Marco Magnano on XR Safety Week, journalism, and the meta…

vrcoin on December 3, 2021

December, 6th will be the start day of XR Safety Week, an event that aims at fostering a healthy debate on some social themes surrounding XR, and at promoting safety, privacy, inclusion, and accessibility for everyone in our ecosystem. These are themes that have always been important to me, and that in my own small way, I have always tried to talk about. That’s why I will be a panelist at the event this year, and I am spreading the word about it with two posts today and tomorrow to help in making it a success. This is the program of the event, including the days and the tracks: Day 1 – Dec 6. Immersive Storytelling & JournalismDay 2 – Dec 7. Child Safety Day 3 – Dec 8. Diversity & Inclusion Day 4 – Dec 9. MedicalXR and Immersive HealthcareDay 5 – Dec 10. Privacy & Safety and Digital

A Hands-On Review of Holoride

vrcoin on December 2, 2021

Some of my favorite memories with my children involve traveling around the United States to visit national parks, historic sites, and science museums. We had an old 15-passenger van that I had purchased for $750 from a non-profit agency and with several rows of seats, each of my kids had plenty of space to spread their toys and art supplies while we traveled. They also had a Leapster, a small educational handheld gaming console that kept them occupied and reinforced basic academic skills for the younger children in particular, but we never had any other gaming consoles until many years later when my oldest son purchased an Xbox for his younger brothers with his first paycheck as a paratrooper for the US Army. Our travels took place many years ago and now our lives are quite different. Just a couple of weeks before the pandemic my van finally died, the

The XR Week Peek (2021.11.29): Black Friday deals, investments in Niantic, and more!

vrcoin on November 29, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that you all American friends have celebrated it with your families and have eaten a lot of turkeys (or whatever vegan alternative), enjoying good times with your peers. If you were wondering, we in Italy do not celebrate Thanksgiving, but I would love one year to participate in its celebration hosted by an American family. Who knows, maybe next year 🙂 Before leaving, I have to tell you that in a few days I will be hosted by a podcast organized by Deltatre Innovation Lab, where I’ll meet again my partner in crime at Immotionar! Here you are all the platforms where you can watch/listen to it: Top news of the week (Image by Steam)Enjoy Black Friday deals! Due to Thanksgiving, this week we had almost no really relevant news for the industry. So let’s enjoy the good that Thanksgiving has given to us, that is the sales for Black

The XR Week Peek (2021.11.22): Quest maybe has sold 10 M units or maybe not, Roblox goes VR, and more!

vrcoin on November 22, 2021

I am back in Italy! The trip to the US has been incredibly interesting: I have met many amazing people and tried many innovative devices, so I have been very satisfied with having gone there. I still miss a bit having a walk around University Street in Palo Alto and seeing a lot of young people having fun in the restaurants. I’m sure I’ll return there. But now it’s time to get back to routine work, so let me tell you about the most important news in AR and VR from this week. Top news of the week (Background image from Meta)Meta Quest 2 has sold 10M units, or maybe not The most important announcement of the week has been the one that never existed. Going on the stage at an investor event, Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon has revealed that Oculus Quest 2 (now Meta Quest 2) has sold 10 million units

AWE 2021 Day Two: More on the Metaverse

vrcoin on November 11, 2021

The first day of AWE was all about announcements. There was less of that on day two, but AWE isn’t all about announcements, it’s about celebrating XR experiences and learning from XR expertise. Day two delivered these in droves. In addition to even more great expert talks and panel discussions, it was the first day that the Expo floor and Playground were open. Another Marathon Session on the Main Stage Day two started out, like day one, with back-to-back-to-back powerhouse sessions on the main stage: panel discussions on “reinventing the camera” and “XR for brands,” followed by Charlie Fink on “The Race to Build the Metaverse.” Reinventing the Camera Lauren Goode of WIRED hosted a fireside chat with Snap CTO Bobby Murphy and lens creator Brielle Garcia. Goode opened the conversation with a word that we heard a lot on day one but we’ve never heard from Snap. “The

AWE USA 2021 Day One: “Metaverse Shmetaverse”

vrcoin on November 10, 2021

Tuesday, November 9, was the first day of AWE USA 2021, including keynotes from Ori Inbar and John Hanke, panel discussions, and of course, company announcements. If it could be summed up in a single word, that word would, of course, be “metaverse” – love it, hate it, or both, almost everyone on stage used it at least once. Our classic events disclaimer first: There was too much going on for everything to get covered – including some things that we would have really liked to have covered. Marathon Session on the Main Stage The day started off with three powerhouse speakers on the main stage: AWE founder Ori Inbar, Niantic CEO John Hanke, and Qualcomm’s VP and GM of XR Hugo Swart. Ori Inbar’s State of XR, AWE.LIVE Perhaps nobody has been looking forward to the return of in-person AWE more than Inbar himself, and his excitement was clear

Understanding the Atmosphere Around Policy in Emerging Technologies

vrcoin on November 1, 2021

“Emerging technologies” like extended reality, 5G internet, and blockchain are currently emerging faster than policy on them is developing. While this may allow increased experimentation with these technologies, we’ve seen what happened with the last round of emerging technologies like social media when policy lagged behind reality. Right now, legislation and protections around emerging technologies remain thin, but many, including many within the tech space, think that this needs to change. The Role of Ethicists and Organizations In the absence of legislation and policy regarding emerging technologies, in particular, people and agencies interacting with these technologies have the choice of existing in a vacuum of order, or trying to create that order for themselves. Those who take the latter route often do so by connecting novel concerns with less-specific and more familiar issues. “The process of XR ethics is asking what are these principles informed by human rights concerns,” XR

Mega-roundup of Facebook Connect 2: all the news in a single place!

vrcoin on November 1, 2021

Hello everyone! As it is tradition of this blog, I have prepared a big fatty roundup with all the news announced at the latest Facebook Connect 2. For every piece of news, I have prepared a short summary and some links to go deeper… this way you are sure you haven’t missed any important piece of news from this important event. Are you ready? The whole Facebook Connect has been about Meta. The event has not featured any important hardware announcement, because it was all focused on declaring the new shift of focus of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook executives have spent around 80 minutes explaining with many words, images, and videos what is the “metaverse”, why it is our future, why Facebook should invest in it, what could be Facebook’s business model in it, and how Facebook is already working on it. Zuckerberg has basically made a

The XR Week Peek (2021.10.31): Facebook becomes Meta, Pimax teases Reality headset, and more!

vrcoin on October 31, 2021

Hello everyone and Happy Halloween to whoever celebrates it! Here in Italy we were not used to celebrating it when I was a kid, but children now have fun dressing up and asking for some sweeties from their neighbors. As the ghost of VR, I guess it should be my favorite festivity, so it’s my time to go outside and scare people by saying sentences like “Cardboard is back!” But today I have something more to celebrate… I have reached 20K followers on Twitter! I still can’t believe this… some years ago I even thought 10K was an impossible target for me… in the end, I’m just a guy writing technical walls of text, publishing badly edited Youtube videos,

How and Why Brand Engagement Is Driving XR Development

vrcoin on October 27, 2021

Everybody wins in the world of XR brand engagement. Brands get a unique and dynamic way to interact with customers. Customers get fun and informative ways to interact with their favorite brands. And the rest of us? The most cutting-edge advances in AR graphics and dynamic rendering that will one day build games and other apps are being developed by AR advertisers. Here, we’ll look at some of the most exciting AR brands and brand engagements. We’ll look at their advertising content and programs, but we’ll also talk about the other implications that these use cases have for AR technology in general. LBEs Location-based experiences are the future. We’re talking about going to a specific place and having that location augmented by information and assets specific to that geographic location. Brand engagement experiences and LBEs aren’t always one-to-one, as most of the examples that this article looks at can be