With Apple expected to announce an AR/VR headset by year’s end, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is wasting no time trying to saturate the market with Meta Quest 2 games and gear, while priming the pump for the Meta Quest Pro, which some say may debut as early as this fall. June has seen a summer sale of up to 40 percent off on 60 Quest 2 games. And last week, Zuckerberg mounted a shock and awe offensive, previewing several early prototypes, including the Holocake 2 — Meta’s lightest, thinnest VR headset, which plays PC virtual reality games. Continue reading Meta Teases Headset Prototypes from VR Development Lab

Madison Avenue continues to scale in the metaverse, which is experiencing a land-grab for the best storefronts as brands like Gap and Nike unveil digital-only versions of their goods competing against — and sometimes collaborating with — digital-first brands like sneaker maker RTFKT and fashion house Fabrikant. Mobile game destination The Sandbox has already sold more than 70 percent of its “land” to businesses including cryptocurrency exchange Binance and video-game maker Atari. Even traditionalists like NASCAR and JPMorgan Chase are pitching virtual tents. The bank has signed a lease in Decentraland, a 3D online world. Continue reading Major Brands Are Starting to Experiment with the Metaverse

Spotify says it’s the first music-streaming brand to have a presence on Roblox with the introduction of “Spotify Island,” described as “a paradise of sound” where fans and artists around the world can hang out together, explore music, go on adventures and access exclusive merchandise. Virtual beat-maker stations powered by Spotify’s Soundtrap service will enable users to “enjoy an immersive audio experience by creating music and exploring sounds.” “Spotify Island” will feature “musical Easter eggs at every turn” and allow users to “climb to the top of ‘The Charts’ by collecting points,” the company says. Continue reading Spotify Island a Destination for Music and Quests on Roblox

Los Angeles-based avatar technology firm Genies Inc. has secured Bob Iger as an investor and board member, a coup for the five-year-old startup, which crafts celebrity avatars and also allows people to create their own avatars, fashion, worlds and experiences. The move into the metaverse is Iger’s first entertainment play since exiting Disney in December after 15 years as CEO. Genies says Iger will help “navigate its mission to empower humans to create their own avatar ecosystems” in Web3 — including avatars, fashion lines, immersive experiences and virtual worlds.  Continue reading Bob Iger’s Act 2: Into the Metaverse with Avatar Firm Genies

Taiwanese electronics company HTC has introduced a new Vive Guardian feature for its popular VR headset, the HTC Vive. The safeguard is designed to limit access to apps while children are cavorting in the metaverse, and experts say it’s a much needed step in an environment that thus far lacks kid profiles and parental safety settings. HTC, Meta Platforms and others suggest VR be used only by those over the age of 13, but at this point, it’s only a recommendation, and calls are already amplifying to put child safety measures in place. Continue reading HTC Adds Vive Guardian to Protect Kids in Volatile Metaverse

Dimenco’s new stereoscopic 3D display has been called “breathtaking” and the future of screen viewing. The Netherlands-based company’s Simulated Reality Pro gives the impression of images coming out of the screen without special eyewear. Dimenco defines Simulated Reality (SR) as immersive technology somewhere between augmented reality and virtual reality. Dimenco’s display tech relies on visual parallax and perspective-shifting to provide its SR experience. The viewer’s eyes are tracked by an in-unit sensor that serves discrete left- and right-eye views rapidly enough to read as a single image, allowing you to “look around” the picture elements. Continue reading Dimenco’s Glasses-Free 3D Display a Hint of Things to Come

Game giant Unity is using its game engine technology to help businesses make “digital twins” of real-world objects, environments and even people. These virtual entities take the brunt of testing products, machines and environments. Currently there are dozens of companies reportedly using Unity’s game engine to model digital doubles that can sub-in for robots, manufacturing lines and buildings, among other things, virtually operating and monitoring them even as they are optimized and trained. These twins rust when exposed to water and respond to things like temperature. They learn to avoid a ditch or call attention to a broken part. Continue reading Unity Game Engine Makes ‘Digital Twins’ for Industrial Tests

A CES 2022 session on “Decoding Crypto,” moderated by Transform Group founder and chief executive officer Michael Terpin, touched on the growth and evolution of cryptocurrency as well as regulatory issues and recent developments. Terpin enthused over the sector’s dramatic growth, while panelists Blockchain Association founding executive director Kristin Smith, Celsius Network chief growth and product officer Tushar Nadkarni and Filecoin Foundation founding director Clara Tsao had their own yardsticks to analyze crypto’s evolution. Continue reading CES: Decoding the Regulatory, Technical Aspects of Crypto

The metaverse is in its early days, but many are already concerned as they anticipate the content moderation problems that have bedeviled traditional social media increasing exponentially in virtual worlds. The confluence of realistic immersive environments, the anonymity of avatars and potential for deepfakes is enough to give anyone pause. Throw in machine learning that will make today’s ad targeting seem primitive and it’s an even more volatile mix. Experts agree, the very qualities that make the metaverse appealing — false facades and hyperreality — make it potentially more dangerous than the digital platforms of today. Continue reading Policing the Metaverse Looms as a Challenge for Tech Firms

Intel has raised a red flag regarding the metaverse, warning that more processing power is needed to support the vision. “Immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time” will require a 1,000x increase in computational capability from today’s state of the art, says Intel senior vice president Raja Koduri, general manager of the company’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. Intel remains enthusiastic about the metaverse, however, conceding in the company’s first official statement on the matter it “may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile.” Continue reading Intel Says the Metaverse Needs 1,000x More Compute Power

Meta Platforms last week threw open the doors to its “Horizon Worlds” virtual reality, online video platform. The collaborative environment has been in private beta since 2019 and had required an invitation to join. Now adults in the U.S. and Canada can download the free “Horizon Worlds” app and experience CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse, as long as they have a Meta Quest 2 and a Facebook account. The playground lets users build things and virtually hang out with as many as 20 people in an environment that feels like being dropped into the OASIS of “Ready Player One.” Continue reading Meta Bumps ‘Horizon Worlds’ Out of Beta in U.S. and Canada

Social media platforms, which have had challenges maintaining a safe, socially conscious online environment — as the year’s spate of whistleblower disclosures and global regulatory hearings proves — may face an even tougher time maintaining civility in the metaverse. The shift from monitoring text, images and video to supervising a live 3D world will be orders of magnitude more complicated, observers say. According to a 2020 safety video for “Horizon Worlds,” a game Facebook developed for its virtual reality platform Oculus Quest, the company plans to record what happens in the metaverse, storing data that transpires in users’ VR headsets. Continue reading Meta Building a Safe Metaverse While Expanding VR Holdings

Nvidia is mapping out a customer service future populated with real-time avatars who use natural-language AI with real-world customers. The company, which has seemingly transformed from graphics powerhouse to AI authority (in just under 28 years since being founded by Jensen Huang, company CEO) used this week’s GTC conference to emphasize full-stack computing. The speed and flexibility of the company’s three GPU chips offer general purpose enterprise potential, thanks to Nvidia’s parallel-processing platform, CUDA. Huang backed this assertion with a slide indicating Nvidia has deployed more than 150 SDKs to industries generating $1 trillion. Continue reading Nvidia Goes Full-Stack, Touts Artificial Intelligence and Cloud

Facebook, the University of Lorraine and the University College London published a paper that detailed how they researched a way to use artificial intelligence to create complex game worlds. Building video game environments has always been time-consuming, but this group’s approach — using content from the fantasy text-based multiplayer adventure “LIGHT” — demonstrated how machine learning algorithms can learn to “assemble different elements, arranging locations and populating them with characters and objects.” Continue reading Facebook and Academics Use AI to Generate Game Worlds

Nvidia used processing power and neural networks to create a very convincing virtual city, which will be open for tours by attendees to this year’s NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal. Nvidia’s system, which uses existing videos of scenery and objects to create these interactive environments, also makes it easier for artists to create similar virtual worlds. Nvidia vice president of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said generative models are key to making the process of creating virtual worlds cost effective. Continue reading Nvidia Reveals Use of Neural Networks to Create Virtual City