While watching the super dope new HBO special The Defiant Ones about the life and times of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre I come across a new $99 AR headset that people are calling a game changer.
The funny thing about it is that the students that created that prototype and then recevied funding from backers including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Will.i.am,and Sequoia Capital went to school at the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young (Dr. Dre) Academy at the University of Southern California. Funny how those defiant ones have influenced a new generation of defiant ones.
More affordable than the $3,000 HoloLens and the $949 Meta2 Mira uses an iPhone for the headset's brain, Mira apps run on an iPhone, and the iPhone screen is part of the display.
"Right now this is the only accessible hardware solution for AR," Mira CEO Ben Taft said.
"This is really a vehicle to deliver our software platform and the content we're cocreating," Mira COO Matt Stern said. "It's all about creating an accessible solution that people aren't scared of — not putting a big machine on their head that costs multiples of $1,000."
Mira founders Ben Taft and Matt Stern were classmates in a programencourage creative thinking and entrepreneurial risk-taking that was funded by Beats founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre after they sold their company to Apple for $3.2 billion. The program is mentioned in the new HBO series The Defiant Ones.
"We were classmates first, then we became best friends, and then we became coworkers, and then we became cofounders," Taft said.
The team wanted to develop AR but could not afford a hololens so they decided to do their own thing.
"Originally, rather than pooling money together to buy a HoloLens, we literally started sourcing Android spec phones from China and components from Alibaba — we were building these makeshift headsets," Stern said. "Literally thousands of 3-D printed prototypes."
The team worked hard on their product and now are part of the rush of bringing AR to the masses and because MIRA uses iOS, it could take advantage of Apple’s ARKit platform.
