Lenovo rolls out AR headset and other ambitious AI concepts

PanARMENIAN.Net - You might know Lenovo for its laptops and Yogabooks, but the electronics maker is apparently used to conjuring up some pretty far-out concepts much more exciting than a 2-in-1. At its third annual Tech World innovation summit, it has revealed not just a couple of new Yogabook colors, but also the concept products it's most proud of, including an augmented reality headset and a smart speaker-projector. Lenovo envisions the daystAR headset as a standalone vision processing unit with a 40-degree field of view. It doesn't need to be connected to a phone or a PC, and the company expects developers to use its homegrown AR platform to create apps for the device, Engadget said.

Next in the list is SmartCast+, which is supposed to boast a lot more capabilities than the speakers with voice assistants of today, such as Amazon's Echo and its own Echo clone. If the smart speaker-projector ever becomes a real product, Lenovo wants to give it the ability to recognize sounds and objects, as well as to deliver AR experiences by projecting images onto a wall or a screen.

Lenovo is also eyeing the creation of an AI assistant called CAVA that's smarter than Siri and Alexa. The company wants to use deep learning to create facial recognition systems and natural language understanding technologies for the AI. That way, CAVA can truly understand your messages and make recommendations based on what you tell it. If you tell CAVA that you have a meeting in two hours, for instance, it can automatically check the weather and traffic conditions to tell you when to leave.

One of the last two concepts Lenovo showed off is the SmartVest, an ECG-equipped piece of clothing that can monitor your heart rhythm 24/7. The other one is the Xiaole customer service platform that can learn from interactions with customers in order to make each conversation more natural and personalized.

Lenovo says it sees cooking up concepts as an important part of its R&D process, because it lets the company explore and push boundaries. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that any of them will become real products, Engadget said.