A new era for smart glasses will be introduced when the DigiLens ARGO range goes on sale next year, powered by Phantom Technology’s next-generation spatial AI assistant, CASSI.
Phantom Technology is an AI start-up founded in 2019 by “a group of game engineers, code wizards and alien researchers” to develop cutting-edge human interface technologies for AI wearables.
The partnership with DigiLens means Phantom’s patented optical platform will be available in a consumer product.
The two companies – DigiLens is based in Silicon Valley, Phantom Technology is based at St John’s Innovation Centre – began working together 11 months ago, says Phantom co-founder and CEO Farbod Shakouri.
“We’ve been quietly building for the last three-four years and moved to Cambridge last year,” says Farbod, who met his co-founders while on a games course at Bournemouth University.
“At CES in January this year we found a company called DigiLens and we approached them and said we have software, CASSI, and it would be amazing to partner up and they said yes, so we spent the last 11 months on that, and CASSI is due to launch on their platform next year.
mpu1
“DigiLens’ ARGO is the perfect platform for combining visionAI with modern, large language models, which takes AR to a whole new level. We have seen the impact of generative AI with chatbots and images, but we’ve yet to see this applied to real-time AR.”
CASSI is a novel spatial AI assistant for wearable devices, designed “to enhance user productivity and awareness in enterprise settings”. That means it will tell you where you left your bike, or describe all the objects in your field of vision.
CASSI combines computer vision algorithms with a large language model to generate practical solutions in AR using spatial awareness.
The power of generative AI helps CASSI gain a deeper understanding of real-world context, which it then uses to provide users with step-by-step assistance for a wide range of tasks. The partnership with DigiLens will give ARGO customers an AI upgrade and helps accelerate Phantom’s mission to elevate human capabilities with AI-powered wearables, which the company describes as “real-world superpowers in the making”.
ARGO users will be able to access the following CASSI features using their voice:
Spatial search: Locate any physical object or destination in the real world with 3D precision.
Contextual assistant: Generate step-by-step instructions to help perform physical tasks.
Task management: Use AR to create, edit, and track tasks seamlessly while performing them in the real world.
mpu2
ARGO is one of the first purpose-built, all-in-one XR smart glasses for the enterprise and lite-industrial market. The glasses feature DigiLens’ best-in-class Crystal30 waveguides and an EnLiten30 projector. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform, ARGO also features inside-out tracking capabilities, which enable developers to bring their ideas to life and revolutionise the possibilities of headworn AR.
“ARGO, integrated with a spatial AI assistant platform like CASSI, will change the future of mobile computing as we know it – for the better,” said Brian Hamilton, VP of sales and marketing at DigiLens. “DigiLens is excited to partner with Phantom Tech to deliver this AI-enabled technology for our customers to help optimise their workflows significantly.”
It’s been a startling – and stealthy – launch for Phantom Technology, which has relied on grants to get this far.
“I started the business with Daniel Mosaid after we met on a degree course at Bournemouth,” says Farbod, who followed a BSc in games technology with a fully-funded research engineering doctorate which began in 2018. “I was lecturing in Bournemouth at the same time as Daniel, and there was one student building a rocket simulator at the university and I was like ‘wow!’. He showed me how the 3D mapping worked – he was doing a project with a company in the US, and I said I’ll pay you double, so Louis joined.”
First up was a games engine which went on sale on the Unity games platform.
“We got 1,000 users but the market for developed toolkits is incredibly crowded so we thought ‘why not move into next phase?’ which is smart glasses, and then we started working with DigiLens.
“Generative AI is a whole type of new utility for wearable devices, it’s a new category that’s emerging for use in wearable cameras, and that’s becoming possible because of large language models and AI.”
All DigiLens glasses will have CASSI installed as the default AI software with vision capabilities.
“We call it spatial AI,” says Farbod, “so you can open the fridge and ask CASSI ‘what can I cook from the ingredients here?’. The product combines two important technologies – perception technology, or 3D mapping, and large language models.
“Some of CASSI is on the cloud, and some is local. The generative AI part is happening on the cloud.
“Basically it’s seeing its environment, it’s aware of your location through GPS, and it creates frame of context which is updated every second, so if you query anything – ie ask ‘what do I do now?’ – it gives you an answer, so it’s like Jarvis.”
Jarvis is a virtual assistant developed in 2016 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that’s used to operate devices in his home.
The team now includes Farbod; Daniel Mosaid, COO and co-founder; Louis Eriksson, system architect; Nikolay Penev, machine learning engineer; Nazar El Sayed, augmented reality engineer; and most recently James Banfield, head of commercial partnerships “who’s been working on mixed reality at Nikon for 17 years”.
James said of the partnership: “This is a huge development within the AR/XR space as CASSI’s ability to work on various platforms makes what are currently optical displays powerful AI wearable interfaces through our integration.
“I witnessed photography’s shift from analogue to digital, which gave everyone a tool to document their lives. Now, with CASSI, we’re entering an era of wearable AI, ushering in super-intelligence and spatial abilities for enterprise businesses. It’s a thrilling time for innovation and so exciting to be part of the UK’s cutting-edge AI efforts.”
“We’re building an operating system that is spatial, from the moment you turn it on it’s learning about the environment, including movement, so you can say where did I leave my keys, or my bike? There’s no tags, it sees things and remembers where they were. It’s indexing everything in 3D space so you can search the 3D world.
“We’ve invented the spatial search from vision to 3D indexing and we’re getting patents for all of that.”
