Mira has used this cash to refocus its business and refine its hardware.
By late-2018, the founders had decided to move their focus solely toward industrial rollouts of their headset.
“As we looked across the consumer landscape, as we looked across the industrial landscape, as we looked across government, it became very clear that where that value-driven use case is ripe today is much more in the industrial landscape,” Mira co-founder and COO Matt Stern told TechCrunch in an interview.
Photo via Mira.
The company’s Prism Pro headset sidesteps the technical complexity that has been a major stumbling block for previous entrants in the space that have struggled with their devices holding up in the field. Mira’s device is about as simple as the task requires, integrating a slot-in design for users to pop in an older-generation iPhone and physically connect it to a head-mounted camera that allows workers to scan items and markers. There are a number of advantages to this type of device. It’s cheaper, it’s simpler to operate and it’s easier to integrate into a company’s enterprise device management structure.
Compared to the experience a worker might get with a HoloLens, there’s a much lower ceiling to the capabilities of these devices. The Prism Pro hardware eschews what some consider “true AR” capabilities, dumping spatial tracking and mapping, and opting instead to augment your vision with a heads-up display window. The added camera is for scanning items, not generating depth maps so that holograms can be projected onto a space’s geometry, i.e. there are no floating whales to be had here. This isn’t a dramatic rethinking of the future of work so much as it’s a rethinking of form factors already being used; it’s a tablet for your face that you can control with taps and your gaze.
The AR world is still certainly a rough place to be building a startup, but Mira’s founders feel good about where the company has ended up after refocusing on manufacturing, especially within the competitive landscape.
“I can’t confirm this because I don’t work at Magic Leap, but we have literally onboarded more customers to our platform that are using our device every single day than companies like Magic Leap that have raised literally hundreds of times our funding,” CEO Ben Taft tells TechCrunch. “And it’s just been by trying to grow a business in a conservative manner and actually keeping up with the rate of adoption.”
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AR 1.0 is dead: Here’s what it got wrong
The first wave of AR startups offering smart glasses is now over, with a few exceptions.
Google acquired North this week for an undisclosed sum. The Canadian company had raised nearly $200 million, but the release of its Focals 2.0 smart glasses has been cancelled, a bittersweet end for its soft landing.
Many AR startups before North made huge promises and raised huge amounts of capital before flaring out in a similarly dramatic fashion.
The technology was almost there in a lot of cases, but the real issue was that the stakes to beat the major players to market were so high that many entrants pushed out boring, general consumer products. In a race to be everything for everybody, the industry relied on nascent developer platforms to do the dirty work of building their early use cases, which contributed heavily to nonexistent user adoption.
A key error of this batch was thinking that an AR glasses company was hardware-first, when the reality is that the missing value is almost entirely centered on missing first-party software experiences. To succeed, the next generation of consumer AR glasses will have to nail this.
Image Credits: ODG
App ecosystems alone don’t create product-market fit
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Google acquires smart glasses company North, whose Focals 2.0 won’t ship
Google confirmed today via blog post that it has acquired Canadian smart glasses company North, which began life as human interface hardware startup Thalmic Labs in 2012. The company didn’t reveal any details about the acquisition, which was first reported to be happening by The Globe and Mail, last week. The blog post is authored by Google’s SVP of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh, which cites North’s “strong technology foundation” as a key driver behind the deal.
Osterloh also emphasizes Google’s existing work in building “ambient computing,” which is to say computing that fades into the background of a user’s life, as the strategic reasoning behind the acquisition. North will join Google’s existing team in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, where North is already based, and it will aid with the company’s “hardware efforts and ambient computing future,” according to Osterloh.
In a separate blog post, North’s co-founders Stephen Lake, Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant discuss their perspective on the acquisition. They say the deal makes sense because it will help “significantly advance our shared vision,” but go on to note that this will mean winding down support for Focals 1.0, the first-generation smart glasses product that North released last year, and cancelling any plans to ship Focals 2.0, the second-generation version that the company had been teasing and preparing to release over the last several months.
Focals received significant media attention following their release, and provided the most consumer-friendly wearable-glasses-computing-interface ever launched. They closely resembled regular optical glasses, albeit with larger arms to house the active computing components, and projected a transparent display overlay onto one frame which showed things like messages and navigation directions.
Around the Focals 1.0 debut, North co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake told me that the company had originally begun developing its debut product, the Myo gesture control armband, to create a way to interact naturally with the ambient smart computing platforms of the future. Myo read electrical pulses generated by the body when you move your arm, and translated that into computer input. After realizing that devices it was designed to work with, including VR headsets and wearable computers like Google Glass, weren’t far enough along for its novel control paradigm to take off, they shifted to addressing the root of the problem with Focals.
Focals had some major limitations, however, including initially requiring that anyone wanting to purchase them go into a physical location for fitting, and then return for adjustments once they were ready. They were also quite expensive, and didn’t support the full range of prescriptions needed by many existing glasses-wearers. Software limitations, including limited access to Apple’s iMessage platform, also hampered the experience for Apple mobile device users.
North (and Myo before it) always employed talented and remarkable mechanical electronics engineers sourced from the nearby University of Waterloo, but its ideas typically failed to attract the kind of consumer interest that would’ve been required for sustained independent operation. The company had raised nearly $200 million in funding since its founding; as mentioned, no word on the total amount Google paid, but it doesn’t seem likely to have been a blockbuster exit.
In an email to North customers, the company also said it would be refunding the full amount paid for any Focals purchases — likely to defray any complaints about the end of software support, which occurs relatively soon, on July 31, 2020.
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