The culture must be built - CES 2024 Special

“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.” ―?J.G. Ballard,?Crash

I was at CES 2024 in Las Vegas mostly to cover the AI and GPU developments for Jon Peddie Research, and to network with friends old and new. That means that this week the newsletter is all about cool things I saw at CES. It's also a break in our usual format, since there's mostly original content this time. Let me know what you think of the change. I'm pondering how best to do 'a newsletter' in 2024. - David

HyAxiom Green Hydrogen Solutions

If you don’t know HyAxiom, Inc., they are a Doosan Group company with plans to become a global integrated H2 solution provider by capitalizing on the growing recognition of hydrogen as the next-generation energy source most capable of achieving zero carbon emissions. I like Hydrogen, though it is currently rather expensive compared to other renewables.

?HyAxiom’s Proton Exchange Membrane Electrolyzer, (PEM Electrolyzer) facilitates the generation of hydrogen through an electrolysis process, where clean electricity splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. A load following capability integrates with intermittent renewable energy sources like solar and wind. They say it has 75% efficiency and suitable for installations ranging from 1 MW to 100+?MW.

HyAxiom also exhibited the PureCell?Model 400, a commercially available fuel cell which operates on 100% hydrogen to generate clean electricity and heat for process use, and supply off-grid power. Doosan Group commissioned a large-scale fuel cell plant powered by 100% hydrogen in July 2020. Based in Korea, the 50 MW hydrogen fuel cell plant is comprised of 114 units and produces more than 420 GWh of electricity annually.

.lumen XR glasses for the blind?

The?founder of .lumen?comes from from a family where all members except himself have disabilities, which motivated him to solve the lack of assistive technology. .lumen a startup looking to build glasses that empower the blind to live a better life.

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Using what they describe as “self-driving tech scaled down to a headset”, the Glasses replicate the main features of a guide dog without the drawbacks that make the guide dog a non-scalable solution ($60k training cost and there are only 28 thousand guide dogs to 40 million blind individuals; source: .lumen).??

The .lumen Glasses have been tested by over 250 blind individuals they say, and are currently in Clinical Investigation.

Ultrahuman Home: It’s a health wearable, but your house wears it.

Ultrahuman launched Ultrahuman Home which introduces a new capability for individuals to track and enhance the health of their living spaces. The device provides insights on an individual's external environment including exposure to artificial light, air quality, humidity and noise levels.

Regular home health monitors measure many markers like PM, humidity, temperature etc but don’t provide a longitudinal view of how these markers change over time. Ultrahuman Home does, in order to correlate all of a user’s health markers in the home environment (humidity, air quality, temperature) to an individual’s lifestyle (sleep, stress). Personalizing or changing these markers based on recommendations from the Ultrahuman home platform might help improve the passive factors that affect an individual’s health.

Qualcomm aims at Mixed Reality Experiences with Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2

?Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 Platform, a single chip architecture that unlocks 4.3K spatial computing at 90 frames per second. The device is a major focus for Qualcomm at CES 2024.

The press release tips that hat to two major partnerships: Samsung and Google, with Samsung leading on hardware.

“Samsung is thrilled to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies and Google in revolutionizing the mobile industry once more," said Inkang Song, vice president and head of technology strategy team at Samsung Electronics.

“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies and Samsung on the future of immersive and spatial XR,” said Shahram Izadi, vice president of AR at Google. “We’re excited for the Android ecosystem to take advantage of Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2’s capabilities and enable new experiences.”

Samsung and Google are big wins on the partnership front. I also think the new XREAL device is Qualcomm based, though probably a custom device based on older Snapdragon tech. This leaves Meta and Sony working with MediaTek, who otherwise have no news on the AR front for CES it seems. “MediaTek currently does not have any new comments or updates to share on their AR/VR plans,” they told me. That said you can find out just what MediaTek is up to at Jon Peddie Research’s TechWatch, in my interview with them, here.

?Samsung’s hardware plans are clear. Google’s are less so. They killed their inhouse Project Iris AR device recently, but we understand that the form factor they envisaged will still come out, with Google branding, but based on Samsung’s platform and Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 and developed by the team that Google bought in from North.

Building upon the capabilities of the recently announced Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, the new '+' version helps to unleash a new tier of experiences in MR and VR with higher GPU frequency by 15% and CPU frequency by 20%. Supporting 12 or more concurrent cameras with on-device AI, Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2-powered devices can track the user, their movements, and the world around them for navigation and experiences that merge physical and digital spaces.

Wearable Devices enable gesture-control for Apple devices.

Wearable Devices?was at CES to demo their?Mudra Band AI?gesture-control interface for all Apple devices.

The Mudra Band is a watch band replacement that connects via Bluetooth to devices in a user’s Apple ecosystem including iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and Mac computers. The device uses Surface Nerve Conductance (SNC) sensors to capture neural signals transmitted to the brain through a user’s wrist and finger movements, translating these “Air-Touch” finger movements into everyday functions for controlling Apple devices.

In addition to announcing general availability of the Mudra Band, they introduced a Mudra Developer Kit (MDK) to help OEMs integrate gesture control into their own applications and devices for XR, gaming and Industry 4.0 sectors.

Grivix Autonomous Megawatt Charging System for commercial EVs

Through my work with Libertine FPE I’ve become quite interested in the question of how to best charge larger electric vechiles, especially in fast turnaround shipping environments.

Grivix has engineered an autonomous charging system designed specifically for heavy-duty electric vehicles that centres on a robot arm/charging cable they have designed themselves (they’ve previously designed cables for other companies).

The system is fully autonomous with AI vision recognition to understand when it needs to operate. The robot arm, IS the charging cable and incorporates a unique cooled cable and connector design; There’s a communication and positioning module that allows vehicles to be optimally positioned towards the robot. No driver intervention is required; it’s robots all the way down. The system is said to be capable of charging at 6 MegaWatts (4'000A/1'500V).

I know some of my readers are VCs, or just flat out rich: Grivix is currently rasising.