wearable devices
Zuckerberg is turning trillion-dollar Facebook into a ‘metaverse’ company, he tells investors
Following the quarterly release of Facebook’s earnings numbers where the company’s CFO takes time to walk through the nitty gritty of the company’s financials, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment…
Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform it has spent billions of dollars building out doesn’t seem to be off to a great start. The company…
Facebook has bought several virtual reality game studios over the past couple of years, and they added one more to their portfolio Friday with the acquisition of Seattle-based BigBox VR.…
Four years after joining as Facebook’s first VP of VR, ex-Xiaomi exec Hugo Barra has left the company, he said in a social media post Tuesday. Barra led Facebook’s VR…
Longevity startup Gero AI has a mobile API for quantifying health changes
Sensor data from smartphones and wearables can meaningfully predict an individual’s ‘biological age’ and resilience to stress, according to Gero AI. The ‘longevity’ startup — which condenses its mission to…
Family tracking app Life360 to acquire wearable location device Jiobit for $37M
Popular family tracking app Life360 is investing in hardware. The company this morning announced the $37 million acquisition of Chicago-based Jiobit, the maker of a wearable location device designed for…
Subscription pricing is landing on Facebook’s Oculus Store, giving VR developers another way to monetize content on Facebook’s Oculus Quest headset. Developers will be allowed to add premium subscriptions to…
New Quest 2 software brings wireless PC streaming, updated ‘office’ mode
After a relatively quiet couple of months from Oculus on the software front, Facebook’s VR unit is sharing some details on new functionality coming to its Quest 2 standalone headset.…
Today, at a special AR/VR focused event held inside its virtual reality community platform Altspace, Microsoft showcased a new product aiming to provide their AR HoloLens platform and VR Windows…
NASA will use Fitbits to help prevent spread of COVID-19 to astronauts and employees
NASA will provide 1,000 of its employees, including 150 astronauts, with Fitbit devices in a pilot program designed to see if they can help supplement efforts to keep these mission-critical…
Facebook spent more time than usual talking about their success with VR in their quarterly earnings call, taking time to note developer success and their own wins peddling their latest…
Apple said to be working a high-priced standalone VR headset as debut mixed reality product
Apple is reportedly working on developing a high-end virtual reality headset for a potential sales debut in 2022, per a new Bloomberg report. The headset would include its own built-in…
Featured Article
5 consumer hardware VCs share their 2021 investment strategies
“Tesla is arguably the most interesting connected consumer hardware company since Apple exploded in scale with the success of the iPhone.”
Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25 million for its employee health management tools
ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital. With companies looking…
NextMind’s Dev Kit for mind-controlled computing offers a rare ‘wow’ factor in tech
NextMind debuted its Dev Kit hardware at CES last year, but the hardware is now actually shipping, and the startup shared with me the production version to take a test…
Apple is launching its subscription fitness service, which is built mainly to complement Apple Watch, on December 14. Apple Fitness+ was first announced at Apple’s iPhone event in September, and…
Tokyo-based virtual reality game developer Thirdverse gets $8.5 million Series A
Thirdverse, the virtual reality game developer behind “Swords of Gargantua,” has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by JAFCO, with participation from Presence Capital, Sisu…
We’ve got an in-depth review of the Apple Watch Series 6, Apple gives Facebook a temporary break on App Store fees and Alexis Ohanian is raising a new fund. This…
Facebook debuts Infinite Office, a virtual reality office space
Facebook wants to turn the Quest into more than a gaming device. Today, the company shared early demos of “Infinite Office” a new set of features that will bring solo…
Facebook is launching smart glasses in 2021, its ‘next step’ to an AR device
At Facebook’s first big event since moving away from the Oculus brand and rebranding its AR and VR efforts as “Facebook Reality Labs,” it announced a new consumer wearable and…
Facebook changes name of its annual VR event and its overall AR/VR organization
Facebook is moving further away from the Oculus brand. The company says it is changing the name of their augmented reality and virtual reality organization to “Facebook Reality Labs,” an…
Bluetooth SIG works to include wearables in COVID-19 exposure notification systems
Current smartphone-based exposure notification systems (ENS) like the one created jointly by Apple and Google are a clever way of leveraging modern technology to support comprehensive contact-tracing efforts by health…
The Oura Ring is the personal health tracking device to beat in 2020
The Oura Ring has been getting a lot of attention lately because of its role in a number of COVID-19 studies, as well as its adoption by both the NBA…
Google-Fitbit deal to be scrutinized in Europe over data competition concerns
In a set-back for Google’s plan to acquire health wearable company Fitbit, the European Commission has announced it’s opening an investigation to dig into a range of competition concerns being…
Magic Leap has a new chief executive and it’s former Microsoft exec Peggy Johnson
Peggy Johnson, the former executive vice president of business development at Microsoft, has been named as the new chief executive of Magic Leap, the company said in a statement. Johnson,…
MIT’s new way to remotely monitor vital signs over time could help with early COVID-19 detection in care homes
MIT researchers have been building out the capabilities of a system they created that can monitor vital signs without requiring any direct contact sensors or wearables — using wireless signals…
Fitbit launches a COVID-19 early detection study, and you can join from the Fitbit app
Fitbit’s activity-tracking wearable devices are already being used by a number of academic institutions to determine if they might be able to contribute to the early detection of COVID-19 and…
Oculus surpasses $100 million in Quest content sales
Despite a handful of devices and years of sales, Facebook has never shared unit sales of any of their VR headsets. Today, Oculus released a new sales figure as the…
Fitbit’s Chinese rival Amazfit mulls a transparent, self-disinfecting mask
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of Chinese companies with manufacturing operations to produce virus-fighting equipment: Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD quickly moved to launch what it claims…
Apple Watch designer reveals the device’s origins on its fifth birthday
Update: We mistakenly noted in an earlier version that Chaudhri had been a part of Microsoft’s Hololens team. The story has been updated to remove the reference. In his two…
