The Tech Landscape #199 🚗
Microsoft helps doctors, Spotify’s Thing for cars, and VR subscriptions: this is issue 199 of The Tech Landscape, a weekly collection of news about consumer digital technology. Stories are selected by me, Peter Gasston, with a little insight and opinion where appropriate.
I read this week that Google has opened a number of job vacancies for people to work on augmented reality hardware. It owns a number of AR headset properties and patents, from its work on Glass (far too far ahead of its time), and its acquisitions of Lytro (lightfield cameras) and North (smart glasses). But while it’s obviously putting more effort into dedicated AR hardware, its approach to smartphone AR is still baffling me.
Google has experimented with AR face masks and cosmetics in Duo and YouTube, with AR stickers in the Camera / Playground app, with models (mostly animals) in Search, and with artworks and style transfer effects in Arts & Culture; but it doesn’t seem to be wholeheartedly interested in any of them
The Google product that AR makes most sense in, to me, is Lens. Back in May 2019, the Lens team said it was moving “from an identification tool to an AR browser”. It ran a lot of AR experiments in Lens, including announcing a high-profile partnership with the New York Times which seemed to go nowhere quickly. I know for a fact it got very close to implementing AR discovery for creators, but seems to have backed away from that path entirely. Now Lens is more tightly integrating with Photos and Searc, all the AR experiments seem to be over, and the VP of Lens and AR has left the company.
Google makes a bunch of AR tools (ARCore, Scene Viewer, MediaPipe, WebXR in Chrome) for developers but shows surprisingly little ambition to put AR in the hands of creators or consumers. I’ve no idea what Google’s smartphone AR strategy is, or if it even has one at all.
Anyway, let’s get on with this week’s newsletter. Hope you’re well!
Assistants & Voice
Microsoft bought speech recognition service, Nuance. The deal, worth £14.3bn, gets Microsoft a way in to the healthcare market and a best-in-class speech product for its cloud services.
news.microsoft.com/2021/04/12/microsoft-accelerates-industry-cloud-strategy-for-healthcare-with-the-acquisition-of-nuance/
Spotify launched Car Thing, a hardware music player for the car. It’s a limited release, free to Premium users in the US. The device combines a screen, a jog wheel, and voice commands—I said last week when Spotify announced its “Hey Spotify” voice assistant that it made more sense on hardware than in the app.
newsroom.spotify.com/2021-04-13/spotify-launches-our-newest-exploration-a-limited-release-of-car-thing-a-smart-player-for-your-car/
Amazon released an updated Echo Buds, its wireless earbuds. They’re smaller, lighter, and have improved noise cancelling, but still aggressively priced to be some of the cheapest on the market—a way of putting Alexa closer to more people.
theverge.com/2021/4/14/22381820/amazon-echo-buds-2-features-price-release-date
Mozilla and NVIDIA partnered on the Common Voice speech technology project. NVIDA will invest about £1.1m in the project, which aims to help open alternatives to Alexa, Google Assistant, et al.
blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/04/12/mozilla-partners-with-nvidia-to-democratize-and-diversify-voice-technology/
Google added some new features to Assistant, including “find my phone” for iPhones. It’s also extending the ‘Duplex on the web’ service to some takeaway restaurants in the US; tell Assistant your order and it will fill out all the forms and make your payment.
blog.google/products/assistant/5-new-ways-google-assistant-can-make-day-little-easier/
XR (AR & VR)
Oculus is updating its Quest 2 VR headset with several new features, including game streaming from PC. The Quest 2 can connect to a gaming PC with a USB cable to play higher-quality games, but now can skip the tethering and have the games streamed instead. The update also adds desk detection to Infinite Office, blending physical and virtual environments, and a higher visual refresh rate for some games.
oculus.com/blog/introducing-oculus-air-link-a-wireless-way-to-play-pc-vr-games-on-oculus-quest-2-plus-infinite-office-updates-support-for-120-hz-on-quest-2-and-more/
Oculus is introducing subscriptions for VR apps. The VR market is small but shows some potential with a few key apps, so letting apps monetise beyond a one-off payment is a way to let the best thrive and hopefully build a stronger platform for the rest.
oculus.com/blog/discover-premium-content-with-subscriptions-on-the-oculus-quest-platform/
Snapchat is hosting a virtual exhibition of AR monuments in Los Angeles. Monumental Perspectives teams artists with Lens creators, and is part of a partnership with the LA County Museum of Art announced last year.
newsroom.snap.com/en-GB/lacma-monumental-perspectives
NVIDA announced Omniverse, a platform for creating and working in virtual environments. It allows multiple people to collaborate in virtual spaces, for everything from architecture to robotics to TV production, and uses Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) format which has implications for future AR—it’s the format that Apple uses for ARKit. This is one of those boring-seeming services which hint at much bigger things.
developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-omniverse-platform
Everything Else
Instagram is going to test giving people the option to remove public Like counts. A ‘global test’ will offer the options of removing all Like counts, removing them on your own posts, or keeping them as they are now. Personally I like to see them, but then my mental health isn’t affected by my comparative popularity.
theverge.com/2021/4/14/22382692/instagram-public-like-count-test-expand
Social
Core, a platform for creating and playing games, has launched in an early access release. Core has received major investment from Epic Games and uses its Unreal Engine; the hope is that it will be a ‘metaverse’ title for creating, playing, and earning—like Roblox for an older audience.
theverge.com/2021/4/15/22385303/core-manticore-games-creator-development-play-free-early-access-epic-store
Gaming
The three major US mobile carriers have scrapped plans to create an RCS messaging app. Google has been trying to get RCS (“SMS 2.0”) off the ground for years, but gave up trying to convince carriers and has implemented it directly in Android’s Messages app; an alternative would have been good for nothing but fragmenting the service. However, unless Apple implements RCS in iOS it will remain an Android standard only.
lightreading.com/ossbsscx/verizon-atandt-t-mobile-blow-rcs-launch/d/d-id/768729
Messaging
Facebook is experimenting with a speed-dating app called Sparked. The app, which is from Facebook’s New Product Experimentation lab, uses human curation to select ‘kind‘ participants.
theverge.com/2021/4/13/22381511/facebook-video-speed-dating-npe-team-sparked-feature
Apps
Stat of the Week
TikTok has 732m monthly active users, with 100m in the US. The data comes from a deck that the company shared with advertisers to show off new ad units. TikTok is absolutely massive and that’s happened so quickly that I don’t think everyone has realised.
socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-previews-coming-ad-and-product-display-options/598336/
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