Leonardo DiCaprio Invests In VR Company MindMaze
The Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio has become an investor and also advisor in Mindmaze, a neuro-computing company that has been building mind-machine interfaces. Yes, it sounds all Arthur C. Clarke, but this company which captures brain activity and has already been used successfully in the healthcare industry to speed up rehab from strokes and brain injuries, is now looking to expand into virtual reality.
DiCaprio issued a quote for the announcement: “MindMaze technology has already impacted the lives of many people, and it is poised to define the way we will experience and create content in the future. I am excited about the possibilities of MindMaze’s technology, especially for its potential to be a driving force in media and entertainment in the years to come.”
In February 2016, the company has raised a $100 million round of funding at a pre-money valuation of $1 billion. MindMaze’s ambition, says CEO and founder Tej Tadi, is to build not just hardware and software for MindMaze’s own services, but to develop technology that might power VR experiences across a range of other devices and services.
The latest product from Mindmaze is called “Mask”, a technology that can capture your facial expression and translate that to the face of a character in virtual reality. It detects the electrical signals from your face muscles and then uses software to figure out what kind of face you are making, such as frowning, smiling, or squinting. Right now, the tech can recognize 10 distinct expressions, and MindMaze is working on dozens of others.
The Mindmaze founder Tadi believes that the technology could be integrated into the next generation VR eyewear. The cost of production for masks should be in the double-digit range. According to Tadi, the company is in talks with Google, Oculus and HTC.
MindMaze will eventually make an applications programming interface that makes it easy for game companies to create games that make use of the facial expressions in a VR experience.
Tadi assures that “As we continue to gain traction in these industries, the addition of Leo to our advisory board is a vote of confidence in our technology and road map for ushering in a new age of interaction between humans and machines.”