Most people under 35 have fond memories of the Nickelodeon television channel. Responsible for unique cartoons such as Rugrats, Nickelodeon has managed to remain one of the leaders in children’s television for nearly thirty years.

And with their new original TV series Meet The Voxels, even they’re getting into the mixed reality game.

Meet The Voxels is a brand show that centers around the Voxel family — a family of modern-day video game characters. Using virtual and augmented reality, the show is rumored to use state-of-the-art cinematography and real-time facial performance capture.

The premise of the show itself sounds similar to that of The Incredibles. A family of superhero-esque individuals have adventures both on and off duty. There is Hunter, a thirteen year old star of a laser tag first-person shooter. His sister Maude is a sixteen year old whose mission is to pop as many bubbles as she can. And then there’s Cody, the youngest sibling who hasn’t decided what he wants his purpose in the video game world to be yet. Their father is a 90s-era console game character who is retired from the video game world.

Chris Young, Senior Vice President of Nickelodeon’s Entertainment Lab, had this to say about the project:

“Our vision is to take the real-time technology we’ve been exploring in the Lab and marry it with a creative concept that connects with kids and their passion for video games. We designed this next-gen animation workflow and filled it with characters who can exist naturally across multiple platforms from day one.”

Looking at these character profiles, one cannot help but see the similarities between the games these characters are purportedly interested in and their real-life counterparts. The 13 year old enjoys shooters (Overwatch), the 16 year old girl plays a mindless bubble-popping game (reminiscient of cell phone games), and the father is a console throwback that doesn’t play video games anymore.

All that said, we are excited to see a recognizable name in the television world breaking into the world of mixed reality with a show like this. Nickelodeon now joins the ranks of Walmart, the city of Honolulu, and online travel booking giant Kayak as companies slowly make the push into the world of augmented reality.

When will we see the tipping point? It’s impossible to say. But one thing is for sure: as more and more institutional brands like these pour resources into the augmented reality space, the technology is increasingly likely to penetrate the public consciousness and become mainstream.

Lucyd Update August 6th

The Lucyd eShop opened last week. This will be our sales platform for all Lucyd products. We have launched with four main lines of frames, international shipping, a variety of Rx and plano lens options, and more. The first four lines are Lucyd Loud, a Bluetooth “soundglass” that enables handsfree music and voice assistant; Turboflex, a line of durable, flexible frames; Di Valdi, cutting-edge Italian designer frames, and Lucyd Looks, basic frames with a unique understated style.

In addition to our in-house development of Lucyd Lens and Loud, we are continually researching the best tech and fashion forward glasses worldwide, to make them available on the eShop. We are also making ongoing improvements to the UX of the eShop, so please give us a few weeks as we polish the mobile and desktop experience.

Some of you may be surprised by our decision to launch an eShop, because this is a new development not outlined in our roadmap. But we realized it was needed to allow for the proper customization of our hardware to address the visual requirements of our customers, and the concept of an eShop for tech glasses was born. It has already become one of the only places in the world to purchase Bluetooth glasses with prescription lenses, and likely the only one to deliver in a timely fashion. It is also the first online store in the world for purchasing prescription eyeglasses using crypto as well as fiat currency. The LCD token. Many of you are wondering when LCD will come into play. We are currently developing a wearable app for LCD to enable its use with both Lucyd Lens and Loud. We are also developing integration into the eShop for a rewards program, and redemption for hardware and software. We expect to have these utilities in the next 6–7 months. Lucyd Loud, the Bluetooth soundglass, is still a beta product. We plan to make several enhancements to both the style and technology in this product over the next year. Lucyd Lens, the visual AR smartglass, is expected to enter beta on time in Q1 2019. It will be released via the eShop. We are also developing an app called LINK to improve the usability of smartglasses for common smartphone tasks, with a focus on messaging, navigation, social and search. The LCD token portal at lcd.lucyd.co is temporarily down. It will be back up shortly with an access link in the footer of the eShop.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more updates, and upgrade your eyewear now at lucyd.co!