“Generative AI came last year and took the world by storm, and everyone is now talking of quantum, but will it really change the world and how soon will it be?” asked Singh in his speech at The AI Summit in London.

Setting out his roadmap for quantum, Singh said the focus in the next one-to-five years would be on error mitigation techniques and small applications that leverage quantum algorithms.

Between five and ten years, he said there will likely be significant breakthroughs in error correction, while users will also see the realization of practical, mid-sized quantum computers. However, full-scale deployment is unlikely in the next decade.

“At the moment, it’s not possible to build that system and the challenge is because they operate at a sub-zero level,” said Singh, who has worked on AI and machine learning, Blockchain, cyber security and other tech projects across both the public and private sectors.

Running these supercomputers at near zero temperatures means they require dilution refrigerators, which have an average power consumption of 10 to 20 kilowatts, compared to an average classical computer server which uses one to two.

“It’s a huge jump,” said Singh. “We are not going to be carbon friendly if we are going to use quantum computing excessively.”

Alongside this, he said that specialised quantum computer data centres demand a lot more energy than the average data centre.

To ensure that quantum is environmentally friendly, research is being done to create more energy-efficient qubits and error-correction methods.

Singh also added that they are looking for renewable energy sources for data centres and alternative, more energy-efficient cooling technologies.

Industries that will see quantum solutions the soonest include finance, for security solutions, healthcare and pharmaceuticals for drug discovery, and the optimisation of energy grids and the use of quantum simulations for more efficient solar panels.

For other industries, “maybe after 2035.”

The post Quantum computing unlikely to see mass adoption for 10 years, says UK digital chief appeared first on TechInformed.

To date, most of the conversations around CBDCs have been focussed on whether they should go ahead or not, rather than on the major infrastructure that would be needed to support such a venture.

However, the argument for launching a national digital currency has already been settled by China, according to Paul Sisnett, a tech entrepreneur whose Netherlands-based company paywith. glass is currently looking at the architecture involved in supporting a potential retail CBDC in the UK.

From the moment China announced it was powering ahead with the digital yuan two years ago – while the rest of the world was just taking tentative steps towards looking at CBDCs – competing economies have been “caught on the backfoot” says Sisnett.

In the US, progress in exploring a digital USD was glacial until March this year, when a Biden government executive order called for “the responsible innovation of digital assets.”

Biden’s order came as the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency is under threat, claims Sisnett, because in the digital currency era reserve currency is no longer relevant.

As it is, he adds, global reserves of the US dollar have decreased by “trillions” because they are no longer used as much for trade.

“The US has suddenly figured it out, which was reflected in Biden’s executive summary, section four, where he talks about foreign central bank digital currencies and the threats to US sovereignty and US dominance,” Sisnett adds.

The second thing to note about the digital currency era, says Sisnett, is the infrastructure, which, he claims, is as important as the currency itself, in terms of asserting global influence.

“It’s not about the currency. It’s about who owns the infrastructure. China can offer other countries its infrastructure for their CDBCs especially to nations that are already in debt to the superpower – and what that means is that China will have the final say about what happens to a sovereign currency that’s built on its systems.”

And, he adds, if all those countries have a smoother, faster way to trade with China, then they don’t need to use the US dollar as a reserve currency.

Hailing from the telco world, Sisnett is firmly ensconced in the world of infrastructure. The platform architect was involved in designing and deploying part of the 2.9G EDGE network in the Caribbean for AT&T; his company has also designed infrastructure for ISPs and data centres.

The nomadic entrepreneur’s interest in fintech was first piqued 10 years ago, he says, as he found himself moving from country to country working on tech projects.

To avoid the hassle of setting up bank accounts in each country he started to experiment with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

“Yet every time I solved one problem, it turned out to be a symptom of another problem. So, I tried to solve that problem but then I realised the overall issue I was trying to solve was 50 years’ worth of legacy infrastructure that hasn’t changed in a world that has moved on so far,” he says.

“So, I thought, while it may seem insane, we need to create brand new infrastructure to replace this legacy infrastructure that everything’s sitting on,” he adds.

SWIFT for digital currency

And so, the concept of paywith.glass was formed – an intelligent digital currency/electronic payment (iDC/EP) network that claims to provide global replacement for SWIFT for the digital currency era.

Released this year, the platform is built on the company’s proprietary distributed cloud architecture, an open-source distributed ledger protocol and a proprietary machine learning High-frequency trading (HFT) algorithm.

It supports digital fiat currency, cryptocurrency and other units of value including loyalty programme points or tokenized real estate. Paywith.glass also claims to enable secure, instant, and nearly free global financial transactions of any volume at inter-bank rates – with no foreign exchange costs at infrastructure level.

Says Sisnett: “Since digital currency is data, we want to enable all the functionality, all the capabilities, the issuance of CBDC, the interoperability of payments, the compliance and to set up an infrastructure that allows everything to work from a technical standpoint,” he says.

“It comes from 20 years of experience designing telecommunications and common data centre infrastructure solutions and all the security and data privacy issues that go with that along with about a decade of blockchain experience and all the different disciplines that are needed to pull all of his together,” he adds.

The platform’s underlying Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is based on the Stellar payment network’s permissioned blockchain but employs no native cryptocurrency.

According to Sisnett, only 20% of the technology involved in the infrastructure is blockchain because blockchain doesn’t scale effectively to meet the requirements of the retail CBDC that the UK is currently exploring.

It’s worth pointing out that there are two main types of CBDCs: ‘retail’ CBDCs – which are effectively a digital extension of cash which can be used by everyone, and a ‘wholesale’ CBDC which can only by used by financial institutions to replace or compliment reserve currency in the interbank market.

Sweden and Switzerland are examples of nations which are pursuing a wholesale CBDC model, while the Bahamas, China, Nigeria the eastern Caribbean and Cambodia are examples of countries that have already launched a retail CBDC.

“Retail CBDCs require a scalability and need to be able to handle more than 300,000 transactions per second,” explains Sisnett, “whereas wholesale CBDCs are high value, low volume so you can build most of those solutions on blockchain technology.”

According to Sisnett, paywith.glass has been in development since 2016 but it has taken several years to perfect.

“Anyone who thinks that this can be done in six months or by the guys in IT who work in the basement of big banks is kidding themselves. It’s not that simple. The People’s Bank of China with the entire nation’s GDP at its disposal, took four years to get to pilot stage,” he says.

The UK’s CBDC

Sisnett’s team developed a prototype for the technology which was first demonstrated at UCL and Kings College London in 2018, when it  caught the eye of Amsterdam-based Startupbootcamp – a Dutch accelerator that helps start-ups scale internationally.

It was through association with two other start-ups on this Dutch programme that brought paywith. glass to the attention of the UK’s Payments Association and a consortium of other private industry stakeholders that are currently investigating the feasibility of a retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the UK.

Paywith.glass’s tech is now being used in a pilot to explore several retail CBDC deployments – which include use cases involving retail payments, cross border transactions as well as enabling servicing Payment Institutions (PIs) and Electronic Money Issuers to use the CBDCs.

“We’re pulling everyone together into a consortium first inviting the core technology partners and then the bigger banks to form a foundation to finalise the rules that everything sits on and to find out what new goods and services and products they can create.”

‘If we can provide a foundation that demonstrates what the digital currency era looks like then that’s when policy makers at the central bank and the Financial Conduct Authority can use this information to make policy decisions,” he says.

Companies that have already come to the table include a handful of fintechs and challenger banks from the UK, US and EU, as well and at least one Tier 1 UK bank.

“We’d also like card networks to come on board as well as more financial services companies, companies that offer aggregation solutions and companies that provide solutions for SMEs – the Xeros of this world – because we want to demonstrate what the full ecosystem will look like,” Sisnett adds.

He adds that they’d love to have other telco companies on board too. “Telcos were the first non-banks that looked at using digital money for any electronic payments – The M-Pesa initiative [a mobile phone-based money transfer service] is the perfect example of this.

“But a lot of telcos are, I guess, hesitant or just waiting for the traditional fintechs because many of them have been burned in the past. So, it would need to be a telco with an appetite and an interest in really going into this digital currency future.”

Where telco companies, broadband and cloud providers excel, adds Sisnett, is in their robust approach to cybersecurity.

“In the telecommunications industry, we’ve done such a great job of making things work. Every major company in the space has successfully managed to make everything work on the infrastructure layer to the point that it’s taken for granted and is completely invisible to the end user.

“Every single day AWS and Wix and all the providers in between are making sure your site doesn’t get taken down by cyberattack. They’re making sure that phishing attempts to get your email address and your password are blocked and that all the spam emails that are coming in go in the right place and are monitored. They’re doing all this stuff automatically.”

“Now if you’re going to build a CBDC solution then you have to revisit this because while the internet support is there for what we know today, the digital currency world is a slightly different kind of world, and you have to rethink those things that are now taken for granted.”

“Because once a G7 state gets its retail CBDC off the ground, even in the pilot stage, then China is not going to sit back and welcome them on board. Their digital army is going to be hitting this infrastructure daily and that’s what a design must compensate for. It must be designed with that in mind, security cannot be an afterthought.”

The post Designing a backbone for the digital pound appeared first on TechInformed.

The development of hydrogen technology has become very prominent within the past decade.  In September 2018, Germany began operating the world’s first train powered by hydrogen fuel cells.  India has begun retrofitting diesel trains to run on hydrogen fuel.  According to the Indian Ministry of Railways the new fuel cells will allow savings of Rs2.3 crore annually.

Toyota is already one of the largest producers of hydrogen powered cars, with its first generation Mirai cars capable of driving 300 miles on one 11 lb hydrogen tank.  Hydrogen batteries are far quicker to refuel compared to conventional electric ones, the only by product is water and the hydrogen powered vehicles are virtually silent in use.

The first passenger flight in a plane powered by hydrogen fuel cells has already taken place when ZeroAvia retrofitted a six-seater plane in 2020.

Producing hydrogen fuel is becoming big business worldwide with major corporates like BP becoming involved alongside start up companies. Production methods are currently focusing on either green hydrogen created from wind power and solar energy, or blue hydrogen created via electrolysis water & steam systems.

Although blue hydrogen is popular around the world from Canada to Japan, Cornel University has sounded a note of caution pointing out that no data has been presented to support potential reductions of carbon dioxide emissions for blue hydrogen, and that current assumptions are too optimistic.

Considerable investment is being ploughed into the development of hydrogen technology.  In 2021, the US department of Energy announced  $52.5 million hydrogen acceleration projects while the EU has announced its intention to invest €470 billion into hydrogen technology creating up to 1m jobs.  The UK’s hydrogen strategy aims to provide up to one third of the UK’s energy requirement by 2050, in deals worth around £13 billion.

One of the biggest hydrogen transport infrastructure projects has just been announced for northern Europe involving the governments of Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.  A network of hydrogen fuelling stations will be constructed along major routes from Hamburg to Oslo.

In India the first hydrogen-based energy storage system is being piloted by Bloom Energy (India), a wholly owned subsidiary of US based Bloom Energy.  The project involves utilising Bloom Energy’s solid oxide, high temperature electrolyser to create hydrogen from electricity produced by an adjacent solar farm. It will operate on a 24-hour basis, providing continual energy generation. The intention is that this initial project will provide the basis for large scale, off grid hydrogen energy storage and micro grid projects at locations throughout the country.

At a recent roundtable discussing the project, Garima Singh, senior manager of Energy and Environment for the U.S. India Strategic Partnership Forum, said: “The U.S.-India Gas Task Force is focused on stimulating demand for natural gas in India as well as on grid strengthening, to power India’s economy. The Task Force is appreciative of GAIL’s support in developing a growing network of LNG distribution across the country.”

Methods of production of hydrogen fuel are proving to be one of the most rapidly expanding areas of development involving numerous new inventions and discoveries. Scientists at Zurich University are currently testing a method in which solar kerosene jet fuel is produced out of a mix of sunlight, C02 and oxygen (syngas).   In California, renewable energy startup Heliogen in collaboration with Bloom Energy has set up a massive array of mirrors linked by artificial intelligence to develop a sunlight refinery.

According to Bill Gross, founder and CEO of Heliogen “the mirrors act like a large, computer controlled magnifying glass.” The light is reflected to the top of the Sunlight Refinery tower, and turning it into hot air, which is stored in rocks below ground for later use.

Shining a light

Solar energy is just one of the ways in which hydrogen can be produced.  It can also be created as a by-product of biomass.  Professor Hubert Girault and his team at the EPFL, Lausanne has just developed a new method involving flashlight pyrolysis using a Zenon lamp.

The lamp acts as a high power energy source, releasing short pulses promoting photo-thermal chemical reactions on a variety of biomass materials including banana peels, corn cobs, coconut shells and orange peel which had been dried and ground to a fine powder. Within a few seconds of the Zenon lamp being switched on, the conversion process had been completed.  One kilogram of dried biomass generated approximately 100 litres of hydrogen energy and 330 grams of biochar capable of being turned into fertiliser or for the manufacture of conductive electrodes.

The potential opportunities provided by hydrogen technology are also expanding into associated sectors. Electrolyser manufacturer CPH2 has developed a sustainable IP-protected membrane free electrolyser which do not require the use of platinum materials.  Instead, CPH2’s innovative system uses cryogenic separation to remove excess moisture from a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases.  This allows the recovery of heat and cold gas energy, which can be used by industries such as cement and glass production.

Hydrogen fuel is clearly here to stay and is set to provide an increasing proportion of the world’s fuel for many years to come.

The post Will hydrogen fuel our future? appeared first on TechInformed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also played a role in accelerating interest in online education either. As lockdown’s shuttered people in, education became an increasingly important component of the tech sector. Key tech trends such as the internet, AI and machine learning all were introduced to make the online experience an even more customer-friendly place. 

FutureLearn’s newest CEO Andy Hancock spoke with TechInformed about just how technology and education have weaved together to create an advanced online marketplace for education. 

How has tech turned education into a marketplace? 

Like many industries, the education sector is undergoing its own digital transformation, especially due to impacts of COVID. The importance of tech and digital learning in education is already demonstrating its influence today, with our recently launched report on the Future of Learning showing that online learning is the most popular way for one-third of UK adults to build their skills today. The demand from a global audience for renowned courses is also growing. We are no longer bound by our geographical location and instead have the choice through platforms like FutureLearn to gain an education anywhere and any time. 

From my experience in helping to bring the financial sector into the digital age and making it easier for the customer to navigate, I can already envision a similar path for the education sector. Education is now well on its way to becoming a marketplace where both learners can choose their learning pathway to suit their life and career goals, and educational and industry partners can serve bite-sized learner-focused content to enable the building of these pathways. In terms of how we build on this marketplace for the future, it’s all about continuing to optimise it with technologies such as AI and machine learning, in order to make the process of choosing a course or uploading content as seamless as possible for learners and partners respectively. 

How has the digitalisation of education strengthened learning?  

Online learning has expanded beyond its debut as the ‘MOOC’ over a decade ago. Where platforms once looked to service large cohorts of learners via synchronous courses, the industry has naturally progressed towards a more asynchronous, personalised experience that’s more tailored to the individual.  

Through this increased customer focus, online learning has placed more power into the hands of the learner, enabling them to find what they want to learn whenever they want to learn it. This is something that will only grow within the sector as consumer expectations around what they can do digitally continues along this trajectory. For educators, universities and learning platforms like us, this means we’ll need to leverage the vast amounts of data and customer behaviours we have, using tech, namely AI and machine learning to understand and help guide their experience on the platform. 

These technologies not only have the potential to benefit learners, but, harnessed in the right ways, they can also give partners the tools they need to refine and grow their digital offerings. I see an opportunity here to make it even easier for partners to be on the platform. 

Where does data, AI and automated models come into online education? 

As mentioned above, the education space is ever-changing due to the changing needs of the learner and as such technology will play an instrumental role in delivering this effectively. Namely through AI and machine learning to understand and help guide their experience on the platform. 

How will FutureLearn invest in the modern-day student? 

As we know, the very nature of being a student is changing. FutureLearn is always looking to understand the learner of tomorrow and we’ve recently done research as part of our Future of Learning report into identifying what exactly the needs and expectations of the future learner are. The report’s findings around the importance of online learning to consumers really tells that people want more flexibility, accessibility and affordability from their education, which are the exact areas FutureLearn will continue to invest in and strengthen as a core part of our strategy.  

We also know that learners value being able to interact with their peers while they learn, and the impacts this type of social learning has on their educational outcomes speaks volumes. At FutureLearn we’ve found that those who interact with social learning on a course are six times more likely to complete their course than those who do not. As education becomes increasingly blended between in-person and online delivery, investing in this social aspect will be a crucial part of ensuring the best outcomes for the modern-day student. 

How do you feel about joining FutureLearn and what are you excited about?  

I joined the company towards the end of 2021 and, having previously worked within the fintech sector at one of the UK’s biggest price comparison platforms, I’ve spent the last few months really getting to know the education sector and all its challenges and opportunities better. So far, what I’ve seen is very promising and I’m excited to be joining FutureLearn at a time when I believe we can make an even bigger impact on the sector through continuing on our mission to transform access to education. 

I’m particularly excited to see all of the opportunities around scaling the platform and its offerings to our learners, educators and partners alike in order to deliver a robust lifelong learning experience. The career for life has become a thing of the past, especially with recent trends like the ‘Great Resignation’, which is why it’s more crucial than ever that we can continuously deliver career-relevant courses for people as they take their next step up, and the next one after that. 

The post Learning online: How tech transformed education during Covid-19 appeared first on TechInformed.

In the hub of London’s Business and Design centre earlier this month, the world of payments felt like an interesting place to be as new types of conversations about programable money played out at the Payment Association’s annual conference, Pay360, and its new digital money spin out, Digital Currencies 360.

It was a cross fertilisation that saw financial service bods rub shoulders with blockchain outfits, while telco-based start-ups shared case studies with fin techs.

Merchant payment services meanwhile listened to how new players on the market were providing blockchain-based money transfers to financially underserved businesses in developing countries.

For Tony Craddock, the Payments Association’s director general, encouraging partnerships and collaborations between old and new financial players can only serve to advance payment innovation. But Craddock also wants to hear ideas and learn from the tech sector and other verticals too.

How can software programmers and hardware developers, for instance, support implementation and innovation in digital currencies such as Bitcoin or a stablecoin? How can they help with the roll out and the complex design of the digital pound, the UK’s mooted Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – which, the Bank of England predicts, could start circulating for retail use towards the latter half of this decade.

In a quite-ish corner of a busy show floor, TechInformed sat with Craddock to talk about his vision for a new era of money.

How long have digital currencies been on your agenda?

I first went to a conference in Amsterdam eight years ago where the one thing they advised us to buy was Bitcoin. The market has moved on since then. We launched Digital Currencies 360 about nine months ago and have also published the green paper, ‘A New Era for Money’. The paper explores how we can create a programme of activities which allow us to create, use and deploy digital currency technologies in the UK without the needing to get the central bank 100% on board; We want to operate like a skunkworks and set up and explore different ideas among small pockets of agile people who often work outside of big companies. That’s really what we’re doing with digital currencies.

Every country has its own reason for launching a CBDC – what’s in it for the UK?

The digital pound will operate on several levels. On a reputational level the UK finance industry is known for being innovative – it’s what attracts talent, money and companies into our ecosystem.

Because these new technologies are there, we need to show leadership. The community and the country needs to be seen to be adopting new technologies and we need to be seen to be leading on digital currencies.

Digital currencies also have the potential to make things much easier for the average consumer. Take cross border payments. If I sent money from my local corner shop in Tooting to Cambodia it will go through around 12 different entities. That’s hugely inefficient, old fashioned, expensive and slow. This new type of technology builds afresh from the ground up which can solve these sorts of problems.

There are also geopolitical reasons too. There is currently a systemic threat to the dominance of the USD from China and its digital yuan [which launched its first pilot earlier this year]. We need to be prepared and protective of our interests at a very strategic and national infrastructure level. We can only do that if we ensure that we are as every bit as good as the Chinese.

The UK government has launched a consultation into the merits of the digital pound. What are the main barriers to adoption?

Fear, uncertainty and doubt. People say the technology is there, the brain power is there, the money is there – but people are also scared, they don’t understand it and they fear risk. And there is some risk attached to it. If we get this wrong and deploy the wrong set of policies and systems, then there’s a risk that it could have a negative impact on the systems that we’re trying to promote and encourage.

Earlier this year the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee said that the concept of a digital pound presented ‘a lot of risk for very little reward’…

Their conclusions were what you would expect from the House of Lords. They went to talk to people who they regarded as experts. But the problem with that is that there’s no such thing as an expert in digital currencies – there are a few commentators but no experts because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s so new. They spoke to authors, people in the industry, some technology people who caveated their comments with ‘we don’t know yet because we haven’t done it’ and, as a result, their conclusions were cautiously positive – saying that it’s something that needs to be kept an eye on.

But they also said that it was ‘a solution looking for a problem’ which it’s not. Particularly with cross border payments and de-risking – there are some very big problems that our industry has which digital currencies could help solve.

Where did this sudden interest in digital currency come from in the House of Lords?

It’s seen the writing on the wall. It might have heard the news (announced earlier this month) that the Biden administration is putting its support behind the Fed researching and developing a US CBDC.

Given that the dollar is the world’s most dominant currency, the Fed has been reticent until now to support any development of CBDCs…

Yes – also because of fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s a risky and unsecure territory riddled with fraud and crime – in the way that when any new tech is adopted there are grey areas.

But there are also companies – operating successfully on the fringes – that are finding new use cases for digital currencies and consumers. We’ve seen some speak today – companies such as Paywith.glass – which comes from the telco world – and the blockchain fintech FinClusive – and we need to bring these companies into the midst of the community and making them standard.

There are also more established companies such as e-commerce solutions provider Trust Payments – which view digital currencies as an opportunity to innovate and stay ahead of their competition.

How can the wider tech community get involved in conversations around digital currency?

We need hardware manufactures to create more efficient processes. Software developers to ensure that the software works and is interoperable.

We also need innovators in technology – around digital identity and verification: if I am going to bring a new technology into the system and use digital money – it is going to depend on me not having to require you to post your utility bill to make a transaction. I also want to make sure that I’m not constantly being consulted by regulators over privacy concerns.

Where does blockchain and digital ledger technology fit into all this?

It will help us produce new payment systems – have you spent much time thinking about programable money? What’s clever about digital cash is that when you move it somewhere you can programme it to do certain things under certain conditions. You put caveats on cash: you could programme it to only be received by an authenticated individual.

One condition might be that it will cost me more to use digital money across multiple territories rather than money I can only use in one territory. Or maybe its tied to other digital currencies such as stable coins or the digital pound and tied to the central bank. If I can do this, then I can have a coin that is interoperable with multiple currencies so that it can always be changed into the digital euro or the digital peso at the mid-market rate.

I could be a small construction business dealing with a supplier of house building materials. I have a £30K budget which I need to use very carefully and so I use programmable money to ensure that I know exactly how much that I’ve bought and what I have returned to the supplier and in exactly 15 days the purchase will be made. So instead of having to rack it up at the end of the month, reconcile what was and wasn’t returned, I can do that instantly in a programmable way that is contracted into the money itself. Building supplies, transport, pharma, we can go out to all these industries, find out what their challenges are and work out how digital currencies can help solve them.

Developing these strategies seems like a good opportunity for smaller tech companies, start-ups, and universities…

Universities should be all over this – we currently have partnerships with the Loughborough Business School the Alliance MBS Business School at The University of Manchester and a US college too.

The thought that you can program money is a bit mind blowing but once you start playing with the idea there are multiple possibilities and it’s generally easier to see these if you are coming at it from another industry.

The post New change appeared first on TechInformed.

Over the years, reasons the physicist and CEO, the word has been hijacked by fiction to come to mean the magical and the fantastical where reality defies the laws of mechanical physics.

But what Peronnin and his 40-strong team are building – and what they’ve just secured a Series A funding round of €27m for, is a marketable quantum computer with real world applications.

“There’s nothing magical about it – quantum physics is the most accurate representation of nature, without any magic in it and building a quantum computer is a well-defined challenge that requires an eloquent solution,” he says.

Hence Alice&Bob – a reference to two characters used in physics and cryptography theory (instead of A & B) – and a name which is proudly more physics textbook than quantum fiction.

And as the market moves from fantasy to theory to reality, there is real money pouring into quantum computing. A report by Global Markets Insights estimates that the market is set to surpass $5bn by 2028.

International Data Corporation meanwhile projects global customer spend for quantum computing will grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027- a compound annual growth rate of 50%.

Little wonder then, that global technology giants – including Google, Amazon and IBM – as well as international academia and laboratories around the world  – are all racing to build the first commercial quantum computer.

In the latter category – a spin out from a federation of French research labs – is Alice&Bob, founded by Peronnin and fellow quantum physicist Raphaël Lescanne.

Quantum physics is the most accurate representation of nature, without any magic in it

As a start-up, explains Peronnin, it was important to take a “lean and singular and focused vision” by adopting a hardware-efficient approach to quantum computing.

“We’ve picked what we think is the main battle in this race, which is the quantum hardware. We’re building the chip devices that will be at the core of quantum computers,” he adds.

The simple aim is to build a quantum computer that does not make errors. One of the biggest challenges in building a quantum computer is the errors affecting qubits (a qubit, or ‘quantum bit,’ being the quantum version of the classic binary bit).

Companies like IBM are attempting to solve this problem by working on processors with more and more qubits.

Alice&Bob, however, have taken a qualitive approach by designing a superconducting ‘cat qubit’ circuit, which, it claims, is able to reduce the faults in processing thus reducing the number of processors needed to overcome these faults.

Recent work with one research lab, led by the experimental physicist Zaki Leghtas, has shown that these cat qubits resist “bit flips” (that’s the name for one of the two types of faults which appear in quantum computing) for up to several minutes.

While this might not seem long, the company claims that it’s a near “100,000 times improvement on earlier quantum efforts”.

With this recent discovery, Alice&Bob claims it has created “a shortcut to delivering a scalable universal quantum computer”-  by reducing the number of qubits required.

News of this breakthrough coincided with a successful $30m fundraising round, with investors including the French VCs Elaia, Bpifrance and Breega as well the disruptive tech fund manager Supernova Invest.

According to Peronnin, the plan now is to use the cat bit circuit to reduce the other known error in quantum computing: ‘phase flips.’ He estimates that this will take another year – meaning that the first fault tolerant quantum computer could be in circulation by 2023.

If it is a success the firm will deliver Quantum-as-a-service (QaaS) to allow businesses to utilise quantum computing resources remotely.

“No one so far managed to build this kind of quantum computer that manages to do things that a classical computer can do because of these errors. And so, in our case, we’re really focusing on solving the technical challenges,” he says.

Quantum’s got talent

Peronnin adds that one of Alice &Bob’s assets is its ability to attract talented and accomplished physicists and engineers to solve these challenges. To this end, the firm plans to hire a further 30 employees over the next two years, mostly with advanced physics skills, as well as developers and engineers supporting the commercialisation of its technology.

“The limiting factor in quantum computing at the moment is not funding – although it is quite capital intensive – it’s the access to scientists and to knowledgeable people that know how to build those extraordinary machines,” he says.

But even with scores of extra talent – does Peronnin really think he can compete with the might of Google and IBM? While it’s not about money yet, he admits that one day it will be and they will need to scale up. However, in terms of size, he adds that the start-up is not that far behind.

“If you look at Google’s quantum hardware team, it’s between 50 and 100 people from estimates. IBM is around 100 to 200 people. Now we are 40, we will be we aim to double within the next two years. So while we are not the same ballpark yet, but they are not lightyears ahead in terms of size,” he says.

While half Alice&Bob’s staff hold PHDs, you won’t see many sales and marketing people among its numbers. Peronnin appears so confident that the use cases for these machines are “ubiquitous,” that he says he’d rather focus on creating value to firm’s shareholders through improving the technology.

In terms of actual deployments, Peronnin can only speak in broad terms, but he sees three main areas where quantum computing will be used to solve problems that classical computers can’t. The first area is optimisation – optimising a financial portfolio or designing an optimal shape of aeroplane blade.

“Quantum computers can be used to speed up optimisation dramatically and find the ultimate solution, for example, for logistics or complex networks as well,” he explains.

The second area is in addressing engineering problems – or linear algebra – with quantum computers able to solve fluid dynamics equations in designing aeroplanes or to train neural networks for artificial intelligence.

“Most modern engineering could be exponentially speeded up and it has applications in sectors such as energy, engineering and data science,” Peronnin says.

However, what excites Peronnin the most is quantum computers’ ability to simulate molecules to decode secrets of genomes, drugs and proteins.

“Just to take a very practical example, if you want to simulate a molecule like penicillin – that’s a simple molecule – but it would take a classical computer, something like 10 to 80 free bits of memory, so more bits of memory than you have atoms in the universe.

“So, it’s not just that our current computers are not fast enough, they never will be. Whereas with a quantum computer, it will take something like 254 quantum bits, if I recall correctly, so while we’re not there yet, it’s all within reach.”

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As its name suggests, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, running from January 5 – 7, is focused on direct-to-consumer technology, but the show’s key themes this year – electrification, connectivity, automation, and AI – also delivered technologies that promise to transform whole swathes of industry too.

During CES several firms gave press conferences during the event’s media days on the 3^rd and 4^th January as well as during the show itself, announcing first-of-their-kind products. Here is a round up of the top four.

 1) Smart Agriculture: John Deere’s fully autonomous tractor

“If you visit a farm you will see as much technology in the field as you will in Silicon Valley – from robotics to sensors to AI and Big Data the farm is a high-tech operation,” declared Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer of 185-year-old agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere during the firm’s Tuesday CES media briefing.

Hindman was at CES to unveil the world’s first autonomous tractor – one that John Deere now claims are ready for large-scale production and will be available to farmers later this year.

The firm claims that the breakthrough will help the industry with labour shortages and increased demand for crops, providing farmers with tools that “Do more for less and still allow the farmer to return for dinner at the end of the day.”

To use the autonomous tractor, farmers only need to transport the machine to a field and configure it for autonomous operation.

Using an app on their mobile device, users can swipe from left to right to start the machine, leaving them to focus on other tasks, while monitoring the machine’s status.

Deere’s operating system provides access to live video, images, data, and metrics, allowing farmers to adjust speed, depth, and other functions.

Willy Pell, the head of John Deere’s AI Lab, added that achieving high degrees of safety and productivity were “the core challenges of this project.”

He added: “While a farm has fewer variables than the open road, building a production worthy vision system requires a world class machine learning research team and many hard-fought innovations,” he added.

According to Pell the system is capable of constant improvement through finding relevant data and training new models with it.

“In addition to the 50 million images we have collected from farms all over the US, we are also constantly feeding it new images and the training process rewards it for making correct decisions and penalises it for making incorrect ones,” he explained.

Even for obscure events such as a billboard blowing into a field and obstructing the vehicle’s path, Deere has built an anomaly detection system that recognises standard objects so that when it sees something it does not recognise, the machine automatically stops.

2) Smart Research: Advanced Symbolics’ Ask Polly AI

Canadian research company Advanced Symbolics (ASI) chose CES’ media day this year to launch the next version of its AI research tracker, Polly, which is designed to understand how people’s online behaviours and connections predict their real-world actions.

Developed by the University of Ottawa with a clear ‘tech-for-good’ mission, one of its first applications was to help the Public Health Agency of Canada reduce national suicide rates by using the AI to identify online trends and find patterns of suicide-related behaviours.

Polly has since been used for pandemic tracing, vaccine hesitancy and even modelling of how the virus has moved through Canada.

While many of Polly’s government agency and public health clients are sensitive to privacy issues, ASI’s chief executive Erin Kelly emphasises that individuals are not tracked as the AI relies on population-level data which drills down into demographics, psychographics, and conversational modelling.

And while statisticians and mathematicians could only really use the first incarnation of Polly, Kelly claims that the updated version, Ask Polly, will be released as a generally available (GA) product, which people can access through the internet.

“Right now, the AI still takes 3.5minutes to process but we hope to speed that up by fall of 2022 when it will be available for GA,” Kelly added.

Playing to the crowd of press gathered at CES and online, Kelly also highlighted several professional use cases for the tool: from market research (including research for EV car manufacturers) to journalists wanting to check out the truth of an issue.

““Polly is not biased – she will present you with what people are actually saying which is ideal for journalists embarking on a story who want to see what people are actually saying about any given topic in an unfiltered, unbiased way,” she said.

Despite the AI’s tech-for-good stance, Polly is best known in her native Canada for correctly predicting the outcome of the Canadian Federal Elections in 2019, predicting a Liberal Party minority government calling the result within a couple of seats at a very narrow majority.

Most traditional pollsters refused to call the result maintaining it was too close a call.

Again, rather than targeting individual users directly – something that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were called out on during the 2016 US election – Kelly said that ASI creates an anonymous, representative picture of what is on voters’ minds based on the information that they have shared publicly. On its website, ASI states that it does not access any private communications.

“We don’t do any work for political parties out of principle,” Kelly added “but we could definitely tell you where the other parties were going right or wrong and what they would have needed to do to get better results.”

3) Smart Construction: Doosan Bobcat’s electric loaders

As Doosan Bobcat acknowledged during the manufacturing firm’s press conference at CES, construction equipment has not changed much in over eighty years: it’s noisy and polluting, guzzling diesel fuel and hydraulic oil.

Which is why the South Korean firm claims that its new, all-electric track loader will “power the future of work” providing construction firms the opportunity to become more sustainable as well as more productive.

According to the company’s president and chief executive Scott Park, the compact loader uses only one quart of eco friendly coolant compared to fifty-seven gallons of diesel and features no hydraulics at all – making it the first machine of its kind.

“It also required fifty percent fewer parts than its diesel equivalent and is ten time quieter – making it ideal in sensitive urban environments,” he added.

Bobcat collaborated with aerospace and defence motion control system company Moog to design the machine’s control capabilities and the drive. Moog has previously supplied the tech for the closing roof in Wimbledon as well as for the International Space Centre and to commercial jets.

Bobcat has also entered a partnership with US rental company Sunbelt Rentals who have committed to taking the loaders and excavators into their national fleet.

4) Smart Deliveries:  Ottonomy’s curbside Ottobots

Born during the midst of the pandemic in 2020, Ottonomy’s mission has always been to find ways of using autonomous technologies to help solve the problems that the world faces right now, rather than soon, according to its founder and chief executive Ritukar Vijay.

At CES on Wednesday it launched a fleet of fully autonomous delivery robots, called Ottobots, for the restaurant and retail industries, which – it claims – can operate in both indoor and outdoor environments.

The Ottobots create a digital map of the serviceable area and localize within that map. Its live location gets updated on the map while they are navigating autonomously to deliver the orders.

According to Vijay, Ottonomy’s proprietary contextual mobility navigation software enables Ottobot to navigate through crowded and unpredictable environments.

The Ottobots’ main two points of focus this year will involve off-road contained environments such as airports or last-mile curbside deliveries (from the supermarket to the carpark, for instance).

To this end, the firm claims to have supplied the world’s first fully autonomous delivery robot at an airport, delivering retail and food items at CVG Airport in Cincinnati.

Ottobot has also partnered with Los Angeles based Crave, for last-mile food delivery for its restaurant customers.

Last month, meanwhile, fast restaurant firm Presto, announced that their partner restaurant guests will be able to order using Presto’s technology and have the food delivered via Ottonomy’s robots.

Quick service restaurant delivery is something the firm hopes to scale up on this year and the robot’s API can be integrated either with the ordering apps or the Point-of-Sale system.

To support its effort to roll out Ottobots across North America over the next 18 months, Ottonomy has formed a strategic partnership with ARO, a global leader in robotic management, operations, and support.

At CES Vijay also announced that Ottonomy has opened an office in New York to experiment on deliveries involving less clement weather conditions and revealed that its technology is currently being evaluated for multiple use cases by US retail giant Walmart.

In terms of on road and sidewalk deliveries Vijay added that the firm wants to wait for the right regulations to take form, which he predicted would be “fine tuned in the next couple of years.”

The post CES2022: Four tech innovations that promise to transform industry appeared first on TechInformed.

Our experts predict more new technologies and innovations that support a carbon neutral future.

 AI and Machine Learning will fill the gaps in decarbonised data

“More companies will set bold decarbonization goals such as science-based targets or Net Zero pledges, and the topic of carbon is moving from a pure reporting concern to a core strategic one.

“The challenge is that the underpinning carbon data is evolving much slower. Many leaders are rightly questioning whether they have the right data to act. But it’s not a binary question: Act or gather data. Companies don’t need to wait for perfect data to act as new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the way organisations think about decarbonisation data. These technologies can model missing data, project future scenarios and mobilise organisations to move at the pace required to reach Net Zero.”

Mathias Lelièvre, CEO, Engie Impact

Enterprise embraces third-party sustainable innovation

“The world and the enterprises within it are facing major challenges, especially around climate change sustainability. These big challenges require big solutions, and this entails a more holistic approach to innovation. No business can expect to find the answers by looking only within its own organisation.

“Open innovation refers to the practice of sourcing ideas from an external crowd of experts beyond your own enterprise. It is based on the premise that there are more smart people not employed by you than are. Businesses that have embraced open innovation have found they can tap into an even greater resource than their own employees. Such collective expertise and knowledge are a powerful proposition and can be used to address the sustainability challenges the world is facing, navigate business issues, and unearth new opportunities.

“Furthermore, innovation must be scalable. If you can address a smaller problem within the organisation, then it makes sense to expand and scale that, so it is even more impactful. Enterprises are becoming more aware of this need and 2022 will be the year that the concept truly hits home.”

Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku

The post 2022 Informed: Sustainability predictions appeared first on TechInformed.

Trials in the US, Singapore, India and more have given a glimpse into how self-driving vehicles might function, and how they may be transformative for a range of other industries.

However, despite the opportunities offered by autonomous vehicles, challenges still remain. Legislation is lagging way behind, while existing road users may not be prepared for streets full of self-driving cars or trucks.

Then there’s the issue that perhaps could cause the biggest headache for global adoption: connectivity.

To power a self-driving vehicle, you need high speed, low latency connectivity that allows the car to “speak” to both other vehicles on the road, and road systems, such as traffic lights. Initial models overcome this by relying on local sensors to ensure that connectivity issues – inevitable from time to time – do not cause harm on the roads.

However, future models will still need access to high-speed connectivity for both in-car and driving purposes. Not only will connectivity power the vehicle, it will also add to the experience inside through “infotainment” platforms.

So, how to deliver the connectivity that will enable the experience needed within connected cars? There are two obvious contenders; satellite and 5G. The former has traditional been key to vehicular connectivity – hence the still used term “satnav” for navigation and mapping systems. But in 5G, there is now a realistic terrestrial competitor.

Onur Karabey – co-founder and CEO of Alcan Systems – believes the vehicles of the future will require both technologies.

“For us there is an obvious answer, that is to take the best parts of both and combine them in a hybrid approach. In cities, cars would take advantage of 5G networks and the fast, high-capacity service they are able to offer.

“As the vehicle moves out of an area with 5G coverage, it would switch over to satellite making the most of universal connectivity but without the high price tag of relying on this technology full time.”

Driving antennas forward

Alcan builds smart antenna systems which use ultra-thin flat panel technology, very low power, and are able to adjust their beam electronically without any moving parts. As a start-up, it successfully trialled the world’s first liquid crystal-based phased antenna in a satellite communications field test.

According to Karabey, the company, which is based in Germany, is currently developing a smart flat panel antenna which will work with the 5G and satellite infrastructures to enable its vision for connected cars. This follows 15 years of research, using liquid crystal technology in high frequency applications.

Karabey noticed that, on a system level, there was nothing using liquid crystal technology and automotive presented an obvious use case. This led to the firm’s development of the first liquid crystal-based phased array antenna, which could form the cornerstone of an ecosystem that will allow operators to overcome the challenge of quickly rolling out the very high frequency mmWave technology required for 5G.

Returning to connected cars, Karabey explains that Alcan is combining this technology with satellite communications, which has traditionally been very expensive, perhaps even prohibitively so for consumer markets, and also high power.

“If you go to market today with an existing antenna, it will almost be as expensive as the car,” he adds. “What we’re doing, with this technology, will see antenna costs reduced hugely – this our long vision target.”

The company is running two programmes simultaneously to achieve this: in urban areas connectivity is provided by mobile terrestrial operators – via services such as 5G connectivity –  while in rural areas, where connectivity is sparse, it will be provided by satellite communications.

Alcan is working with several companies, including K-Band satellite provider SES, and multiple mobile operators, to provide the technology. It has also partnered with several German car manufacturers to look at how to implement its solution.

Car antennas have changed dramatically in recent years, from long, thin expandable antennas, to car fins. But, according to Karabey, Alcan will be a “game-changer”.

He adds: “The requirement on the car will be much different to what we find today. Current antennas can only offer limited data rates, offering low connectivity through a SIM card or satellite connectivity. With our technology you will achieve around 60-100Mbps connectivity in-car.”

For reference, the average broadband connectivity speeds for fixed terminals in the UK is around 51Mbps according to cable.co.uk, but this is among the slowest in Europe. The average speed in Western Europe for fixed data connectivity is 90.56Mbps.

Phasing to the future

In a phased array antenna, you have four main sub-components: the radiating element, which detects the signal; a phase shifter, the component that controls the speed of the signal; a feed network which connects phase shifters; and a controller which computes this.

Alcan replaces the semiconductor phase shifters, which control the signal, with liquid crystal panel technology. Because this technology is thinner and consumes less power, it allows more control over higher speed connections.

He adds: “What phased array antenna does by controlling the signal speed, you transmit or receive the signal from a certain direction on the space. So the antenna is always on the table, there is no mechanical moment on the table. But by controlling the phase shifters, you are steering your beam from one direction to the other.”

Karabey predicts that the vehicle market will split into two key stages. The first will be based around autonomy in the way they are driven. This is a key focus across the automotive sector right now. According to Facts and Factors market research report, the Global Autonomous Cars Market size & share revenue is expected to grow from USD 23.33 Billion in 2020 to reach USD 64.88 Billion by 2026, at 22.7% annual CAGR growth during forecast period of 2021-2026.

“Initially, we will see connectivity improve which will help cars come up to the fourth or fifth level of autonomous vehicles. But we are focussed on the next step – infotainment. If you’re not driving your car, what will you be doing? You’ll need entertainment, or the ability to use your car like an office, while moving.

“At the moment, in many countries, if you are travelling on a motorway, forget about internet connectivity – even making a traditional phone call is a problem!”

For Alcan, connectivity will change the definition of what a car is. No longer will it just be a means of transport – it becomes “a software platform with four wheels”.

“It will change completely,” he adds. “From today to 2030, it will be a hybrid experience, but afterwards, it will be a full software platform. We may not even have our own cars – we will simply call a connected car through an app, and that vehicle will always be connected through hybrid high-speed communications.”

The post How hybrid connectivity will power the connected car? appeared first on TechInformed.

That is the view expressed by Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson when she spoke at this year’s Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, about her recent move to the company.

The former Microsoft executive vice president of business development joined AR headset maker Magic Leap in August 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and found a company that had a launched a functional and exciting AR headset aimed initially at consumers. Even though the Magic Leap One was cutting edge, it was struggling for mass adoption.

Johnson explains that the product came “perhaps a bit too early” for consumers – it was too large and wasn’t backed with a substantial ecosystem or enough applications to justify the cost (currently around $2,300).

The pivot, she added, came as she arrived at the company, with a realisation that the headset could solve numerous problems and challenges for certain enterprise sectors.

“To me that just made so much more sense. And then I narrowed it down to just healthcare, manufacturing and defence and public sector because those verticals are already used to wearing things on their eyes, and they’re comfortable with that and they could embrace the value of augmented reality.”

As Johnson explained, it is a lot easier to convince a doctor training for a complex surgery to wear a headset in the operating room than to get people to put them on when they go out with friends or just to use at home.

She likens the challenge for Magic Leap and other AR headset makers to that of the mobile phone manufacturers in the 90s. Initially, the devices were primarily owned by businesses and those who worked for them, too bulky, inconvenient and expensive for most consumers.

“Those things didn’t matter because you were using the phone to solve problems for your business,” she explained. “If you needed to do that quickly, you could pull over and make a call from your car, rather than finding a parking spot near a phone booth. So there was a return on that investment.

“With AR, there is a return on investment in those industries we’ve identified today.”

As mobile phones grew in popularity, they got cheaper, lighter and less expensive, and that evolution offers hope for AR and VR, she adds.

Second Leap

Though the Magic Leap One didn’t achieve critical mass (although the company keeps a tight lid on sales figures), the manufacturer is well-funded, with investments believed to have surpassed $2.6 billion from backers including Google and Alibaba. That means it is steaming straight into a follow up device, Magic Leap 2.

Johnson announced plans for the new device in October when the company revealed it had raised another $500 million in a funding round.

“This investment is an important step in advancing Magic Leap’s mission to transform the way we work,” said Johnson, in a statement. “Since joining Magic Leap in 2020, my focus has been on accelerating the company’s shift to the enterprise market, strengthening our technological foundation, and building a robust business across sectors ranging from healthcare and manufacturing to defence and the public sector. With ongoing support from our existing investors, Magic Leap will have greater financial flexibility and the resources needed to continue our growth trajectory as we expand on our industry-leading AR technology.”

Magic Leap 2 will be smaller, lighter, and faster than its predecessor, she explained, offering an “all day, every day” kind of experience for users.

“You have to be able to leave that thing on your head right through your eight hours or however long you’re working. So we made that move.

Another key consideration was the field of view, and where you can place content on an AR headset. “That’s the optical challenge – you want it to be as big as possible. So we were roughly the same as [Microsoft] HoloLens, which is is second generation – that’s the other product in our category. Now, with Magic Leap 2, we are going to double that field of view. You’re going to be able to put digital content in a much larger space.”

What does this mean for the user? Optically, the AR field of view will cover around 70 degrees, which is double what Magic Leap One offered. This will help enterprise users who may have to look around more, such as at a factory floor, but still need to perceive the content produced on the headset.

Another key challenge for AR headsets is bulk, much of which is caused by the need for larger batteries to power them.

Magic Leap’s headset are tethered, although there is an optional battery pack which can be attached to a belt or placed in a pocket in order to remove both weight and the heat generated from a battery away from users’ heads.

Use cases

Key to making AR into a success, whether that be for consumers or for enterprises, is offering solid use cases for the technology. This means building out an ecosystem that offers applications to meet business needs.

The latest $500 million funding round will not only guarantee the development and launch of the second generation headset, but it will also allow Magic Leap to “build the ecosystem around it”. And Magic Leap has turned to the developer community to partner with it on developing killer apps.

“We’ve got an open SDK that we’re starting to distribute to developers, and the ecosystem grows as fast as we can bring them on,” she explained.” It’s easy to just take their applications, and then using the features that Magic Leap provides the ability to create a 3D visualisation of a of a brain or a factory machine they can use.”

One example she offered was a recent partnership with Cisco to integrate its WebEx video conferencing platform into Magic Leap.

“They’re taking video conferencing to a new level with 3D meetings,” added Johnson. “So they have a very high quality engagement and Magic Leap is one of the devices that they’re using to turn a typical 2D, sitting in front of our laptop, kind of a meeting into a 3D meeting where you’re sitting back and you can virtually see the people you’re speaking with. But maybe we’re getting on planes less because you don’t feel the need to actually fly several hours.”

She says Magic Leap’s role in these partnerships is to take advantage of features on an existing product in order to make the experience more realistic for the end user. This includes features such as special audio, which gives the impression of where people are in a room in relation to you.

It also allows for more collaboration. Say two people are working on a design together. On a typical meeting, they may share a screen, but through AR, they can annotate together, change the size or shape of the design, or adapt it on the fly in a way that is more challenging than through Zoom or Teams.

Another example of use cases she discussed is surgery. “The power of augmented reality is when we can interweave it into everything we do,” she said. With surgery, doctors will be able to take an augmented reality device like Magic Leap into the operating room with them. They might be carrying out knee surgery and the headset would enable them to lay a marker for where an incision might go.

Johnson added: “I think in a few years, we’ll look back and say remember when doctors didn’t use augmented reality to operate on you – you’re not going to want that old experience. You’re only going to want the new experience because it’s going to be so much more accurate and precise.”

One key challenge that surgeons using the headsets faced was the impact of highly lit rooms on the content. Surgeries are, understandably, well lit. This can dull the content, making it harder to see on Magic Leap One.

To combat this, the company developed a dimming function that actually dims the lightness of the room around the content if necessary, which would allow surgeons to only light the part of the body they are focussing on. In fact, according to Johnson, this technology is more VR than AR and the headset can go full VR if necessary.

Of course, widespread adoption will be stalled until headsets feel less intrusive. The “holy grail” of XR is a headset that is no more disruptive than wearing normal glasses or sunglasses. So how far out is this? Analysts often say it might take a decade. Johnson is more confident.

She said: “I’d say it’s probably a couple years out. I don’t think it’s the 10 years out that some of the companies that are starting to dabble in AR are saying it is. We’ve been doing this for 10 years and we’ve already solved a lot of the complex optics in the AR product that we have. So I think it’ll be more like a few years not 10.”

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