Big XR News from Immerse Global Summit 2023, Meta, Cognitive3D, and RealWear

The Immerse Global Summit (IGS) will kick off its 2023 edition in Orlando, Florida, between 17 and 23 October. The VRAR Association is helping to host the annual event alongside the MetaCentre and Synapse.

Following ten years of operations, IGS 2023 is launching as part of the Metacenter Global Week, an event packed with the latest XR industry innovations and trends.

Moreover, IGS 2023 continues its vision of providing attendees with leading industry figures who will offer core market insights via keynotes and speaker sessions, showcasing emerging immersive technologies and solutions across the AR/VR/MR, Metaverse, and spatial computing spectrum.

The Immerse Global Summit has earned an incredible reputation for its insightful speeches from some of the world’s leading XR brands. This year, there’ll be a keynote speech from experts such as Meta’s Dan Nieves, Global Executive for Meta Reality Lab, Kurt Leucht, Simulation Software Developer for NASA; Kurt Scheuringer, Principal Spatial Computing and Prototyping Architect for AWS, Jules Shumaker, Senior Vice President for Revenue and Create Solutions at Unity, Amy Peck Founder and CEO of Endeavour XR, Eliot Danner Managing Director of Customer Engineering for Google Cloud, and Takeshi Tawarda Ad Research and Insights, Augmented Reality lead at Snap Inc.

Full general admission is available for $599, with access to all keynote talks and panel discussions. You can also access a VIP ticket for $999, including the VIP welcome reception, closing party, off-the-record Q&A sessions, and lounge access.

Meta to Issues Layoffs and Faces Lawsuit

Meta Reality Lab’s Facebook Agile Silicon Team (FAST) divisions face layoffs. Employees received notice of their redundancies on Workplace, Meta’s internal discussion forum, on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters the day before the announcement.

Currently, FAST hosts 600 staff, many of whom are building bespoke semiconductors for Meta’s device lineup. These allow the company to compete with chipsets for designated tasks, computing requirements, and efficiency. The news comes as Meta restricts its FAST unit, where a new executive stepped in to lead in the Spring of this year.

Moreover, Meta Platforms is facing another lawsuit in US courts due to an allegedly anticompetitive “campaign to conquer” the virtual reality market, led by Andre Elijah Immersive Inc. in the US District Court of the Northern District of California, whereby the firm claims it lost revenue from a terminated contract.

Andre Elijah Immersive Inc. stated it designed a fitness app in collaboration with Meta Platforms and Alo Yoga, claiming it would feature the “best and most widely-recognized yoga instructors in the world.”

Additionally, the complaint stated that Meta would launch the app at the Meta Connect 2023—the tech giant’s annual conference on new product lineups and solutions.

However, Meta terminated the contract after it found Andre Elijah Immersive had been working with Apple, one of Meta’s most significant competitors.

As outlined in the lawsuit, Andre Elija Immersive have accused Meta and its co-defendants of “abusive and anticompetitive behaviour,” violating antitrust laws in the United States. The plaintiff also seeks over $100 million in damages and several million for breaching the app contract.

XR Analytics: The Ultimate Insight?

This week, Tony Bevilacqua, the founder and CEO of Cognitive3D, joined XR Today to discuss the relevance of 3D analytics across VR, AR, and MR applications – specifically within the enterprise, customer experience, and academic use cases. The company launched in 2015 and released its first product in 2016 – focusing on spatial analytic services.

Bevilacqua said that Cognitive3D works to solve client pain points across various categories, which is “dependent” on the type of content a developer or business is building.

Training and simulations are still Cognitive3D’s “bread and butter.” The CEO and Founder added:

So simulated content, how can we measure human performance? How can we demonstrate the value proposition that is associated with these [immersive] training simulation apps? – And competency, the knowledge retention, those types of outcomes. Leveraging these 3D analytics capabilities.

Bevilacqua also added:

There are two different sides to the insight that we provide support for. So, in the earliest phases of building a new project, we can provide really great insight into UX and UI in terms of how people are interacting with the experience, what’s drawing their attention, keeping their attention, how they are comprehending the content that you’re putting in front of them.

RealWear, NHS Deploy Navigator 500 for Surgical Training

RealWear announced on Wednesday that the North Tees and Hartlepool National Health Services (NHS) Foundation Trust had deployed the company’s head-mounted solutions.

With the new wearable tablets and software, students can boost their learning retention rates and practice critical skills to secure operating theatre training.

According to the recent use case, the healthcare department hopes to significantly increase the number of students receiving operating theatre procedural training in a secure, safe, immersive environment.

News of the collaboration comes amid a massive NHS England Long-Term Workforce Plan, announced on 30 June, which aims to tackle increasing upskilling demand and the ongoing labour skills shortage across the NHS.