Kura, a pioneer and leader in generative multimodal AI and widest-FOV augmented reality technology, today announced that the company has been recognized as a CES 2024 Innovation Award honoree for its AR glasses. The award recognizes the product’s custom AI framework and powerful developer tools that provides an unrivaled user experience.
The annual CES Innovation Award program recognizes outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products. This year’s CES innovation Awards program received a record-setting number of more than 3,000 submissions and is one of the most respected and renowned awards for frontier electronic devices. This is Kura’s second CES honor.
“This is yet another significant milestone in Kura’s journey, and this honor highlights our drive to integrate powerful artificial intelligence models with augmented reality to enhance our users’ lives,” said Kelly Peng, Founder of Kura. “Imagine a powerful AI virtual assistant that follows you wherever you go, recognizing real-world objects and actions, and interacting with you in a very natural way — that’s what Kura will provide.”
To date, Kura has met significant milestones, achieving an industry record 150-degree field-of-view with the Kura glasses and has provided demos to hundreds of users and professionals. Kura’s product is enabled by Kura’s customized design silicon — through a partnership with TSMC (the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer) — and world’s first AI-generated optical design software, built by an in-house team led by Kura co-founder Bayley Wang, who worked on the world’s first GPU-accelerated AI optical design tool at MIT.
Kura is also in the process of developing a multimodal AI platform and APIs which combine visual, voice, motion, and gesture inputs to augment users’ workflow and activities. Kura currently supports general and domain-specific questions, real-time information retrieval and generation using large language models, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a technique which combines a fast and referenceable vector database with an LLM. With real-time visuals from the built-in camera system, imagery can also be used as part of the prompt.
“The Kura glasses see what the user sees, hear what they hear, and can act as an extension of human working memory and senses. What makes Kura different is that humans get about 80% of learning and input from visuals, and all AI software and applications are competing for the user’s mobile and computer screen times these days,” said Chuck Alger, Kura General Manager and former member of the Microsoft Hololens and Microsoft Surface teams. “We’re bringing AI from the era of phones without screens to today’s modern age. Most AI wearables are simply like a speaker and microphone without a display, which is a good data collection device, but not effective at providing private input and instructions for complex tasks. Thanks to augmented reality, we can use an overlay to point out objects or places in the real world, dramatically enhancing the user experience.”
Kura’s glasses also dramatically outperform competing augmented reality products, offering best-in-industry field of view, transparency, resolution, and brightness, all in a compact form factor that is comfortable to wear daily. With a robust set of use cases — from travel and entertainment to manufacturing, training, and even law enforcement — the Kura glasses represent a major milestone in augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
“There’s simply no other device on the market that offers 150-degree field-of-view, 95% lens transparency, and 8K resolution, especially in a form factor that mimics a pair of eyeglasses,” said Gregory Gallinat, Chief Operations Officer of Kura and consumer electronics industry veteran. “Our team boasts decades of experience in consumer technology, and it’s an honor to be recognized by the Consumer Technology Association for developing these breakthroughs to supplement the user experience.”
Since its founding, Kura has received overwhelming demand, with orders and contracts from over 400 companies and government agencies worldwide, and is actively working with leaders in industrial manufacturing, automotive design, law enforcement, travel, and entertainment.