Oculus founders reunited: New glasses project revolves around AI instead of VR
Two Oculus co-founders and other Oculus veterans are now working on smart glasses that will enable lifelike conversations with an AI.
Sesame has been working on glasses with its own voice AI since 2023.
(Image: Sesame)
The start-up Sesame was founded in 2023 and aims to develop an AI assistant with emotional intelligence that can be used to hold natural-looking conversations. The assistant is supposed to remember previous conversations, react to contexts, and even incorporate linguistic slip-ups and pauses to appear as human as possible. At the same time, Sesame is working on smart glasses that will enable all-day access to the assistant.
Two of the three Sesame founders formerly worked at Oculus and later at Facebook: Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe and Ryan Brown, who previously held a management position in research at Meta Reality Labs. Yesterday, another Oculus co-founder and long-time companion of Brendan Iribe joined the team: Nate Mitchell is taking on the role of Chief Product Officer at Sesame. In a LinkedIn announcement, Mitchell writes that many other members of the “original Oculus crew” are also on board.
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Brendan Iribe left Facebook in 2018 because he did not agree with the company's VR strategy. Mitchell followed him a year later. He was the last Oculus founding member still working at Facebook. Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey was kicked out of the company in 2017 for political reasons, but reconciled with Meta. His defense company Anduril and Meta are now jointly developing a futuristic AR helmet for the US military.
Big competition from Meta and Co.
Sesame left stealth mode in February and published an initial demo of its AI assistant, which can be freely tested online. However, it is currently only available in English. The start-up announced its intention to support more than 20 languages in the future. The underlying AI model was published as open source in March.
Sesame is backed by several well-known investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and Matrix Partners. These are all investors who invested in Oculus at an early stage. The amount of the current investment is not known. However, it had enough capital to acquire another start-up called Zinn Labs, which developed a pioneering eye-tracking system for smart glasses
The competition for Sesame is fierce: Meta has already had its first successes with its AI glasses, while Google and Apple could get involved with their own comparable products as early as next year. Xiaomi is also already testing AI glasses on the Chinese market. Against this backdrop, Sesame is likely to speculate on a takeover by a tech giant.
(mack)
