But First…Cool, if Real
We now have a navigation system more accurate than GPS:
Virtual Positioning System
Scroll to the end of this edition to see.
Becoming Dauntless
My last employer laid me off when I was 39 weeks pregnant. It forced a career pivot at one of the most vulnerable times of life. This experience burned badly enough that I never want to so easily put my livelihood in someone else’s hands again.
Building a business was a step in the right direction, but not the whole plan. As many are learning with each AI update announcement, businesses can be made redundant too.
At Dauntless, we remain unfazed, or undaunted if you want to go there, by what’s going on with AI. We’ve enjoyed the upside with little downside: It hasn’t negatively affected our revenue and has allowed us to build better apps faster, and produce more high-quality government proposals. But how? And why?
Only a short scroll on LinkedIn will reveal that this isn’t a common story. I’d like to credit my entrepreneurial genius and Nostradamus-like ability to predict the future. Critics tell me it was luck. But both those suggestions are unsatisfying, so here’s an analysis instead:
We like building tech to support the human in the loop and the human on the loop. My motivation for starting Dauntless was to help people in jobs that couldn’t be automated and systemized away (I was in one of those jobs, and my time there was miserable because it was so tedious).
We understood that tech must be grounded in the physical world, no matter how abstract the user experience might be. My introduction to the startup world was with Wedge Technologies, that makes wind turbines. I didn’t get to work with apps that are ones and zeros living on a cloud somewhere until much later. We are always bound by hardware capabilities, infrastructure, and that fact that we have to do things in the real world.
While some are heralding the start of “the hard tech era” with data centers, quantum chips, defense tech drones, getting headline real estate and investor dollars, I never entertained the idea that tech was anything but a physical enterprise.
I mean, even the Matrix was a huge infrastructure job.
All our software is for instances where technology isn’t going to take the human out of the loop for a long time: Katana for guiding humans through tasks that we only trust humans to do, Aura for briefing and debriefing missions that need a human operator, and now Flight Deck for helping pilots master the muscle memory of cockpit workflows. Until NeuraLink gets really good, we will have to build neural connections the old-fashioned way.
If you’re interested in learning more about identifying human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop opportunities, let me know.
News You Need to Know About
Dauntless XR Launched a Services Division. Bring us your toughest vibe-coded into a corner or dev shop disaster projects. We love a challenge.
Slim & Slam: Finding AR’s Holy Grail (AR Insider) Why didn’t we think of this headline? AR Insider explains why we don’t have a lightweight mixed reality headset yet.
Remix Reality has a Daily XR Digest.
The Unity awards are back for a 17th year. Submit your projects by September 9th.
Small Language Models Are the Next Big Thing NVIDIA published a paper arguing that small language models (SLMs) are superior to Large Language Models (LLMs) for agentic AI. SLMs have fewer internal variables and are more economically and computationally efficient. Software applications have also evolved from monoliths (one giant codebase that does everything) to microservices (a collection of deployable services that work together). It’s interesting that apps and AI mirrored how human brains work.
The posts that caught my attention this week:
The AI Job Swap (LinkedIn)
Recently Played >
What we listened to this week
Big Deal with Evy Poumpouras (YouTube)
Overheard on Slack
Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…
Everyone in the comments: "talk to users!"
Us: "That and $300k is a steal for 18 months of dev, where did you get that?”
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📸 This is real! Niantic, the creators of Pokémon Go, just released a VPS, or virtual positioning system, for Quest headsets. VPS is accurate down to a few centimeters, with the added benefit of wayfinding through large, GPS-denied spaces like convention centers, factories, canyons, and war zones.
