And so I just discovered that the Metaverse may actually be coming together after all, which means that I absolutely MUST create a news and discussions thread for it.
The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. The word "metaverse" is made up of the prefix "meta" (meaning beyond) and the stem "verse" (a backformation from "universe"); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe
Last edited by Yuli Ban on Fri May 03, 2024 6:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Video games, VR, AR, and the metaverse aren’t just for gamers and fashionistas. Politicians are going virtual too. In 2020, the Biden Harris campaign launched a map in Fortnite. Also in 2020, US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on a virtual tour in the game Animal Crossing. Now, Andrew Yang is using the metaverse to campaign for mayor of New York.
Andrew Yang, a front-runner in the New York City Democratic mayoral race, incorporated immersive technology and the metaverse in his first metaverse press conference on June 10. He’s doing it on one of the fastest-growing metaverse platforms, ZEPETO. Andrew Yang engaged with his audience as an avatar.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
We will see a shift in the way people play, work, learn or simply hang out in 2021. Some of this connection will move into the Metaverse, a digital place where people seamlessly get together and interact in millions of 3D virtual experiences. Early iterations of the Metaverse emerged in the 1980s with VPL Research’s DataSuit and Linden Lab’s Second Life in 2003. However, it started to feel very real in 2020 as several platforms have been envisioning – and building – their own versions of the Metaverse.
The pandemic, with its requirements of physical distancing, has brought people into online digital environments for a growing range of shared human experiences. Gaming platforms are being used to host meetings ranging from online birthday parties to job interviews. We’re already seeing more events with millions of avatars enjoying a collective virtual and social presence in the Metaverse, from concerts to movie premieres. While gaming has initially been the province of such digital co-experiences, it is rapidly expanding. This shift has created urgency for entertainment brands and artists to generate innovative formats and ways to reach their audiences in a world where social consumption with physical co-presence has suddenly become almost impossible.
Over the course of 2021, the Metaverse will experience widespread use, and start to become a human co-experience utility
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Today Epic Games announced that it completed a $1 billion round of funding, which will allow the company to support future growth opportunities. Epic's equity valuation is now $28.7 billion.
This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital. Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.
“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse. Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder, Epic Games.
“Epic continues to deliver revolutionary experiences through their array of cutting edge technologies that support creators in gaming and across the digital entertainment industry. We are excited to strengthen our collaboration to bring new entertainment experiences to people around the world. I strongly believe that this aligns with our purpose to fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology,” said Kenichiro Yoshida, Chairman, President and CEO, Sony Group Corporation.
Credit Suisse and BoFA Securities acted as joint placement agents to Epic, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati provided legal counsel to Epic.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
I really, genuinely hope that the Metaverse genuinely takes off. It always couldn't! We could always look at Metaverse hype as similar to VR hype from the 90s, especially if the right means of interaction aren't there. But if it works out well...
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Facebook will create a product team to work on the “metaverse,” a concept related to VR and AR that involves creating digital worlds that multiple people can inhabit at the same time.
Facebook is heavily investing in AR and VR technologies because they offer the company the possibility of controlling its own hardware platform.
“I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week.
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Imagine a world where you could sit on the same couch as a friend who lives thousands of miles away, or conjure up a virtual version of your workplace while at the beach.
Welcome to the metaverse: a vision of the future that sounds fantastical, but which tech titans like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are betting on as the next great leap in the evolution of the internet.
The metaverse is, in fact, the stuff of science-fiction: the term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow Crash", in which people don virtual reality headsets to interact inside a game-like digital world.
The book has long enjoyed cult status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—but in recent months the metaverse has become one of the tech sector's hottest buzzwords, with companies pouring millions of dollars into its development.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sun Jun 13, 2021 10:00 pm
And so I just discovered that the Metaverse may actually be coming together after all, which means that I absolutely MUST create a news and discussions thread for it.
The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. The word "metaverse" is made up of the prefix "meta" (meaning beyond) and the stem "verse" (a backformation from "universe"); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe
New to exploring this topic. What metaverse specific projects/sub niches are emerging and important?
Right now, the metaverse itself is the main thing coming together, as is virtual reality. The subniches that matter the most are the foundational ones: creating a tangible virtual world, virtual currency, virtual feedback, things like that.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
While his fellow tech CEOs try to usher in an era of mass interplanetary travel, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is dreaming of expansion not into outer space but cyberspace. The lords of Silicon Valley are all done with earthly reality, but as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos arrange plans to physically leave, Zuckerberg wants to program a better earthly experience — one curated by Facebook.
In July, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is in the process of transitioning into a “Metaverse” company over the next half decade. The social media giant wants to morph into an all-consuming, all-encompassing platform with relationships, work, commerce, and entertainment commingling under one big tent.
If that’s vague, it’s because the Metaverse is an octopus with a nearly infinite number of arms and no single blueprint, which is why many are calling it the Web 3.0. It’s “the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told the Verge last month. “You can think about the Metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.”
As part of his initial Metaverse media blitz, the Great Hoodied One appeared on CBS News last month to play show-and-tell with Horizon Workrooms and demonstrate what being “inside the internet” actually means.
Workrooms, Facebook’s attempt at trumping Zoom, is an immersive conference call program where coworkers don an Oculus VR helmet and share a virtual office space to, say, scribble notes on a digital whiteboard using hand gestures while their avatars mimic their own movements. The demo looks laughably underwhelming (the cartoonish avatars look like what would happen if Nintendo made an app called Wii Work), but it’s easy to see why management might flock to a gentle, brightly colored panoptic workplace where it’s impossible to escape the gaze of your boss, even in your own bedroom.
According to Zuckerberg, Horizon Workrooms is just a taste of what’s to come. “Five years from now, people will be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want but feel present when they do it,” he said.
If the Metaverse idea expands beyond the goofy CGI-driven trickery seen through the goggles of an Oculus helmet, the idea of “being present” may change altogether over the coming years (though Zuckerberg’s half-decade timeline seems optimistic). Many of the Metaverse’s architects envision a future in which physical, augmented, and virtual realities converge into a single enhanced reality governed by a shared economic and media consumption system.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
The concept of the metaverse is one of the more futuristic and hype filled phrases in the last couple of years. That one of the largest companies in the world is changing their name and placing their full focus on this, is a potential game changer.
In addition to this, Facebook's issues with privacy etc., is straight out of a dystopian novel and the combination here makes for a potentially highly problematic cocktail that is likely to seriously impact people.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
The Metaverse is still a far off concept by Facebook (not to mention other players) but some are already attempting to cash in the concept — and even provide a digital workforce for it. Enter Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that says it’s designing AI-driven digital humans for clients to use for things like customer service, promotional videos, and education. However, the company also has its sights set on the future — with co-founder Greg Cross saying it plans to create a “digital workforce” for a potential metaverse.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Samsung has announced its next-generation RAM tech made for mobile devices, which it says can be used in future smartphones but also in servers, cars, and “the metaverse.” While Samsung’s press release doesn’t mention how its new LPDDR5X RAM chips could help people enter the “digital reality,” the tech should help make devices run faster and last longer.
Putting the buzzwords like metaverse, AI, and 5G aside, Samsung is promising some real improvements to speed and power usage: it says its next-gen RAM will have 1.3-times faster processing speeds versus the previous-gen LPDDR5, will be capable of higher densities (up to 64GB per chip), and will use 20 percent less power than the last generation. Some of these improvements, according to Samsung, can be chalked up to the new 14nm process it’s using to create the chips. Also, for all the ribbing about the metaverse, lower-power draw and better performance could actually help with AR and VR headsets with onboard processors or phones that are driving those devices.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Seoul says it will be the first major city government to enter the metaverse. On Nov. 3, the South Korean capital announced a plan to make a variety of public services and cultural events available in the metaverse, an immersive internet that relies on virtual reality. If the plan is successful, Seoul residents can visit a virtual city hall to do everything from touring a historic site to filing a civil complaint by donning virtual reality goggles.
The 3.9 billion won ($3.3 million) investment is part of mayor Oh Se-hoon’s 10-year plan for the city, which aims to improve social mobility among citizens and raising the city’s global competitiveness. It also taps into South Korea’s Digital New Deal, a nationwide plan to embrace digital and AI tools to improve healthcare, central infrastructure, and the economy in its recovery from the economic crisis caused by covid-19.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
