With more and more business and sales being conducted in virtual worlds, one digital marketing agency with physical offices in California is expanding its services into the metaverse. The LookinMeta Launch LookinLA is already a digital-first marketing agency. With partners like Google, Salesforce, and Shopify, high-tech trends like big data analytics and online retail are not new to the company. So, what’s new? In a way, everything. “We are the forefront of metaverse marketing,” LookinLA CEO Ali Payani said in a release shared with ARPost. “Our clients are now able to expand their businesses and operations into the virtual world to amplify their growth and authority.” The March 3 release announced a new platform from LookinLA called LookinMeta. This platform will give clients and client companies access to a whole suite of emerging technology tools and services. What Marketing Looks Like in the Metaverse A lot of the release has
Late last year, enterprise remote collaboration platform Spatial announced a major pivot “to become the metaverse for cultural events such as NFT exhibitions, brand experiences, and conferences.” The platform recently made good on that endeavor in a major way, hosting the “first-ever metaverse film screening.” The premiere of the documentary film GameStop: Rise of the Players took place in a custom Spatial room on March 1 and included a screening of the film, a director Q&A, selfie opportunities and, of course, an NFT giveaway. Remembering Recent History In January of 2021, GameStop stock was struggling. Around a year earlier, the company had announced that it would be closing many locations, and many expected that the entire chain would soon follow. Members of the Reddit group r/wallstreetbets made a run on the stock. Stock value jumped from under $20 on January 8 to $325 on January 29. Some stock-trading apps
Another week has passed by, and while the situation in Europe is always more complicated because of the war, in the XR landscape nothing particularly special has happened. It has been a pretty boring week, notwithstanding the MWC, which, as it happened the last few years, hasn’t brought important news about XR. But this roundup will be worth reading anyway, so don’t go away too fast! Top news of the week (Image by Samsung)Samsung is close to launching an XR device, or maybe two The metaverse hype is growing, and with it, all the interest of the big brands towards XR. Last month, we got to know that (according to a rumor) Samsung is working together with Microsoft on new AR glasses, most probably powered by a Qualcomm chipset. This week, instead, we discovered that Samsung is actually working on another headset in parallel. According to the Korean magazine Electronic Times, the device
Set up a private 5G network for multiple VR headsets in under 30 minutes using the Reign Core.Today marks the final day of MWC 2022 in Barcelona and so far we’ve been treated to a variety of incredible announcements showcasing the future of connectivity. Day four of the event included informative talks featuring speakers from companies such as Amazon Web Services, Weta Digital, and Nolia as well as a plethora of incredible demos from a large list of exhibitors. One demo from HTC had attendees driving a small remote-controlled car fitted with cameras and 5G connections around a tiny racetrack using a portable 5G base station called a Reign Core.Vive Flow / Credit: HTCThose lucky enough to experience the demo had two different views of their carthanks to a couple of hi-res video feeds (POV and top-down) that were delivered using a 5G network from the Reign Core. As the drivers
Virtual reality and metaverse are mainly associated with men and gaming. White men are particularly leading the charge in today’s top gaming platforms such as Roblox, Sandbox, and Decentraland. Moreover, males outnumber females when it comes to owning non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to one survey, 20% of US online male adults own at least one NFT. Meanwhile, only 7% of their female counterparts are NFT collectors. While women are involved in creating NFT art, they make up less than 16% of all NFT artists. Moreover, female artists generate only 5% of total NFT sales. The Tide Is Shifting in Virtual Reality Entrepreneurship A growing number of women entrepreneurs are breaking into the male-centric metaverse. They’re also promoting “metadiversity” in this sphere that remains vulnerable to the real-world realities of discrimination and harassment. Some groups such as Women in Blockchain Talks and Curious Addys are guiding women toward crypto-literacy. Others like
I know that in these crazy war moments probably we all are a bit less interested in the news about XR, but this is my job, so today you can find here the new weekly roundup I prepared for you, as usual. I hope it serves to distract you by giving you something to read to not think about the terrible things happening in this world. I just hope for peace to come to Europe again soon: I have friends on both sides of the conflict, and no one of them wants this war, but all of them have to stand the consequences. I really hope for the best for all people that are in this awful situation. I have also a little announcement to make: in the upcoming weeks, starting from today, I will start a paid partnership with NVIDIA to promote the GTC. I am usually not interested in
Holoride uses a technology called ‘elastic content’ to merge immersive experiences with the movement of your car.HTC Vive’s metaverse continues to expand with the recent announcement of Viveverse, an open-sourced connected ecosystem that will let you easily travel between worlds such as Beatday, Engage, VRChat, and Vive Sync, all while protecting your identity, security, and privacy.Using a tool called Vive Guardian, you’re able to create a set of privacy and security boundaries. It’s also a tool that parents can use to make sure their kids aren’t exposed to anything inappropriate as they world hop. Credit: HTC ViveAnother part of the HTC Vive’s Viveverse announcement was that the company is working on expanding the state of in-car VR entertainment through an exciting partnership with Holoride, a company that aims to deliver VR entertainment to car passengers.According to an official press release, passengers would be able to access VR experiences through the HTC
Viveverse is a metaverse inside a metaverse inside a…HTC Vive this week revealed Viveverse, an open-source VR metaverse composed of various interactive worlds, apps, and games. Accessible via a smartphone, PC, tablet, and the company’s new Vive Flow VR glasses, the cross-platform allows users to travel between various platforms like Vive Sync and Engage, a popular enterprise metaverse platform. You can even connect your favorite crypto wallet and import your favorite NFTs using the Vive Flow. [embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=rTislcoD4eA&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent[/embed] The goal, according to HTC Vive, is to create an open-ended digital universe where users can travel between worlds while maintaining a sense of “identity, security, and privacy.” The company says its partnering with hundreds of partners to expand its growing platform, including Beatday, Engage, VRChat, and Vive Sync. Users can connect to Viveverse using the Vive Connect cross-platform app.“Since starting VIVE in 2015, we’ve integrated technology with humanity. Viverse is taking
HTC released a video showing off its vision of the metaverse, a reflection of what the company thinks virtual spaces will look like in the near future. And… it’s not a great look.
Some ideas are inevitable. Slim and light XR glasses capable of fluidly serving up novel and meaningful interactions are basically the holy grail in tech right now, with Apple, Meta, Google, Qualcomm, and many more laying down the groundwork to one day make them a reality. When that will happen, no one can say.
HTC’s most recent concept video isn’t at fault for shooting for the stars. It is, after all, only a showcase for what should be outwardly neat concepts, but it unfortunately manages to land pretty hard on its face as it wildly strings together some of its favorite buzzwords and concepts that feel plucked straight from trending hashtags. It feels, well, like a parody, raising the question of whether HTC’s drably conventional futurism is actually doing more harm than good.
Meta: A Polarizing Trendsetter
Add VR, AR, and AI together and you have the fundamental recipe for the metaverse. That’s at least what Meta laid out in its futuristic concept video as it makes its transition from traditional social networks to a self-described “metaverse company.”
Meta’s video, which it released during its Connect developer conference in October, is less a roadmap and more a marketing barrage—like a hundred Magic Leap ‘whale’ moments smooshed into one.
It’s supposed to get you excited, but also open up a range of interactions to an audience that may have heard of AR or VR, but may not really know what either means functionally.
Okay, a playdough-faced Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly what dreams are made of, but you have to give credit where credit is due: it looks pretty amazing, even if the smug, corporate cleanliness of it all doesn’t more than resemble the beginning of a Black Mirror episode. It at least makes the effort to demonstrate that the metaverse will one day let you do almost anything you can imagine.
Follow the Leader
Now toss in some of HTC’s favorite concepts from the last few years: 5G, blockchain, sprinkle in some NFTs, reduce the production budget by a whole bunch and you’ve got a treacly sweet dollar store knock-off of Meta’s hype video that feels like it’s more concerned with lining up the right buzzwords than offering an honest-to-goodness vision of the future.
Yes, we know the future will be cool, but is the future… VIVERSE? You be the judge.
That’s not only my hot take. YouTube may have removed the counter on its ‘dislike’ button, but a simple browser extension reveals that HTC’s video is currently sitting around a 3:1 dislike ratio, which isn’t typical for any of the company’s videos. You might chalk that up to residual metaverse hate, courtesy of Meta and not HTC itself, but… well, that should have been preventable by not making a remarkably worse, less demonstrative version.
What’s confusing—besides how you actually pronounce ‘VIVERSE’, or that the future is somehow just a standard version of VIVE XR Suite, or that you have to press a ‘CHEERS’ button to drink, or that you pay for a glass of wine in your house with Bitcoin, or that you can actually hug an entirely photoreal version of your grandma then buy her a cat NFT and she doesn’t even ask why the hell you would waste your money on that… sorry, lost myself there—the confusing thing is how HTC plans on creating this future for anyone, let alone the more outwardly mature, less gaming-focused enterprise segment it’s been courting the past few years.
To think, HTC and Oculus were once competitors back in the early days of consumer VR. Since the launch of Quest in 2019 though, HTC has progressively shied away from appealing to consumers outside of China because it didn’t (more likely couldn’t) invest the same heaps of cash that Meta has in a standalone app ecosystem for its own standalone Focus headsets. Ever since, it’s been pumping out higher-cost headsets for enterprise and arcades outside of China, and quietly maintaining its own PC VR app store Viveport (which has a worse selection of games than Steam, but at a subscription price so you can actually play a bunch of great VR games at a significantly cheaper price than buying them individually).
But until we see HTC more broadly appeal to consumers though with its hardware and standalone app ecosystem, it’s hard to take the company’s vision of the metaverse any more seriously than its NFT marketplace—a quickly produced, low upkeep project that is more flash than boom. And that’s a sad thought for a company that still has the ability to deliver legitimately great VR hardware, and simultaneously hasn’t perpetrated a steady stream of privacy scandals over the years. The Vive XR Suite isn’t bad either, but it’s not the future—it’s the now.
Granted, these perfectly integrated XR futures aren’t coming anytime soon, and no one company will likely be able to make them a reality alone—no matter how slick the hype video, or how buzzy the word. Still, that doesn’t mean the immersive web of tomorrow will be a neutral playground that all companies are equally building towards. If the mobile market is any indication, we can at least expect to see early efforts divided along product ecosystems.
And in the meantime, even if the top headset producers imbue their next device with all of the wishlist items, like eye-tracking, facial haptics, varifocal lenses, all-day batteries, wide FOV displays—it’s probable that none of these things will impress anyone if they aren’t already paying attention to the space. This may mean most people are still a few device generations away from getting their first VR headset, and decidedly more for an AR headset.
So you might ask, what exactly is HTC and Meta selling with these far out concept videos? It actually may be more about what they’re buying: time.
Do you think these sort of concept videos do more harm than good? Let us know your thoughts below.
This article was originally published on roadtovr.com
HTC revealed its vision for the future metaverse, branded ‘Viverse’, and the internet did not like it.In a now-pinned tweet, the Vive Twitter account yesterday posted a concept for a virtual ecosystem split across both augmented and virtual reality hardware labeled as Viverse. It suggested this platform would deliver a “future where the impossible becomes possible.” The video itself proposed several broad possibilities for Viverse, from graspable concepts like working out at the gym with your performance displayed on virtual overlays to more outlandish ideas like attending virtual wine tasting sessions and then purchasing said wine using bitcoin. Oh, and there’s of course a bit where a young woman buys an NFT of the ‘Meowna Lisa’ (which is exactly what it sounds like) for her grandma. Check it out in the video below. And, just in case you were wondering, no, that’s not a typo. It’s Viverse, not Viveverse. HTC’s
