Weekly Insights

Rimowa launches a virtual store for their latest bag drop

The luxury luggage brand has just unveiled a fully immersive virtual store to showcase their newest release: The Original Bag, a sleek cross-body bag. In this interactive 3D experience, users can explore the new bag in detail, watch videos about RIMOWA's heritage and production process, and discover a historical timeline of iconic RIMOWA travel pieces. The virtual store also allows for seamless shopping of the entire collection. (Jing Daily)

Meta introduces the Digital Twin Catalog from Reality Labs Research

In e-commerce and immersive reality applications, visually-realistic 3D objects that might one day enable these kinds of experiences are called “digital twins.” The term “twin” is used because the digital representation of the object is indistinguishable from the actual physical counterpart in ways that matter for the application at hand. For most applications, the twin needs to be indistinguishable in its visual characteristics. This entails having extremely accurate geometry down to the sub-millimeter level and having materials with textures and light reflectivity that look just like the real object. Creating this level of realism for a porous and organically shaped hand-made vase with a shiny gloss is no small feat. The large majority of digital twins in e-commerce and immersive applications today are painstakingly handcrafted by teams of technical artists at costs that can in some cases rival those of creating the physical object itself, making the barrier to entry for all but the highest-end products impossible to climb. (Meta)

Sinclair Partners to Launch Immersive News App for Apple Vision Pro

?Sinclair’s NewsON and Mindgrub have announced a collaboration to launch an Apple Vision Pro app for NewsON. This is Sinclair’s first foray into spatial computing specifically for local news delivery, blending digital content with physical surroundings.

Using Apple’s Vision Pro technology, NewsON and Mindgrub plan to transform the way audiences watch and interact with local news with Sinclair’s first spatial computing app built natively for Vision Pro devices. (AdWeek)

Snap's Phantom House Season is back with more Halloween-themed lenses

To celebrate the launch of Phantom House Season 2, Atomic Digital Design produced a front-facing AR lens for Snap, offering users an eerie experience where their face splits in two to reveal an inner demon. The lens features a cinematic touch, using an infrared surveillance camera effect, along with static noise reminiscent of old cathode-ray screens and a VHS-inspired aesthetic. Distortion, scan lines, and chromatic aberrations create a found footage style that heightens the intensity of the transformation, making the experience even more immersive and chilling. (Atomic Digital Design)

Meta’s Hyperscape lets you scan and explore real-life spaces in VR

Announced at Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday, Meta is launching a new VR app called Hyperscape that renders recreations of real-life spaces in high fidelity, so you can explore them while wearing a Quest headset.

Available in beta in the U.S., Hyperscape will soon let you use a phone to scan a room and then recreate it. Alternatively, you can step into a room that someone else has scanned and shared. (Tech Crunch)

Google venture arm backs startup aiming to bring mixed reality to any car windshield or plane cockpit

Distance Technologies, a Finnish startup that aims to bring mixed-reality technology to any car windshield or plane cockpit, has raised 10 million euros ($11.1 million) of funding from GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet and other investors.

Distance raised the cash injection in a seed round led by GV, with existing investors FOV Ventures and Maki.vc also stumping up more cash for the startup, the company told CNBC on Thursday.

Helsinki-headquartered Distance develops technology that it says can turn any transparent surface into an augmented-reality display, enabling the user to see 3D digital objects overlayed on top of the panel they’re viewing. (CNBC)

Civitai Gen-AI Makes Its Move

Civitai held a pivotal event at Andreessen Horowitz on Sept. 13 to showcase the winners of its Project Odyssey AI film festival. The invite-only gala featured not only standout films made using AI tools but also panels with filmmakers and industry experts. But the real highlight came at the end when Civitai CEO Justin Maier took the stage to announce “SPINE,” a consolidated workflow that integrates GenAI tools into a user-friendly system for image, video, and music generation. This system brings popular tools like Udio for music, Kling for video, ElevenLabs for voiceover, Freepik for upscaling, and others into one cohesive multimodal environment. "SPINE is designed to make the creative process faster, easier, and more powerful by eliminating the friction of jumping between apps," said Maier. SPINE partners are non-exclusive, and set their own prices. (Forbes)

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