The week’s top hardware news.

December 17th, 2015

Products

Like Headphones for Your Eyes

Funded on Kickstarter in 2014, Avegant’s Glyph video headset is ready to go into mass production. We’re mentioning it because, for $699, it’s a device that gets close to the VR experience by projecting images directly to your retina by using 2 million micromirrors. It doesn’t provide full immersion, but a killer resolution and a wearable home theater.

The Glyph Video Headset. Looks kind of like Beats turned around.
The Glyph Video Headset. Looks kind of like Beats turned around.

FLUXO Smart Lamp

Fluxo is a $395 high-tech lamp packed with intuitive motion sensors and 300 LEDs, which enable it to create directional lighting without any moving parts. And it does so in real time, responding to the swipes you make on your smartphone. Neat design too!

Tennis Wearable

Pivot is a system of nine different sensors that track a player’s movements real-time, offering full body view and analysis without wires or cameras. The data processing and visualisation system is pretty complex, as it should be for the $799 price tag. Time to get really serious about tennis.

+ the next frontier of wearables

Industry

Magic Leap Raising a Whopping $827M

Covert augmented reality company Magic Leap is raising $827 million in a new Series C round. If completed, this would bring the company’s total investment to date to $1.4 billion, making it one of the most funded startups in the world and a startup that has yet to release its first product — a much anticipated cross between Microsoft HoloLens and the Oculus Rift.

+ AR & VR in 2016

The experience being developed at Magic Leap
The experience being developed at Magic Leap

Giroptic Bags $4.5M For 360Cam

French startup Giroptic, the company behind immersive virtual 360° sensor technology, has secured $4.5 million in a new funding round to further develop its egg-shaped 360Cam. FYI, Giroptic set a record on Kickstarter last year by crowdfunding $1.4 million.

Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware

This week, Facebook announced it’s giving away the designs for Big Sur, a server built to run the latest in AI algorithms. Just last month, Google open sourced its own powerful AI engine. What’s going on, guys? Either open source is the new currency for developers, or this is bait to attract talented engineers, or both.

+ why competing billion-dollar tech giants are joining forces

Drone registration

Yep, it’s official. The FAA announced solid rules for registering drones in the US. Basically, if your drone weighs more than half a pound, you have until February 19th to register it.

+ the state of robotics for 2015

+ 4 robot trends for next year