Within the week when gadget lovers world wide are enchanted by Vision Pro, a young, brave startup is attempting to carve out an area for its augmented reality device that incorporates a form factor starkly different from Apple’s device.
Today, Singapore-based Sensible Labs announced its recent product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses powered by a multimodal AI assistant called Noa. The glasses have captured the eye and investment of John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, the augmented reality platform behind games like Pokémon GO. Sensible Labs declined to reveal the quantity of funding it received from Hanke.
In a video demo seen by TechCrunch, one in every of Sensible Labs’ founders asked Noa through voice for a self-introduction. After about three seconds, the agent generated and projected a solution in text onto the lenses.
Along with voice commands, Noa is able to visual processing, image generation and translation, due to the handful of AI models it has integrated: conversational search engine Perplexity AI; Stability AI’s text-to-image model Stable Diffusion; OpenAI’s latest text-generation model GPT4; and the speech recognition system Whisper. Frame’s lenses have a resolution of 640 x 400 for displaying videos and photos.
With these features, a user shopping at a mall can ask Noa to ascertain the web prices of a pair of shoes they’re through Frame, for example.
“The longer term of human/AI interaction will come to life in modern wearables and recent devices, and I’m so excited to be bringing Perplexity’s real-time answer engine to Sensible Labs’ Frame,” Aravind Srinivas, CEO and founding father of Perplexity, said in a press release.
The query is whether or not Frame can be responsive enough for any of its AI-generated responses to be helpful. Sensible Labs’ Bluetooth-enabled devices depend on a smartphone to access the assorted AI models today. Eventually, though, the founders need to eliminate the phone host and embed lightweight machine-learning models directly into the glasses.
Sensible Labs co-founders. Image Credits: Sensible Labs
Frame got here after Sensible Labs’ debut product, Monocle, a single-lens AR device that attracted a loyal following within the open source hardware community due to its programmability and affordability. A gaggle of Stanford students once turned the device right into a dating assistant that made real-time suggestions on what to say to 1’s date.
Frame will proceed to be open source like its predecessor, meaning developers will gain access to resources including living documentation, open source codebase and hardware schematics. They may even have the ability to regulate the parameters of Noa’s supported AI models.
Unlike the bulky Vision Pro, Frame is supposed to be worn every single day and comes with prescription lenses. Weighing 39 grams and featuring thick round frames made from nylon plastic, the glasses are, as the corporate puts it, an “homage to the groundbreaking innovations and concepts introduced by figures of history including John Lennon, Steve Jobs and Gandhi.”
Frame can be available for preorder starting today and can retail at $349, the identical as Monocle’s price tag. The devices will begin shipping in April.
Since its inception in 2019, Sensible Labs has managed to draw a lineup of notable angel investors. Back in June, we reported its $3 million investment from Brendan Iribe, co-founder of Oculus; Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri; Eric Migicovsky, founding father of Pebble and former partner at Y Combinator; and others. The brand new capital injection from Hanke brings the firm’s total financing to $6 million.
