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
The metaverse is composed of virtual worlds. However, those virtual worlds are built and occupied by real people. While they offer real utility, they also pose real risks, particularly given the capacity of XR hardware to collect data and the inability of regulators to keep up. XR Safety Initiative held a roundtable event, The XR Data Classification Roundtable, on International Human Rights Day last year, and a detailed report of their findings and positions has recently been made available. Where Does XR Data Go? “People relinquish their data without realizing the risks or consequences. While this is not new, the difference today is we are moving towards an era of constant reality capture, especially with increased adoption of immersive technologies and a strong push to build the next iteration of the internet, also known as the Metaverse,” reads the “Virtual Worlds, Real Risks and Challenges” report. These strong words from
This Monday, before digging into the news, let me announce to you two things: I have added a new section to this newsletter, called “Other news”. There I will just put a description and a link of those pieces of news I find interesting, but a bit less relevant than the others. These are articles I would have probably not shared with you in the previous editions of the newsletter, but with this new format, I can at least acknowledge that these things have happened. Please tell me if you find this new approach useful so that I can decide if keep going with it or not;We of New Technology Walkers (me and my partner Massimiliano Ariani) have been featured on the local news section of an important Italian newspaper! We are pretty happy about it and I wanted to share this with you. Since “pics or it didn’t happen”
LinkBuds will immerse you in an incredible audio experience while keeping you connected to the real world.Niantic flipped the mobile gaming world upside down back in 2016 when they launched their AR mobile app Pokémon GO and started a global craze that still maintains a loyal player base to this very day. But did you know that before there wasPokémon GO, Niantic launched a sci-fi-based AR game called Ingress Prime that used OpenStreetMap and Google Maps to create a citywide geocaching game of capture the flag?Ingress Prime is now getting a serious update thanks to an amazing new partnership with Niantic and Sony that will blend Niantic’s real-world AR technology with Sony’s latest audio hardware, a wireless headphone called “LinkBuds,” to immerse players even deeper into a game that uses both the real world and a virtual world as a playing field. [embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=RJ52YyG4BJQ&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent[/embed] LinkBuds have an odd donut shape
The world mapped and sold as NFTs to create an AR “metaverse” layer over the physical world. You’ve heard this song before. But, not like this. “Anybody can build a digital layer over the world… the point is, what is the service that you provide?” OVR COO and co-founder, Diego Di Tommaso, told ARPost. “Is it a stand-alone thing, or something that adds value?” Squares Are for Squares. Hexagons Are the Future. Mapping the world and selling the platts is becoming a relatively common practice, as is the “world-scale metaverse” trope in general. Before we get around to what OVR does with that map, let’s talk about how they divvy it up. For one thing, they’ve divided the world into hexagons instead of squares. This may seem like a small difference, but the team is passionate that hexagons make for a more accurate and just portioning of the globe. There’s
