I am not always what one would call the perfect state of calm. I have a lot of anxiety about the present and the future.

Also, my family, like anyone’s family, can be hectic. I could go for a walk, but I don’t often get around to it, instead getting stuck in my day-to-day routine. Being that I live in such a small place, there isn’t really anywhere all that quiet. And even if I were in a quiet place, then that wouldn’t stop the anxieties and ruminations in my head.

Listening to music and whale sounds has helped me calm down a little in the past, but what I need is to be able to keep myself from spiraling too far into my thoughts.

Thankfully, with advancements in technology, many tools are available to help me retain my sanity, even when an actual therapist is not within reach.

A couple tools that have supported me are Tripp’s virtual reality meditation program and their free mobile app. Tripp’s VR app made sense for me, being that I have found video games to be a sanctuary to tune out the anxieties in my head and get lost in another realm. This has also been the case for Tripp’s co-founder and CEO, Nanea Reeves.

“I realized throughout my journey that video games have been kind of a retreat for me at times in my life,” said Reeves. “Even the casual ones on my phone, if I am kind of just ruminating on a lot of negative internal talk, I can play something and it sort of clears my head.”

I tried out the free VR app demo a handful of occasions, when I have felt particularly at a loss. It gave me a private space, even if it was a virtual space, where I could ease my tension a little, and just be. This was thanks to an immersive, multi-sensory experience, with a serene audio track and vibrant visuals, like something out of a kaleidoscope.

The immersive nature of virtual reality is another aspect of what inspired the genesis of Tripp as a concept.

“I was an investor in the Oculus early stage of their company, and that gave me access to devices,” said Reeves. “And a lot of the early experiences were designed to make you feel afraid, you know, you felt like you were on a cliff . . . And that was really interesting to me. I thought, if you could make someone feel fear that easily what else could you make them feel?

I got treated to a surreal fireworks display on launch, then the Tripp hummingbird, who is coincidentally also named Terrence, came and visited. I then performed a short exercise where, by tilting my head, I navigated a spherical object through a path of obstacles where I had to collect coins as they went by. The voice of the application suggested seeing the gaps between obstacles as the gaps between thoughts, which is “where the joy lies,” as the narrator puts it.

The best way to explain this, as author Pema Chödrön puts it, is seeing rays of sunshine that peek through the clouds. Having this kind of visual metaphor for my mental activity was something novel to me, imagining my thoughts as physical objects, and looking between them to see the sunshine. Especially for those who tend to think in terms of images, this can be a powerful metaphor.

Another of Tripp’s tools that I have relied on is its AI assistant, Kōkua, which has recently hit the VR application.

Kokua is fairly straightforward: I type my current mood in the prompt, and the AI voice assistant, based on CEO Nanea Reeves’ voice, offers words of comfort. It then creates a short reflection – some words to guide me through dealing with the stressors I am experiencing, lasting just over two minutes. At the end, I am welcome to provide feedback on whether the meditation helped at all.

I found that, the majority of the time, the app was quite helpful. There was one occasion where the app mistakenly thought I had children, but most of the time it could understand what I was trying to say. I think that is what I needed most, to know that it was okay to feel what I felt, and to have that legitimized.

One of the reasons that Kōkua was released to mobile initially, according to Reeves, was to receive feedback from users before releasing the app through Tripp’s subscription-based VR app.

“We have a smaller audience on mobile,” continued Reeves. “We wanted to learn and see where we might have gotten certain things wrong, based on how people are interacting with it for support.”

While Tripp’s VR and mobile applications are helpful, Reeves hopes to avoid the tools being used in the place of trained professional therapists.

“We do have some connections to different support lines,” she added.

If the AI detects that someone might need real support, if they’re in a crisis, there’s a connection to real professional support.

Tripp’s tools are not therapy in themselves, but from my experience, they have helped in times of distress. If I can’t change what is happening around me, the VR app and mobile app at least help me to feel like I can deal with the challenges, that there is a calm within the middle of the storm. Life has its share of conflicts and arguments. Even if things aren’t okay, Tripp allowed me, even for a moment, to be okay.

Tripp VR is a colorful, calming experience, and while Kōkua is not a licensed counselor, it does make a big difference to at least have the feeling that someone was hearing my struggles and being empathetic, even if that empathy was coming from a computer program.

VR and AI have immense potential for improving people’s psychological well-being, and the advances in the technology could become useful as another tool set for mental health professionals.

This past weekend, I went to the local Apple store and got a demo of the new Apple Vision Pro headset — the one where you’ll spend a minimum of $3,500 and more likely $4,000 if you buy it.

A few years ago, I traded my iPhone for an Android because Samsung released the Gear VR headset and Apple didn’t have anything similar in the pipeline.

I still miss my iPhone, but all the phone-based VR action has been on the Android side. However, Samsung dropped its Gear VR project, and Google stopped developing its Cardboard and Daydream View platforms.

So I’m open to going back to the Apple ecosystem, if there’s something worth switching for.

Is the Apple Vision Pro the reason to switch? No.

Was the demo educational? Yes, and I’m going to tell you what I learned.

And, at the end of this article, I’ll explain who should buy the headset now, and who should wait for two or three generations.

But first, why I’m not going to switch to the iPhone and buy an Apple Vision Pro, even though I cover tech so could deduct it as a business expense.

I can’t do my work on it

Even putting aside the fact that my work computers are all Windows, and the Vision Pro only pairs with Apple computers — and late-model computers at that — the headset itself isn’t optimal for prolonged use.

It’s heavy so you don’t want to wear it for hours. There’s no usable virtual keyboard — you’d need to use a physical keyboard, anyway. It’s hard to drink coffee in it. And you can’t attend Zoom meetings in it. Yes, you can Facetime — but only as a cartoon avatar.

And, of course, it doesn’t replace a computer. It’s an add-on to a computer. It’s basically a single external monitor for my computer. I already have two giant monitors, and the prices for monitors are ridiculously cheap now, anyway. If I wanted to upgrade a monitor, I’d just upgrade the monitor itself and not switch to a VR headset.

Still, the graphics are amazing. I enjoyed the almost-completely-realistic resolution of the display.

There’s no killer app

I didn’t see anything during the demo that I absolutely had to have, and would use all the time.

If there was a killer app, then maybe I’d get the headset, and then use the other stuff because I have the headset on all the time, anyway — might as well do everything in VR.

That’s what happened with smartphones. We got the smartphones because we needed a phone anyway. You can’t live without a phone. And once you have the phone, might as well use it as a camera, as a GPS, as an ebook reader, as a music player, as a note-taking app, as a calendar, and as a casual gaming device. Not to mention all the thousands of other apps you can use on a smartphone.

Will that happen with VR? No. Nobody is going to spend their life inside a VR headset.

It will happen with AR. I’m still totally convinced that AR glasses are the future. They will replace our phones, and, since we have the AR glasses on anyway, we’ll use them for work, we’ll use them for music and movies and games and social media and everything else.

But right now, we’re not there. The Apple Vision Pro wants to be there — it’s pass-through camera makes the device usable for augmented reality. But it’s not an always-on, always-with-you device. And until it is, we’ll still use all the other stuff.

It’s too expensive for just fun and games

Sure, there are a handful of games for the Vision Pro. And you can watch movies on a giant personal screen.

But there are far, far cheaper ways to play VR games, with much bigger selections. And there are already very cheap and lightweight glasses that let you watch movies if you want that kind of thing. Or you can just buy a slightly bigger TV. TVs are getting ridiculously cheap these days.

Also — I already own a big TV set. And I can watch my TV with other people. I can’t watch movies on the Vision Pro with other people.

Now, lets talk about what I learned about the future from getting this demo.

Seeing an overlay over reality is awesome

Yes, the Meta Quest has a pass-through camera but the video quality is lousy.

The Apple Vision Pro’s video quality is awesome. It’s almost like looking through a pane of glass. Not exactly glass — it fakes it with video — but close enough. I was extremely impressed.

And, Samsung showed off a transparent TV earlier this year.

So the idea of a transparent pair of glasses that can turn into AR or VR glasses on demand — it’s within reach. And these transparent glasses are going to be awesome for augmented reality. And we can replace our phones with these glasses.

If you want to see what that world will be like, go to the nearest Apple store and get your own Vision Pro demo.

The interface of the future will be gesture-based

Remember how, in The Minority Report, Tom Cruise moved images around with his hands?

That’s what the Vision Pro interface is like. They have cameras on the headset that can see your hands. In fact, even if my hand was hanging down by my side, it still registered if I made a pinching gesture.

No controllers necessary.

This will be great in the future when we wear smart glasses all the time because we won’t have to carry controllers around. The fewer things we have to carry around, the better.

But the big progress that Apple made with the interface is the eye-tracking. To click on something, you just look at it and pinch your fingers. That means that you don’t have to have your hands up in the air in front of you all the time. That would get tired. I mean, how long can Tom Cruise stand there, waving his arms around? No matter how fit you are, that’s going to get tiring.

And, like I said, you don’t need to raise your arm to make the pinching gesture. You can keep your hand down on your lap, or by your side, or on your desk.

You still need to raise your arms to resize windows, or to drag them around, but how often do you need to resize a window, anyway?

Who should buy the headset today

If you’re building an AR or VR platform for the future, you should definitely check out the Vision Pro and see what possibilities are offered by the pass-through camera and the eye-tracking-and-pinching control system.

But, unless your company is paying for the device, return it within the two-week period.

The only reason to keep it is if you are currently developing apps for the Apple Vision Pro. Then, you need the device to test your apps.

If you’re anyone else, buy a larger TV and computer monitor and a PlayStation VR or a Quest to play games on and you’ll still be around $3,000 ahead.

But do go and get a demo. It’s free, and it might give you some ideas for apps or business opportunities for a few years down the line.

To book, go to the Apple Vision Pro website and click on the “Book a demo” button at the top right.

I recently read a CNN article on Tim Cook and the risk he’s taking with Apple Vision Pro. The gist of it is this: The Vision Pro will be Apple’s riskiest launch in years and could end up being the product that defines Tim Cook’s legacy.

What struck me is the point of view. The main concern is the fate of one person, Tim Cook. And fair enough, his legacy at Apple might indeed be affected by the success or failure of the Vision Pro. But I can’t help thinking about how there’s high visibility attention on a single wealthy-for-life individual — but far less talk about the societal impact of this latest Apple product, which, to my mind, conjures up the phrase, “gentrification of extended reality technologies.”

Have you seen the Apple Vision Pro movie? It’s a statement, not only about the product, but also of the affluence of the “neighborhood” that Apple associates with their target demographic. 

The thing about gentrification of physical neighborhoods is that it implicitly demotes the preceding locals and the context of their lives, despite marketing claims to the contrary. I’ve watched this happen first hand in the so-called Arts District in Los Angeles. Artists and artists’ lofts have, with few exceptions, given way to expensive upscale condominiums and trendy food and drink spots.

The first impression the Vision Pro movie makes is that Apple’s target demographic lives in immaculate upscale dwellings ostensibly in an upscale neighborhood. Of course this compliments the marketing of an AR-forward technology that includes seeing the physical environment while the projected interactions are displayed as a visual overlay.

However, a cluttered wall or messy pile of clothes is also going to be a part of the Vision Pro experience, and a major distraction I think. The minute I see highly staged and perfected environments in the marketing I suspect that gentrification – in this case, gentrification of our dwellings – is in play.  

If that was the end of it, we could excuse it as marketing pretention to flatter the product. But then there’s the retail cost of $3,500 for the privilege of Vision Pro ownership and the case for gentrification becomes unavoidable.

When VR and AR, component technologies of XR, were still emerging from niche implementations, it was interesting that Google created viewers out of cardboard, to take advantage of the ubiquitous technology of the cell phone and provide some form of XR experience to virtually anyone, anywhere. The cost of entry was exceedingly low, although we understandably bemoaned the lack of apps and motion sickness.

Subsequently, however, the push for a superior stand-alone headset has seen rising costs while still not achieving widespread adoption. Consumers have balked at the increasing retail price of the Meta Quest headset, which has doubled between the two latest versions. Still, I suppose it’s something to say that it comes in under $1,000, similar to the cost of a well-configured recent model iPhone.

Now with the Vision Pro, however, Apple has really upped the ante and set its sights on a privileged few. At $3,500, it costs five times as much as the Meta Quest 3 and ten times as much as the Meta Quest 2. It’s priced like a very well configured MacBook Pro, but without the corresponding breadth of software ecosystem to power it. 

Hopefully the cost of anything is, first and foremost, a reflection of its relative value.

Well, as shown in the Vision Pro movie, the primary functionality of the Vision Pro is watching visuals, entertainment and video chats. So, your friend can appear to be hovering over your bed as you chat and walk about the room. Amazing? Sure, but who needs this?

Perhaps truly absurd is the person packing a suitcase, while wearing the headset and then taking a video call. It’s already challenging that there’s a headset and tethered battery to wear at all, but to wear it while doing a real-world chore, just in case a call comes through? No one… literally no one with an ounce of practicality is going to do that.

Yet the implication is that if you want to stay connected, you should want to do that, at all times. Ironically it also suggests that your cell phone, which easily slips out of the way into a pocket or waits, also out of the way, patiently on a counter, has become just so… passé, so… inadequate. Gentrification of your phone calls never looked so sci-fi, yet so pointless.

Consequently, my concern is that this whole class of technology still won’t become ubiquitous like the cell phone. The potential benefits of XR’s components, VR and AR, could be enormous for everyone. 

But like gentrification of a neighborhood, people will be priced out of the Apple XR privilege in droves. There will be fewer customers, but with necessarily greater economic means. Their needs and desires will take over the paradigm and be the influence for most content.

And consider this: the Apple marketing movie shows movie watching with the Vision Pro. Are you in a family of, let’s say, four? Well, that’s $14,000 in headsets for everyone to take part together.

Yet Apple touts an inclusive paradigm of the Vision Pro by displaying an uncanny valley version of your face on the headset to people who look at you. But rather than inclusivity, the implicit message is, “I live in a world you can’t experience without affluence.”

I’m skeptical that Apple has cracked the code for selling the world on XR, but we may nonetheless be witnessing the gentrification of a technology.

Of course, it’s not so much that Apple is trying to gentrify this domain. Solving the challenges of this technology has been expensive, and the devices we’d be happy with would inevitably be expensive, at least at first. I just hope XR doesn’t remain a vanity project for Apple with usefulness based on deep pockets and superficial ideas of what we need to lead meaningful lives.

Update: I’ve been online at Apple’s Vision Pro sales page to see what kinds of options are available for the Vision Pro. To my surprise, the first step you’re compelled to complete is a scan of your head for measurements needed by Apple to include the correct fit of Light Seal and head bands. You’ll need an iPhone or iPad with Face ID to find the right size. If you’re on a desktop computer, you’ll also scan a circular Apple code on the screen that synchronizes their site with your captured head dimensions.

After looking left, right, up and down, twice, your dimensions are submitted to Apple. The next step is to select options for your vision, whether you have a prescription, contacts or readers. You won’t need precise prescription information because the inserts are generalized and accommodate most prescriptions. The optical inserts run between $99 and $149.

After all of the sizing procedure, you’re able to select a storage memory size, from 256GB to 1TB. The 1TB option is $3,899.

My final point is this: If there was any doubt this device is a vanity device, the custom fit and optical inserts tell you that each Vision Pro is tailored primarily for just for one person. Since the optical inserts attach magnetically, you could swap them out with another user, but in practice, is that practical? And what about the Light Seal and head bands, also sized to fit?

Of course, the real measurements that count are product sales and paradigm adoption rates.

They work, are hardly used, and one is even in its original — UNOPENED — box.

If you’re in the western Massachusetts area, and want to meet up, I can give you a free VR headset. Or if you’re anywhere in the world, and can pay for shipping, you can buy the brand-new one.

Here’s the one I’m selling

HP Reverb G2 VR headset

I don’t have my own picture of the headset itself because I haven’t opened the box. Yup, I bought it a year ago and never even opened it. It’s been sitting on a shelf in my office, and I realized that if I haven’t opened it yet, I’m never going to.

It runs for $599 on the HP website, currently on sale for $469, but it’s out of stock as I write this. I’m selling it for $400.

The box is unopened, so I don’t know exactly what’s in there for certain, but I bought it directly from HP and I’m reasonably sure that they put in everything it’s supposed to have.

Here’s the official picture of the headset itself:

It’s a fancy, high-end headset and comes with two controllers, has six degrees of movement, and is compatible with SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality. The way it works is that you plug it into your computer, so there is a cable that you have to have on your head when you use it. So, unless you’ve got one of those computers that fits in a backpack, you’d probably be using this headset sitting down, or, at least, standing in one place close to your PC.

Here’s a picture of some guy using it, with the chair positioned just right so you can’t see the cable running from his head to the laptop:

Are you interested? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. I’m charging $400 plus shipping, so if you’re not too far away, it might be a good deal.

If nobody here is interested, I’ll put it up on eBay.

And here are the three free VR headsets I’m giving away:

HTC Vive

Comes with a couple of controllers plus a faceguard thing. It’s an all-in-one headset that you recharge with a USB cord. I think it’s the HTC Vive Focus Plus. It’s currently $449 on the official website, down from a regular price of $629. I’ve opened it and played with it, and no longer have the original packaging, so I’m just giving it away.

You don’t need a phone or a PC to use it, so it’s completely wireless. You do need a WiFi connection, though, to download apps and stuff.

If you’re around Western Massachusetts, we can meet up in some local coffee shop, and you can just have it. Or you can pay for shipping and I can box it up and send it to you. But, like I said, I don’t have the original packaging so I’ll have to bubble wrap it.

Google Daydream View

This is one of those headsets that you put a phone into. It’s the Google Daydream View and Google has stopped supporting it, but there are still Daydream-compatible apps up in the app store.

The controller has a little hidey-place inside the headset:

That’s also how you put your phone in it. For a list of compatible phones, see this official list from Google.

It can also run regular Google Cardboard apps, but then the controller won’t work.

Generic Google “Cardboard” headset

This is one of those cheap generic $10 headsets you can buy at Walmart that you put your phone into. It can run any Cardboard-compatible app.

I use it with my Android phone, but there’s even support for iPhones. There’s no controller with Cardboard, and no six degrees of movement. You can turn your head, but you can’t move your head laterally forward or backward, so if you’re not careful with how you use it, you can become dizzy quite easily. But you can use it to watch YouTube’s 360-degree videos in VR, and there’s a bunch of roller-coaster-type rides, some simple games, and, of course, porn.

If nobody here wants any of these free ones, I’ll give them away on Nextdoor or Craigslist, but I figured I’d give you guys first crack at them.

I’m giving two presentations tomorrow at the OpenSim Community Conference.

First, I’m giving my usual state of the hypergrid talk at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time. I’ll be doing a roundup of this year’s top news and OpenSim statistics.

Then, at 4 p.m. Pacific, I’ll be talking about how generative AI will change content creation and coding.

I have been covering AI quite a bit lately, especially for CIO magazine. You can see all my latest AI articles here. As part of that, I’ve been talking to CEOs, CIOs and other senior executives at companies around the world, as well as leading experts on AI and the vendors building the technology. It doesn’t hurt that I have a degree in mathematics and can read the research papers. My own undergraduate research, funded by the NSF, was about a dynamical systems approach to differential equations. If you want more AI, and want to see me in the physical world, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the 2024 Data and AI Summit in March.

About the conference

It’s the eleventh annual OpenSimulator Community Conference, celebrating the community and development of the OpenSimulator opensource software. It will feature over 70 speakers leading presentations, workshops, panel sessions, and social events across the diversity of the OpenSimulator user base.

This year’s conference kicks off yesterday with networking events and today there will be art tours and music performances. The conference then features two days of dynamic presentations on Saturday and Sunday–including a hypergrid shopping tour and a closing night party on Sunday. There will also be more community events and tours following the conference weekend.

Register for the conference here. See the full schedule here.

Attending the conference event is free, but those wishing to financially support the conference can still sponsor or participate in its crowdfunder campaign when registering. Participants in the crowdfunding cCampaign will receive a variety of thank-you gifts depending upon their level of participation, including conference VIP seating and the ability to have a virtual expo booth at the event. The conference sponsorship or crowdfunder contribution is tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law for US residents.

You can also choose to register to have an avatar account created for you locally on the OSCC conference grid server or hypergrid to OSCC via your home grid avatar.

“I and the entire industry was waiting for Apple for a decade,” said Rolf Illenberger, CEO of VRDirect, which provides company software solutions to build their own VR projects. Among their clients are Porsche and T-Mobile.

The Apple Vision Pro is branded by Apple as a spacial computer, which will allow users to clearly see their surroundings, and project apps as if appearing within the physical space.

Several companies are currently involved in the virtual reality and augmented reality space, including “Meta, Apple, HTC . . . [and]  Lenovo,” said Illenberger told Hypergrid Business.

Finance website Insider Monkey ranks Apple, Inc. at number one in their largest VR/AR companies, with a market cap of $2.8 trillion — though Apple doesn’t actually have an AR or VR product out yet. It ranks Meta at number six, having a market cap of $787 billion.

With Apple set to release the Vision Pro, VR is about to go mainstream, according to Illenberger.

“So I think now that Apple has joined the group of companies pushing this technology,” he continued, “it’s obvious that this is the next big thing. And it’s also obvious that these companies will, you know, continue investing billions in this technology, not only in the technology but also in the kind of adoption of this technology in the market out there.”

One major hurdle that the Apple Vision Pro will face is its price tag of $3,500, which may turn off many consumers.

“You have to see that the whole, let’s say, metaverse, technologies, VR and AR, we’re still that’s still technologies, very infant technologies,” said Illenberger on the accessibility of VR technology. “I would even argue they’re not yet in a state that it’s a mass market b2c thing at this point in time, you know, look at the look at the Apple headset and the price point, but also looking at the other available VR headsets. We’re not talking about devices that are tailored towards a mass market audience at this point in time.”

In a separate interview with Laptop, Illenberg highlighted that the initial goal of the first Vision Pro model is not to sell units but rather to create buzz for the product.

“A fair comparison might be HDTV, in say, 2006 or 2007. The motivation to announce Vision Pro now was to stimulate and nurture the ecosystem of app developers and content creators to invest in the new device, which was already happening once rumors about the device started to emerge several months ago. Hence, Vision Pro is already a great success for Apple.”

Meta officially launched the Meta Quest 3 during its Meta Connect event last month. Meta is also experimenting with Flamera, a VR headset that utilizes a new passthrough technology that is supposed to eliminate external feed distortion and artifacts.

Remember those mixed reality combat goggles that Microsoft was building for the Army that made soldiers nauseous? (See our previous story here.) Well, they’re back.

Microsoft got its hands slapped and had to go back to the drawing board after reports came out last year that its new AR goggles were making soldiers literally sick to their stomachs. But it seems they’ve fixed the issues, and are ready for round two.

The Army just placed a new order for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System or IVAS goggles, Bloomberg reports.

Microsoft sent the Army some new prototype headsets this summer. The company apparently fixed the issues that caused headaches, nausea and pain.

The Army spokesperson said the new headsets showed “improvements in reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor.”

I’m sure Microsoft was sweating bullets about this contract, since its consumer AR efforts seem to be dying on the vine. Apple has been grabbing all the hype with its upcoming mixed reality headset — but at $3,500 a pop, I don’t know how much traction those headsets are going to get, either. Which just leaves Meta and the Quest 2.

Meanwhile, Microsoft laid off a bunch of the HoloLens team earlier this year.

The next steps for IVAS include adding in cloud computing, the Army Times reports. This will let soldiers download apps for specific mission needs.

The Army wants to avoid overloading IVAS by offloading apps to the cloud instead of the device. During testing, soldiers used the goggles for assault planning, mission practice, targeting, and more.

IVAS lets them ditch the sand table to quickly scout and rehearse missions virtually.

Rather than an MRE-box sand table, a unit could virtually “see” the terrain in their heads-up display and rehearse a mission in their patrol base before leaving the wire,” Brig. Gen. Christopher Schneider told Army Times.

“Now we have to make this system producible and affordable,” he added.

Earlier issues around night vision, size, and weight are getting fixed bit by bit. The goal is to nail down cost and manufacturing in 18 months.

If all goes well, IVAS could start hitting units by 2025. Of course, that’s assuming the cloud tech actually works as advertised. And that Congress keeps funding the project.

How it started

Microsoft started working with the Army in 2018 on mixed reality headsets using its HoloLens tech. The goal was to help soldiers train, plan missions and operate better in the field, the company said in a long article about the project two years ago.

IVAS has night vision, heat sensors, 3D mapping and other HoloLens features. It’s meant to give soldiers more awareness by layering digital info onto the real world, the company said.

To get input, Microsoft engineers did mock bootcamps in 2019, where they learned skills like navigating at night. This helped them design IVAS to handle tough conditions soldiers face.

After soldiers tested IVAS for around 80,000 hours by early 2021, Microsoft had a headset ready for combat use.

I’m not sure why they missed the whole nausea thing the first time around. Maybe the engineers had been using the headset so much themselves, during the whole development process, that they were used to it? Or it was so much better than the early iterations, that the nausea didn’t even register as a problem any more?

New research reports and surveys released this month show that interest in virtual and augmented reality is continuing to drop.

According to an EY Consulting survey released earlier this month, only 24 percent of people said their company has started using VR and AR technologies, putting it in last place among all technologies people were asked about. Those other technologies included cloud and edge computing, IoT, digital twins, quantum computing, biometrics, blockchain, and generative AI. And that’s with quantum computers not even available on the market yet and generative AI only really becoming accessible to the world late last year.

Similarly, even among people who were familiar with VR technology, only 15 percent said that they wear a VR headset at work, only 17 percent said they attend meetings in the metaverse, and only 18 percent use VR for onboarding or training. The survey didn’t ask if they did those things on a regular basis, or tried them once and stopped.

According to a report by research firm IDC, global shipments of AR and VR headsets dropped sharply this year — a decline of 54 percent compared to the same time in 2022.

The only growth was in augmented reality displays — the kind with transparent lenses, where you can see the real world, just with a holographic overlay over it. The top example of this are the Air AR glasses from Xreal. They can project a TV screen or computer monitor into the air in front of you, and look just like sunglasses. You connect them via a USB-C port to your smartphone or tablet, or to a PC or gaming console. You can even order them with prescription lenses. And they cost just $379 — still a little on the high side but about as much as you’d pay for a second monitor, and only about a tenth of the price of Apple’s yet-to-be-released Apple Vision Pro headset.

Right now they only come in black and look a little clunky. But, in general, this is what I expected the Apple headset to be — a replacement display for the iPhone screen that was as easy to use as a pair of sunglasses. Add a few design options, a Bluetooth connection, and a case that doubles as a charger and I’m sold — especially if the resolution of the display is good enough to read text.

Oh, and I want the kind of lenses that automatically turn lighter or darker when you want them to. If they could replace my regular glasses, I could just wear them all the time.

Some companies are continuing to invest in AR and VR. J. Crew, for example, launched a virtual store earlier this month.

When you go inside the house, it’s basically a typical real estate or museum tour — click on the arrows to teleport around, then look in various directions. For the most part, it’s walls with pictures of items from the J. Crew catalog. A bit less pleasant to experience than the paper version, and a lot less convenient than its regular online shopping experience.

Frankly, it reminded me a bit of in-world stores in Second Life and OpenSim.

And I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed.

According to a YouGov survey, 45 percent of J. Crew customers don’t see any practical applications for augmented or virtual reality.

The survey also shows that 67 percent of the retailer’s customers think that augmented or virtual reality allows people to experience products and services before they buy them. Since that statement is technically true — augmented and virtual reality does allow that, for a certain definition of the word “experience” — I’m surprised that the answer wasn’t 100 percent.

The thing is, many retailers are already adding virtual models to their websites, so you can see what the clothes might look like on you, or on a model that’s shaped like you. No AR or VR required.

In other words, AR and VR have all the inconveniences of physical stores — limited selection, hard to find what you’re looking for — with none of the benefits like, say, being able to feel the fabric, checking that the shoes or clothes don’t pinch or itch, or buying a Cinnabon in the food court after you’ve finished shopping as a reward for surviving the ordeal.

I was very much disappointed by the actual announcement of the Apple Vision Pro on Monday.

You can watch the headset part of the presentation below:

The price tag. OMG, the price tag

Really? $3,500? Really? I’m a writer, so I’ve owned cars that cost less than that.

If we assume that prices will drop in half every year, it will take four years to get down to what I would consider a reasonable price — around $200. Unless, of course, it can work as a phone replacement, in which case, it might be down to a reasonable $875 in two years.

Not available until next year

Did I say two years? I meant three years — because this thing won’t be available until 2024.

Which means if it’s an add-on, and not a phone replacement, it will take five years to get down to a reasonable $200.

The size. Look at the size.

This thing is huge. I want my augmented reality headset to be a pair of sunglasses. Especially since this thing is connected by a cord to a battery pack you wear. If it’s connected by a cord to something anyway, might as well connect it to a phone — or a pack that has the processor in it, so that the headset itself can be a lot smaller.

Also, this feels like it’s meant to be a work productivity tool. That means that the cord could be connecting it to a computer. Again, you can move the chips out of the headset itself and make it lighter.

The creepy eye display.

When you look at someone wearing one of these headsets, you’ll be able to see their eyes and where they are looking. Not because the display is transparent — but because the entire outside surface is a display screen that shows you a video of the person’s eyes.

It is super creepy. To me, at least.

Also, it seems like such a waste of processing and display just to show a pair of eyes. If you want to have a headset where you can see the user’s eyes, just have a clear-glass headset where you can see the user’s eyes.

The pass-through camera.

And clear glass goes the other way, too.

As far as I’m concerned, in order to use an augmented reality headset for anything, you need to have clear lenses. That way, you can see your surroundings, with the augmented reality stuff as an overlay on top.

This is what I thought the Apple headset was going to look like:

Plus, when clear-glass headset is turned off, you can still use it as a regular pair of glasses or sunglasses. I currently wear glasses. Being able to have them do double-duty as a phone display screen would be excellent.

Instead, Apple decided to make the headset opaque, and to use cameras to try to trick you into thinking that you’re seeing out of them to the room around you.

Now, according to Mike Rockwell, head of Apple’s AR/VR team, their headset chips are so good that it “virtually eliminates lag.”

It’s that “virtually” that gets to me. Virtually? So there will be lag between what happens around me, and what I’m seeing in the headset? That’s the kind of fake augmented reality I hate in the headsets I already own, like Meta’s Quest.

I really wanted to have transparent lenses — like the old Google Glass headset, but better looking, and with better functionality and usability.

Now, maybe Apple will be able to fully eliminate lag by the time people start to actually use the headset three to five years from now, but, today, I’m disappointed.

Even better, when I actually buy this thing they will have figured out a way to use clear glass. The technology is there already — glass that can programmatically go from opaque to transparent and show projected images on it.

Or they’ll have made the cameras so responsive that any lag is completely eliminated, not just “virtually.”

Not a phone replacement

Because this is a bulky headset with short battery life and a cord — and not a pair of sunglasses you can whip on and off — this is not a headset that is going to replace your phone screen.

And if it doesn’t replace my phone, then I’m not going  to be using it all the time. Which means I’ll be using it the way I use my VR headsets today — infrequently. And when I use things infrequently, I forget how they work between sessions.

This means that I’m reluctant to use the headset instead of, say, just a regular Zoom meeting. Which means I use it even less often, until, eventually, it just sits there gathering dust on my shelf. I’m not about to pay $3,500 for a paperweight.

I spent over a decade of trying to make it happen for myself and my team. We had an in-world office. I started a group for hypergrid entrepreneurs that met in OpenSim. I am on the OpenSim Community Conference organizing team, and our early meetings are in OpenSim. I even figured out a way to get my desktop and many of my apps into OpenSim, so that I could work in my virtual office.

Spoiler: I did not, in fact, ever do any significant amount of work in my virtual office.

I still think it’s possible. Well, theoretically possible, at least.

Eventually. But not in the immediate future, and not with the technology we have today.

First, until the resolution of a virtual world is as good as real life, there will be an advantage to working the old-fashioned way, especially when you’re in a graphics-heavy profession. I’m not an artist, but I do create graphics to go with blog articles and social media posts. And I’m the one responsible for web design for several outlets, including Hypergrid Business, MetaStellar, Writer vs AI, and Women in VR. That’s hard to do on a screen in a virtual world.

And don’t even get me started on trying to work in virtual reality. Even typing is hard if you can’t see the keyboard. I touch type, but sometimes I have to type special characters. I never remember where any of them are. In addition, I multi-task. I have several windows open at once and am cutting-and-pasting between them, looking things up, using calculators and other tools, and, of course, checking my phone. I can’t do most of that in virtual reality, even with a pass-through camera. And if I’m just going to be sitting at my computer, typing, why am I in a virtual reality headset, anyway?

But AR — augmented reality — well, that’s something entirely different. Instead of replacing the entire world around you with a virtual one, augmented reality just adds a little bit of the virtual to the actual world around you. Instead of looking out at the world through a distorting pass-through camera, you see the world as it is.

What this means is that, instead of a Zoom call, I can see the person I’m talking to sitting in front of me as a basically a hologram. Well, they’d be projected on my glasses, but to me it would look as if they were actually there.  Instead of a screen full of little Zoom faces, I could see people sitting around a conference table. I’d have to rearrange my home office so that my layout would work for this, but I had to rearrange my office anyway, so that it would look good on Zoom.

The thing is, we’re probably going to get to AR through our phones. Instead of wearing a smart watch, we’d wear smart glasses and just keep our phones in our pockets. Until the phones got so small, of course, that they’d fit completely inside the glasses frames.

The home screen of my phone is currently — blessedly! — ad-free, so I don’t expect to see pop-up ads just showing up willy-nilly in augmented reality, either. If they did, nobody would use the platform. Instead, we’d probably see ads the same places we currently see them — when we play free games and scroll through news feeds.

I can see some very interesting things happening when we get AR glasses. We’d use virtual keyboards instead of physical ones, and probably dictate quite a bit more, too.

I do like the physical feel of a tactile keyboard, but we already have Bluetooth-enabled keyboards that sync to our mobile devices, so I can easily see continuing to use one, if I prefer.

But I can also see myself dictating more.

Speech detection is getting more accurate all the time. In fact, I’m already dictating most of my text messages because it’s so convenient. And instead of physical screens, we’d get virtual screens that float at an arm’s length in front of us, and we can position them where we want them, and have as many screens as we want, of any size. I only have a couple of apps that I use that don’t run on a phone — GiMP and Filemaker. Everything else I do, including word processing, is browser-based, so I can already do it on a phone.

An AR phone will make my desktop PC, monitors and keyboards and backup laptop obsolete. Well, I’d still keep my laptop, just in case, but my other hardware will go the way of all the other devices that smartphones relegated to the trash heap of history. And, also, to literal trash heaps. And Windows. I hate Windows, and will be happy to never use it again.

Since these AR smart glasses will be so convenient, everyone will be using them for everything. We’ll be living in a world that has a continuous virtual overlay on it, a magical plane that gives us superpowers.

Oh, and our AI-powered virtual assistants who are as smart as we are, or even smarter, will live inside this virtual overlay.

All the pieces are already there — including the intelligent AI. All it will take is for someone to put them together into an actually useful device.

I’m guessing that this will be Apple. When it happens, I’ll be switching back from Android the first chance I get. I originally had an iPhone, but switched to Samsung when Gear VR came out because Apple didn’t support VR. Then I switched to the Pixel because I hated Samsung so much, and because I liked Google’s Daydream VR platform.

Both Gear VR and Daydream are now gone, though Google Cardboard remains. I still see between 3,000 and 4,000 pageviews a month on my Google Cardboard headset QR Codes page. These are the codes that people use to calibrate their Google Cardboard-compatible headsets. They’re ridiculously bad, and have limited motion tracking, but as phone screens get better, the image quality has become pretty good — good enough to watch movies on a virtual screen, and, of course, for VR porn. Ya gotta admit, porn does drive technology adoption. I’ve heard.

But the phone-screen-based approach seems to be hitting a head end, since few people want to have a huge phone screen strapped to the front of their face.

I’ve been waiting for years for Apple to do something in this space.

This might now be happening.

Here’s a quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a recent interview with GQ:

“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook says. “It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.”

He didn’t deny or confirm the release of an Apple AR headset.

But, yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is getting ready to unveil its augmented reality headset this June, and is already working on dedicated apps, including sports, gaming, wellness, and collaboration.

Here’s what an AI thinks that the new Apple headset might look like:

I do love my Pixel, and I’d have to replace all my Android apps with new iPhone ones if I switched, but if we’re about to hit an iPhone moment with augmented reality, I want to be first in line.

Virtual reality hasn’t caught on with American teens, according to a new survey from Piper Sandler released on Tuesday.

While 29 percent percent of teens polled owned a VR device — versus 87% who own iPhones — only 4 percent of headset owners used it daily, and just 14 percent used them weekly.

Teenagers also didn’t seem that interested in buying forthcoming VR headsets either. Only 7 percent said they planned to purchase a headset, versus 52 percent of teens polled who were unsure or uninterested.

That’s not the only bad news for VR that’s come out recently.

Bloomberg has reported that Sony’s new PlayStation VR2 Headset is projected to sell 270,000 units as of the end of March, based on data from IDC. It had originally planned to sell 2 million units in the same time period, Bloomberg reported last fall.

In fact, VR headset numbers in general are down.

According to IDC, headset shipments declined 21 percent last year to 8.8 million units.

“This survey only further exemplifies that the current state of VR is very business-focused,” said Rolf Illenberger, managing director of VRdirect, a company that provides enterprise software solutions for the metaverse and virtual reality.

“The pandemic further accelerated progress for VR and AR usability in the office, while the release of new devices will mean more for developers building practical use cases than they will for teenagers seeking entertainment,” he told Hypergrid Business.

But that might be wishful thinking.

According to IDC, both consumer and enterprise interest in virtual reality fell last year.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Microsoft and other companies have pulled back on their VR and AR plans. And the bad news has continued to come in.

In mid March, Google announced the end of Google Glass Enterprise. And, last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Disney shut down its metaverse team and the Truth in Advertising nonprofit advocacy group reported that Walmart had shut down its Roblox virtual experience.

Even Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to have soured on the metaverse. In his March letter announcing a “year of efficiency” and layoffs of 10,000 people, Zuckerberg said that the company was now going to focus on AI.

“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” he wrote. So much for the metaverse being Meta’s biggest investment. In 2021 and 2022, Reality Labs — its metaverse division — reported a total loss of nearly $24 billion.

Given the explosion of interest in AI since ChatGPT was released late last year, and its clear and obvious business benefits, I have serious doubts that anyone is going to be investing much in enterprise VR this year.

After all, generative AI is clearly poised to solve a multitude of business challenges, starting with improved efficiencies in marketing, customer service, and software development. And virtual reality continues to be a technology in search of a problem to solve.

I’m a huge, huge fan of OpenSim. But, other than giving a presentation at the OpenSim Community Conference in December, I can’t remember the last time I went in-world for a meeting. It’s all Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, and occasionally Microsoft Teams.

Oh, and here’s another downer. I watched the Game Developers Conference presentations from Nvidia, Unreal Engine, and Unity. I don’t play video games much, other than on my phone, so I hadn’t noticed just how amazing graphics, environments and characters have become. I originally watched for the AI announcements, which were insane, but the realism of the visuals just blew me away. I’m feeling the urge to run out and buy a gaming console.

Now, general purpose platforms like OpenSim don’t have to have the same level of graphics to be successful. The early web, for example, had very poor graphics compared to what was available from commercial add-ons like Flash. And look at Minecraft — you can’t get any worse than that, graphics-wise.

So while the graphics were awesome, that’s not why I was most concerned. No, I was looking at the AI-powered environment generation features. And it’s not just Unreal and Unity. There are a bunch of AI-powered startups out there making it super easy to create immersive environments, interactive characters, and everything else needed to populate a virtual world.

With the basic Unreal and Unity plans available for free, is it even worth it for developers to try to add these AI features to OpenSim? It might feel like putting a jet engine on a horse-drawn buggy. I mean, you could try, but the buggy would probably explode into splinters the minute you turned it on.

Am I wrong?

Will we be able to step into OpenSim and say, “I want a forest over there,” and see a forest spring up in front of us? Will we be able to have AI-powered NPCs we can talk to in real time? And will we be able to create interactive and actually playable in-world experience beyond just dance-and-chat and slot machines?

There’s good news, though.

AI tools are helping to accelerate everything, including software development and documentation. With the big players pulling back from enterprise VR, this gives an opportunity for open source platforms like OpenSim to use those tools, grab this window of opportunity, and catch up. Maybe even take the lead in the future hyperlinked, open source, interconnected metaverse.

Samsung, in partnership with Qualcomm and Google, has announced plans to develop a new extended reality product. XR is a term that encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies.

I myself switched from Apple to Samsung in 2015 specifically for Samsung’s Gear VR headset. But when Samsung cancelled the project, I switched to the Google Pixel to stay close to Google’s VR platform. And now, both Gear VR and Google’s platform are gone.

I’m considering switching back to Samsung if they release a new XR headset. I’m also considering waiting for Google’s version. But if Apple beats them to it, I’ll switch back to Apple. It’ll be tough after more than seven years on Android, but I want to be on the platform that supports the metaverse best.

What we know about the Samsung XR headset so far

While the specifics of Samsung’s XR product have not been revealed, the company’s president and head of mobile experiences, TM Roh, confirmed in an interview with The Washington Post that Qualcomm will handle the chipset, Samsung will manufacture the hardware, and Google will provide the software.

“For the chipset, it is going to be a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm. The hardware will be us,” he said. “For the ecosystem, we were trying to determine which platform to work with, and in the end, we decided that it was going to be Google.”

Google and Qualcomm separately confirmed the partnership on XR. A Google spokeswoman, Kaori Miyake, said, “We’re excited to work with our partners to build a new generation of immersive computing experiences that will further elevate what users can do with Google.” Qualcomm CEO, Cristiano Amon, added, “With the shared expertise from our partners, we have the foundation to make these opportunities a reality and drive the future of the spatial internet.”

Roh also mentioned that Samsung’s XR venture will involve service partnerships with Meta and Microsoft, but declined to provide specific details.

Samsung’s XR announcement comes at a crucial time for the company, as global smartphone shipments declined by 12% in 2022, and the company saw its lowest quarterly profit in years. Roh acknowledged that market demand for smartphones could remain weak for the first half of 2023, but believes that consumers will continue to invest in premium products for the added benefits they provide.

The XR market is expected to be crowded, with Apple widely rumored to reveal its first XR device in the near future, and several companies, including Meta and Microsoft, already offering mixed reality headsets.

Those other headsets haven’t been doing well, though. Microsoft recently said it will lay off 10,000 employees. According to media reports, the layoffs include its entire Mixed Reality Toolkit group and the AltspaceVR team, effectively killing Microsoft’s own Hololens project.

And Facebook has been losing money hand-over-fist on its virtual reality projects.

Meanwhile, Samsung has a rich history in the field of XR. It was one of the first companies to develop VR hardware, starting with the Samsung Gear VR platform in 2014, which was paired with the Galaxy Note 4 phone. Samsung Gear VR was the first high-quality 3DOF mobile VR experience offered to consumers. The company later launched the Odyssey PC VR headset in 2017 and a revised model the following year. However, Samsung has not released a VR product since the launch of the Odyssey+.

Google has also had its share of VR ventures, including the standalone Daydream platform, which it discontinued in 2019.

The next big event for Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google, where more information on the XR hardware partnership may be shared, is Mobile World Congress 2023, which kicks off in Barcelona, Spain on February 27.

Experiencing a destination in the metaverse could make travelers more likely to visit the place in real life, according to a new study by Booking.com.

That’s right, 46 percent of travelers are more likely to travel to destinations that they wouldn’t have previously considered after experiencing them in the metaverse, said the study, which surveyed more than 24,000 travelers from 32 countries.

Some travelers — 43 percent — will use virtual reality to inspire their real-world travel choices.

Other travelers might skip real-world travel entirely, with 35 percent saying they’d take multi-day augmented reality or virtual reality travel experiences.

The majority of travelers — 60 percent — still say that virtual travel isn’t as fulfilling as being at a location in person.

To learn more about where and why people will be traveling next year, read the full study results at Booking.com.

Artificial intelligence-generated art is everywhere.

Just scroll down your Instagram or Facebook feed, and you’ll see a bunch of selfies turned into magic avatars with Lensa, an AI image generator app launched in 2018 that is all the rage at the moment.

Images created by AI aren’t only found in your social media feed — they’ve already made their mark in OpenSim and other virtual environments.

From AI art galleries in OpenSim to AI-created fully immersive three-dimensional environments, AI is already shaping how we experience virtual worlds.

The rise of AI text-to-image generators

Nowadays, pretty much anyone can create AI-generated art thanks to AI text-to-image generators.

DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney are three popular AI generators that were released just this year, though there are more than ten available options at this point.

All three AI image generators can take simple text commands and create entire works of art.

The quality of the AI art varies depending on the text you put in and what you’re asking the AI to create.

Here’s a video comparing how the three image generators stack up against each other:

AI art created using these three tools can be found in all sorts of virtual settings.

You can visit this interactive virtual exhibition of Dall-E 2-created art on your computer or on a Meta Quest 2 for a more immersive experience.

It’s called the merzDALLEum and is run by German artist Merzmench.

If you’re on OpenSim, you can take a trip to an AI art museum called AI Dreams in Art.

AI Dreams in Art is a region in Kitely where you can admire and make copies of art created by Dale Innis using Midjourney.

The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:AI Dreams in Art.

AI has reached a point of being so accessible that mass acceptance is unavoidable at this point, said virtual world hobbyist Han Held.

“AI is already being used by non-professionals with no AI background to enhance their interests and activities,” Held told Hypergrid Business.

Held used Stable Diffusion to create some AI-generated portraits that decorate her home in Second Life.

“The results feel more authentically like paintings than I could have made on my own,” she said.

The art that these AI image generators create doesn’t have to be just two-dimensional.

Here’s an example of how Midjourney can make a three-dimensional virtual reality image:

And here’s a three-dimensional image created on Stable Diffusion by Scottie Fox that you can actually move around in:

Images created using these new AI text-to-image generators aren’t only decorating our virtual worlds — they’re already becoming the virtual worlds we explore.

AI is creating virtual worlds

AI is increasingly being used to create detailed images for virtual worlds and other environments, said Matt Payne, CEO of machine learning consulting firm Width.ai.

“AI algorithms allow developers and designers to create realistic graphics that were once impossible to generate,” Payne told Hypergrid Business.

The AI-generated images are becoming more realistic and complex as the technology improves while offering advantages over manually created ones, said Payne. “AI can produce a large number of variations quickly, which makes it easier for developers and designers to choose the best image for their project.”

Software company Nvidia recently unveiled a new AI model called GET3D that can generate buildings, characters, vehicles, and all sorts of three-dimensional objects.

And GET3D works fast.

GET3D can generate about 20 objects per second using a single GPU, said NVIDIA’s Isha Salian in a blog post.

The name GET3D comes from the AI’s ability to generate explicit textured 3D meshes, which means that the shapes come in the form of a triangle mesh covered with a textured material. This way, users can import the objects into game engines, 3D modelers, and film renderers and easily edit them.

AI is also being used to transfer the artistic style of one image into another.

An AI algorithm can be trained on images with a specific artistic style, and that training can be used to apply the same style to other images, said Amey Dharwadker, machine learning engineer at Facebook.

“This can be used to create a wide variety of artistic styles and can be applied to 3D objects and environments in video games and virtual worlds,” Dharwadker told Hypergrid Business.

Here’s a video of a Google Stadia demo showing how the technology works in real time:

While Google Stadia recently shut down due to a lack of popularity, style transfer technology can still be used to change the artistic styles of virtual reality worlds and games without needing a human artist to do the work.

AI could help you create metaverse environments with just your voice

In the future, we could all be the artists that speak our virtual worlds into existence.

Back in February, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the company’s Builder Bot, an AI tool that lets you change your virtual surroundings in the metaverse with just your voice.

“It enables you to describe a world, and then it will generate aspects of that world for you,” Zuckerberg said in the demo.

Zuckerberg and another Meta employee used voice commands in the demo to create a simple beach scene that had clouds, a picnic table, and Zuckerberg’s hydrofoil.

The technology still has a long way to go.

In the Meta demo, the scene looked low-res and lacked detail.

The future of AI images in virtual worlds

As AI continues to mature, it could eventually generate lifelike environments that we can’t distinguish from reality.

One possible direction is through the use of generative adversarial networks, or GANs, said Facebook’s Dharwadker.

GANs are a type of AI model consisting of two neural networks that are trained together to produce realistic images, said Dharwadker.

“GANs have shown great potential for generating high-quality images and could be used to create more realistic and immersive environments,” he said.

AI could also be used to support human creativity, Dharwadker added. “This could include using AI to suggest ideas and concepts or to refine and enhance existing human artist designs.”

In the future, not only could AI create totally realistic virtual environments for us to explore, it could be working hand in hand with humans to create the images we find in virtual worlds.

“By combining the creativity and ingenuity of humans with the computational power of AI, it is possible to create even more impressive and engaging images for video games and virtual worlds,” said Dharwadker.

Gaming technology will be the biggest driving force for the evolution of the metaverse in the near term, according to a new report published last week by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Video game publishers will be pushing deeper into live service platforms whose virtual worlds exhibit the potential of the metaverse, with the estimated in-game purchase revenue driving those platforms totaling over $128 billion in 2021, said the report.

“The substantial global in-game market suggests many consumers are familiar and comfortable with making transactions in virtual worlds, which sets the stage for more commerce to move into metaverse experiences,” said the report.

The supporting technology for metaverses and gaming has a lot in common, said Eric Hanselman, chief research analyst for technology, media, and telecommunications at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“As some of the early pioneers of immersive experiences, game developers have developed capabilities to build and monetize virtual worlds,” Hanselman told Hypergrid Business.

Game developers could face some hurdles as they take on the metaverse.

“Where game developers have been used to reasonable autonomy on the platforms that support them, metaverse operators could look to more tightly control access to the user communities that inhabit their worlds,” said Hanselman. “The tradeoffs between platforms and user communities will become much starker as metaverse competition increases.”

There’s also the problem that games developed for the metaverse will need people who want to play them.

While 64 percent of consumers are aware of the concept of the metaverse, only 11 percent said they would be totally comfortable with metaverse experiences, and the metaverse is still very much an emerging technology, said the report.

The metaverse in business

Gaming isn’t the only driver for metaverse growth.

The metaverse will continue to grow in the business setting, according to Hanselman, who said we’re already seeing applications for industrial process monitoring and troubleshooting.

“Metaverses can provide a management context for industrial and process design applications and offer digital-first design options for applications like warehouses, assembly lines, and factory floors,” he said. “What’s starting out as training use cases today will mature into design and operation as the technology and experience mature.”

The metaverse has a long way to go

There’s still a huge amount of innovation required at all levels of the technology stack before the metaverse really takes off.

The technology to create metaverses works well in a localized setting, but the ability to interconnect a large, global community will require substantially greater connectivity capacity, said Hanselman.

“Dispersed computing approaches can address some of this need by reducing the amount of traffic that has to be backhauled by processing at the edge of networks, closer to users,” he said. “5G networks can address some of the performance requirements for better connectivity, but that will mean a deeper push into millimeter wave radio networks and a much denser cell site deployment.”

The big question about using edge computing to support metaverses is who will actually pay the cost of deploying it, said Hanselman. “There will have to be a clear path to monetization for either telcos or cloud providers to make that move.”

And there’s also the problem that most AR and VR headsets are still uncomfortable to wear.

“AR and VR headsets will need to be substantially smaller and lighter but could be supplemented by glasses-free display systems that are in the early stages of development,” Hanselman said.

The future of how we experience the metaverse

Though technically not a requirement to enter the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality devices will see increased adoption in the next five years as big tech companies underline AR and VR’s potential as a conduit to the metaverse, according to the S&P report.

“As of the end of 2021, S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates there were 28.5 million AR and VR headsets installed worldwide across consumer and commercial settings, and forecasts that base to grow to 73.6 million by 2026,” said the report.

AR and VR headsets will continue to be the main choice for immersive metaverse experiences for some time, but less intrusive technologies will become more common in the future, said Hanselman.

“Glasses-free display technologies and holographic projection will mature to become a more common metaverse gateway,” he said.

We’ll also see more realistic renderings of participants as metaverse capacity improves, instead of the basic avatars people use today, said Hanselman, adding that the user interface will also be simpler in the future.

“More sophistication in eye, mouth and facial tracking will simplify the user interface and reduce the need for physical motion to be the primary driver of user action.”

It’s official — Mark Zuckerberg wants to rule the world — at least the business, entertainment, and social aspects of our lives, on all our devices.

Zuckerberg had a lot to say at Meta Connect 2022 on Tuesday, October 11.

In a live – actually, it was prerecorded – keynote address, Zuckerberg announced the Meta Quest Pro, a new, business-focused advanced virtual reality headset the company’s been teasing for the past year.

The Meta Quest Pro costs $1,499, is available for preorder, and ships on October 25th. The Meta Quest 2 in comparison, costs $399.

The keynote also covered some surprise partners, where Meta is now, upcoming features, and future developments that are currently being researched. 

Before announcing the Quest Pro headset, Zuckerberg handed the keynote over to Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, who spent some time encouraging developers and then promoted social, gaming, fitness, and entertainment apps.

The subject switched to business when Mark Zuckerberg came back onto the scene. 

“As in-person work ramps up, we want everyone to have the ability to feel like they’re present even if they’re not physically there,” said Zuckerberg. “And there are definitely things that could improve the way that distributed teams actually work together.”

Meta Quest Pro

After teasing how companies like Logitech, Puma, and part of the United Nations are using virtual reality and promoting several virtual reality apps, Zuckerberg turned his attention to the Meta Quest Pro.

Angela Chang, head of Meta’s product team, joined Zuckerberg to talk about Quest Pro’s features.

The Quest Pro is Meta’s first enterprise-focused virtual reality headset.

“This is a high-end device designed for work and for people who want the best experience that we can build today,” said Zuckerberg.

The Quest Pro has a new Snapdragon XR2+ processor, which gives the headset 50 percent more power than the Quest 2 and better thermal dissipation, according to Meta.

The new headset has a resolution similar to the Quest 2, but it uses pancake lenses which are 40 percent thinner and make the device look more like goggles rather than a box worn on the face.

Meta does say that the Quest Pro has better clarity than the Quest 2 because of the headset’s new optics, promising a 25 percent improvement in sharpness at the center of the field-of-view, 50 percent improvement in the peripheral region, 75 percent better contrast, and a 1.3 times larger ranger of color over the Quest 2.

The device is heavier than the Quest 2, but has a rear-mounted battery, which Meta says makes it the most balanced virtual reality device they’ve ever made.

The hand controllers, called Touch Pro, also got a redesign and some new features.

The new controllers were engineered to track themselves and work a bit more like extensions of your hands, said Zuckerberg.

“You can get a full 360-degree range of motion and they include our new touch haptics, which gives a wider and more precise range of feedback effects,” he said.

The new controllers will also be available later this year as an accessory for the Quest 2, but will cost $300, almost as much as the Quest 2 itself.

Meta partnerships

Zuckerberg proceeded to call up a couple of heavy-hitter business leaders to talk about their partnerships with Meta. 

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, was up first to discuss how they are partnering with Meta.

Microsoft will be bringing Microsoft Teams’ immersive meeting experience to Meta Quest in order to give people new ways to connect with each other, said Nadella.

In addition, Microsoft will be enabling Horizon Workrooms for Teams, a virtual space for teams to meet up in the metaverse.

Microsoft Windows 365 will also be coming to Meta Quest, providing a cross-screen experience in virtual reality and on laptops, desktops, and phones.

“This is going to be great for anyone who wants to build out their virtual office on Quest Pro,” said Nadella.

Microsoft X Cloud Gaming platform will be coming to the Meta Quest Store, and will allow players to play 2D games with an Xbox controller on what Nadella described as a massive screen in Quest.

Julie Sweet, chair and chief executive officer at IT consulting company Accenture, was up next to talk about how her company has incorporated virtual reality as one of the world’s largest employers.

Accenture started to work with Microsoft on imagining a virtual space in 2019, said Sweet.

“Since then we’ve deployed 60,000 Quest 2 headsets,” she said.

Accenture also uses virtual reality in its onboarding process and has welcomed over 140,000 people onto its virtual campus, Sweet said.

Zoom will also have team meetings that work with Meta in the near future.

Coming soon

Meta will be adding full-bodied avatars to their products in the near future, which means no more just from the waist-up avatars. Those avatars will be available for use across Horizons, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and more, on multiple devices.

Meta is working on providing the next generation of photo-realistic avatars. Meta Connect provided a look at a complex photorealistic avatar of Zuckerberg and a less complex model of an employee. Both were impressive.

An Avatar store will launch in Meta Quest later this year so people will be able to shop for virtual clothing. New outfit releases from Netflix at the Avatar Store were also teased.

In the future

Meta is conducting research for neural interfaces that will work to control an augmented reality or virtual reality device with motor neuron signals. The interfaces shown were rudimentary attachments to the wrist that allowed movement within a game with just a motion of the thumb. 

Apple and Meta will soon be going head-to-head in the high-end virtual reality headset arena — and at enterprise price points.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the new Apple augmented and virtual reality headset could be called Apple Reality Pro and will be released sometime in January 2023.

Apple’s headset may ship with a price above $2000, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo told Macrumors.

The Apple Reality Pro is set to compete against Meta’s Project Cambria –also known as Meta Quest Pro.

It looks like the Meta Quest Pro is coming out before the Apple Reality Pro and will be unveiled tomorrow Tuesday, October 11, at Meta Connect 2022, according to Mark Zuckerberg himself.

A leak from AR and VR YouTuber Brad Lynch has the Meta Quest Pro coming out on October 25, 2022, at a hefty price tag of $1,500.

https://twitter.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1567174793132232710

These headsets are not meant for the average consumer. Both companies are gearing the high-end headsets toward enterprise customers.

But the same technology could make it into mass-market headsets at some point, with the right distribution channels and some help, Apple and Meta might gain traction with the hardware.

“Like with smartphones, it seems like for Apple and Meta to find mass adaptation for their VR devices, they are going to have to tap into partners like Verizon, T-Mobile, and other mobile carriers that sell their hardware tied into mobile and data plans,” said Rolf Illenberger, founder and managing director of VRdirect, producer of virtual reality software solutions for enterprise users.

Even at seemingly high price points, enterprise players may want to purchase the headsets to use in virtual reality business applications.

“There will be the expectation that an Apple VR device works with the same seamless quality as every other Apple device,” Illenberger told Hypergrid Business.

Whether enterprise companies and their employees will fully embrace working with enterprise headsets remains to be seen.

Lenovo this week released ThinkReality VRX, a new mixed reality headset meant for improving virtual 3D immersive enterprise remote training, collaboration, visualization, and meetings.

The device will be available for early access to select clients by the end of this year and to the general public in early 2023.

Lenovo is using a combination of hardware, software, and services-oriented solutions to help enterprise metaverse clients achieve speed-to-solution and realize a faster return on investment while offering a fully engaged customer experience, said Vishal Shah, general manager of XR and Metaverse at Lenovo.

“Hardware and software are critical and you really can’t do much in the metaverse without them,” he told Hypergrid Business. “But the combination of hardware, software, and services is going to be a major differentiator in the nascent XR industry — because speed-to-solution is what is going to accelerate in the new business reality of the enterprise metaverse and give first-mover advantages to firms that get it right.”

The new XR device can be used for hands-free remote assistance and guided workflow to enable technicians to complete tasks with the support of experts who are seeing the same images or by artificial intelligence-assisted prompts in their field of vision.

“Businesses are experiencing up to four times faster training on soft skills compared to classroom training and 275 percent more confidence in applying skills learned in virtual reality,” said Lenovo in a press release. “In addition, VR training can reduce the risk of injury at the workplace by up to 43 percent.”

Tethered or standalone

The ThinkReality VRX operates as a standalone device or tethered to a PC or workstation. It can also use cloud-based solutions such as NVIDIA CloudXR for XR-graphics intensive experiences that need GPUs.

The device supports six degrees of freedom tracking thanks to four front-mounted cameras and also has two full-color, high-resolution pass-through cameras.

Pass-through technology lets users superimpose 3D virtual reality environments on top of the real world in a blend of physical and digital called mixed reality.

The device works alongside the ThinkReality software platform, which is device and cloud agnostic and allows customers to build, deploy, and manage their custom applications and content on a global scale.

Lenovo also offers consulting, content creation, cloud deployment, customer support, and other services for this and other devices.

Three stages of the metaverse

Lenovo is targeting to offer solutions at each of the three stages of the metaverse – namely the creation layer, visual layer, and delivery layer, said Shah.

“The creation layer is how content is built and we can see how metaverse interest is creating job growth for 3D artists and engineers today,” he said. “The visual layer is where 3D apps and tools are developing next-gen solutions and applications.”

The third layer is the delivery layer where distributed computing is a critical component to enable greater device utility, he said, adding that Lenovo’s ThinkReality XR solutions, ThinkShield security solutions, ThinkEdge edge computing solutions, and services serve this need.

One that I haven’t tried yet is the HP Reverb G2 VR headset. And it’s discounted today, from $599 down to $399.

It’s compatible with both Steam VR and Windows Mixed Reality platforms.

SteamVR has hundreds of VR games, though there aren’t a lot of Windows Mixed Reality games out yet. Currently, I’m only seeing 66 on the site. But it includes such VR classics as I Expect You To Die and Fantastic Contraption.

Plus, if you don’t want to fork over any more money after spending all your cash on the headset, their Halo Recruit preview game is currently free.

I haven’t tried this particular headset yet, so I’ve just ordered mine. Hey, it’s a business expense, right? Hypergrid Business has the word “business” right in the title.

It’s scheduled to arrive on Saturday, and I’ll post my review then.

But, at first glance, the specs look good. It’s got a better display than the Oculus Quest 2, and weighs an ounce less. But it’s got the cable — the Oculus Quest 2 is wireless.

The advantage of having a headset that connects to your computer is that you get better performance, since the computer can pick up the computing work. The Oculus Quest 2 has an on-board computer that runs the VR games, and it heats up, and the batteries run down quickly. On the other hand, do you want to be tangled up in cables when you’re trying to fight virtual dragons? I guess I’ll find out on Saturday.

Watch the official preview video below:

According to psychologists, three reasons people love VR are that it reduces stress, helps us face our fears, and lets us have fun by warping our normal sense of time.

As the VR industry takes off, VR headsets have become more affordable and accessible, leading to even greater adoption among the everyday consumer, especially gamers.

IDC predicts that over 43 million VR devices will be distributed worldwide by 2025, representing a seven-fold increase from 2020.

Psychology experts have examined why people enjoy spending time in VR, and they’ve discovered some real benefits.

VR offers relaxation and reduces stress

VR games can help people find new ways to relax.

According to a 2021 study on VR and stress-reduction, performed by researchers from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, relaxation occurs when people perceive themselves as experiencing a state of low tension, which can happen during leisure activities like playing VR games.

The study concluded that VR may be a useful tool to promote relaxation in the general population.

“Experiencing calm virtual audio-visual environments removes users from stressful situations, aiding stress management and relaxation amidst the challenges of everyday life,” the study said. “Increases in relaxation, as well as decreases in stress, arousal, and anxiety, have been shown to result from exposure to pleasant virtual environments.”

That said, the researchers also noted that the use of VR as a tool to promote relaxation is still being studied, and more research is necessary to understand the long-term effects.

It’s also important to note that not all VR games are particularly relaxing, although many VR companies may offer multiple options.

For example, 60out, a Los Angeles-based VR escape room, offers VR games that sound decidedly terrifying — looking at you, “House of Fear” — but they also offer more relaxing adventures that place a stronger emphasis on figuring out puzzles while still exploring the vivid new worlds VR has to offer.

VR helps us face our fears

A 2021 study from psychologists at the University of Catania has shown that VR games can help people overcome certain mental health conditions, including social anxiety, by generating a safe space to overcome their fears.

The study explains that, while the preferred treatment for social anxiety is exposure therapy, in which patients are exposed to their fears in order to help treat them, this can be an expensive and potentially disturbing solution for patients.

VR can eliminate these two problems, according to the study.

“By providing users with a highly realistic, flexible, engaging, safe, and controllable simulation, they are able to acquire the skill, confidence, mental and psychophysical preparation to face real-world activities,” said the study.

In other words, VR allows people to practice facing their fears in a safe environment.

For example, many people can’t deal with a lot of people at once, such as in a crowded shop or at a concert, and experience terrible social anxiety as a result.

During a VR simulation, therapists navigate patients through their fears and phobias of crowds by teaching them calming techniques. Patients can use these methods in their daily lives, so when they feel a sense of panic, they can use their VR simulation training to overcome their social anxiety.

Several VR game designers have released exposure-therapy simulations to the public.

For example, VR game designer SideQuest focuses on helping players overcome social anxiety. In their game Slightly, players practice interacting in social situations that mirror real-life, such as job interviews and meeting new people.

VR games can also provide a strong sense of accomplishment, which studies show is one of the most important determinants of positive psychological well-being.

“VR allowed me to kind of show myself what I was capable of,” said Julian Apellanes, a champion esports player who took advantage of VR programs for social anxiety, in a recent article for Upload VR, adding that he’s been “continuing the momentum since then.”

VR warps our sense of time

While losing track of time can be a bad thing — hello responsibilities — VR gamers looking for a break from the world can experience an altered perception of time where they forget to even look at the clock.

Most gamers have been there — they’re playing a game and then suddenly look at the time and realize it’s much later than they thought.

As it turns out, this happens frequently with VR.

Researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz have identified a concept called time compression where time goes by faster than a player realizes.

Cognitive science undergrad Grayson Mullen worked with psychology professor Nicolas Davidenko to perform a study on how virtual reality affects a game player’s sense of time differently from playing on a conventional monitor.

Participants in the study ended up playing a VR game for 28.5% more time than they realized.

Davidenko theorizes that the time compression effect is a result of the fact that VR separates players from awareness of their physical bodies.

“There are theories that we may rely on our heartbeat and other bodily rhythms to help our brain track the passage of time, so if you have a less vivid sense of your body in virtual reality, you might be missing the pulses of this timekeeping mechanism,” said Davidenko in a release.

The study found that this experience was more intense when playing a VR game than a game on a traditional computer monitor or TV screen.

“This is the first time we can really isolate that it’s not just that you’re playing a video game or the content of whatever you’re seeing,” said Mullen in the release. “It’s really the fact that it is virtual reality versus a conventional screen that contributes to this time compression effect.”

The goal is to invent displays “that are as vivid and realistic as the physical world and much more advanced than traditional computer screens we use today,” Zuckerberg said in a YouTube video.

One of the prototype headsets had industry-leading resolution, a second had extra focal length, the third had depth of field, and the fourth headset combined several of these features into a single — but non-functional — light-weight prototype.

The global market for augmented reality and virtual reality headsets grew 92% last year with shipments reaching 11 million units, according to the latest IDC numbers. Meta’s Quest 2 headset was the most popular, according to IDC, with a 78% market share.

One of the reasons is that Meta has been investing significantly in virtual reality technology, starting with a $2 billion acquisition of the Oculus Rift in 2014. The company spent more than $10 billion on virtual reality last year and has promised to do the same for ten years. It’s well on its way to meeting that target this year, having spent $3.7 billion in the first quarter, according to the company’s latest earnings report.

But today’s virtual reality headsets have a lot to be desired. They’re uncomfortable to use, and the graphics quality means that the virtual reality doesn’t feel particularly real.

Meta is working to change that. According to Zuckerberg, the company is investing in improving resolution, increasing focal depth, reducing optical distortion, and improving dynamic range, in addition to making the headsets smaller and easier to wear.

Butterscotch prototype tackles resolution

Resolution refers to the number of pixels on the display. According to Zuckerberg, virtual reality headsets should have at least 60 pixels per degree of vision.

The headset prototype that features this level of resolution is called Butterscotch, he said.

“This prototype… lets you comfortably read the smallest letters on an eye chart,” he said.

Half Dome prototype tackles focal depth and distortion

Regular televisions and monitors are stationary. People only need to focus their eyes on one set distance.

But for virtual reality, people need to be able to focus on something close to them — and also to focus on something far away — in order for the environment to feel realistic. That’s hard to do with a static computer screen, but Meta thinks it has a solution.

“With varifocal and eye tracking tech, our Half Dome prototypes let you focus on any object at any distance,” Zuckerberg said.

Another company goal is to build a unit that can fix optical distortions extremely quickly.

Optical distortions are kind of like an fun-house mirror, where the center of the display makes the image look too fat or too skinny. One way to fix the problem is to pancake two sense — a fattening lens and the skinny lens on top of each other so that they cancel out.

Zuckerberg says that the problem can also be fixed with software, as long as corrections occur so quickly, Zuckerberg said, “that it’s imperceptible to the human eye.”

The Half Dome prototype also includes the distortion corrections, he said.

Starburst prototype tackles dynamic range

“Nature is often 10 or 100 times brighter than modern HDTVs,” said Zuckerberg. On a headset, “we need those colors to be just as vivid to feel realistic.”

For this they built Starburst, which, he said, is the world’s first high dynamic range virtual reality system.

All three of those prototypes are still very bulky and impractical, Zuckerberg admitted.

Holocake 2 prototype features sleek, lightweight design

The fourth prototype, called Holocake 2, is a lightweight headset that combines all the best features of the other three. However, currently it is just a mockup and doesn’t actually work.

“There’s still a long way to go,” Zuckerberg said.

Watch the full video below:

You can experience Creed in virtual reality before the release of Creed III, an upcoming boxing movie that premieres in theaters on November 23 and follows blockbuster successes Creed I and Creed II, released in 2015 and 2018.

Creed: Rise to Glory is available on the Oculus Quest store for $30, and the game lets you box VR versions of characters from the Creed movies. It’s also available for Windows Mixed Reality, PlayStation VR, PlayStation 4 and 5, and HTC Vive.

You play as Adonis Creed, the main character from the movies, and you’ll have to face very real-looking opponents that get tougher and tougher as you fight your way to the top.

You can get a good glimpse of the game for free in the demo version, which lets you fight one opponent out of the 12 in the full version. Even the demo version of Creed is better than The Thrill of The Fight, another boxing game I played that you can get for $10 on the Oculus Quest store.

The full version lets you customize the gaming modes – from store-driven Career, customizable Freeplay, or minigame-based Training. There is also the option of playing online against friends where you choose your opponent and contenders, including classic characters Rocky Balboa, Ivan Drago, Viktor Drago, and more.

The game supports full body, face, and hands tracking, and it’s room-scale, so you can walk around anywhere in the ring if you have adequate space. You can walk around your room and inside the virtual ring where you can greet and wave at staring fans in the stadium. You can also opt to press on the controller buttons and swing your hands to walk around, but it’s imperative to move around with your feet once the fighting starts. I can comfortably play the game in my living room, so you don’t necessarily need much space.

Creed: Rise to Glory isn’t just for boxing fans — it’s great for anyone who likes exercising in VR. You’ll be sweating hard after just a few rounds because the game keeps you moving as you defend yourself against heavy punches and aim your own jabs and punches at your opponent’s face and body.

This game is hard —  it’s difficult for a non-professional boxer to manage even three rounds of fighting without being knocked out by an opponent.  Despite the challenge, even a beginner will find it competitive and fast.

You can hear directions, insights, and guidance from your coach — in this case, Rocky — as you play on. If you want to last longer, you should follow your virtual coach’s instructions carefully to block punches from reaching your face by using your fists and arms.

You’ll need to aim your punches anywhere above the belt, and there’s a chance you’ll knock out an opponent with a good hit. Points are based on the punches you successfully deliver to an opponent and are counted as the rounds progress into the game.

The matches take place in a packed stadium so you hear cheers from your fans and those of the opponent. It’s intense, and you feel like you’re right in the action, though I suppose there may be more detailed boxing games that professional and hardcore boxers could use for their training.

Creed VR is a realistic game not just because of the life-like avatars and cinematic scenes but also because of the physics. For example, the harder you throw your fist in the air in the real world, the more impact the virtual punches leave on the opponent.

I watched Creed II a few months ago, and I think this is the game to go for if you’ve already seen and enjoyed the emotionally wrecking Creed II — and the VR experience puts you right at the center of the boxing action instead of just watching it happen.

In Creed II, Michael B Jordan plays fictional boxer Adonis Creed, who’s coached by Silvester Stallone as Rocky. Creed is now a WBC Heavyweight champion who has won six times, but this time, against the wishes and advice of Rocky, he accepts a challenge to fight Viktor, son of Ivan Drago, the former Soviet boxer who killed Creed’s own father in a boxing match in 1985.

Rocky feels that Creed isn’t ready yet and refuses to coach him. Creed gets a different coach but suffers a humiliating defeat by Drago’s son, taking heavy punches that result in a broken rib and putting him in a hospital for seven weeks.

Creed: Rise to Glory picks the story up from this point. Now healed from his wounds, Creed is fighting his way to a rematch against Drago’s son Viktor after further coaching by Rocky. Creed II ends in a glorious victory for Adonis Creed, who rises from an undiscovered underdog to a world-class fighter, and with that inspiration you too can shoot to the top, even if you’re starting from scratch with no boxing skill.

If you haven’t heard about the metaverse, or you think it’s just something Facebook invented — you’re not alone.

49% of US consumers aren’t aware of the metaverse, according to a survey conducted in February by marketing automation platform Klaviyo.

The survey of over 1,000 people also revealed that younger Americans don’t especially want to shop in the metaverse, with 65% of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they’re not interested.

Apparently, Facebook’s rebranding to Meta had an impact, because 17% of US consumers believe the metaverse is just Facebook.

Even those who know about the metaverse feel skeptical, as 78% think it’s just marketing hype.

“The biggest risks are one and the same — irrelevance and alienation,” said Marja Konttinen, marketing director at Lockwood Publishing.

“If brands just try to adapt existing marketing assets to this new digital world they will be utterly ignored by, and alienate, their audience,” she said.

NFTs and cryptocurrency

NFTs often get lumped in with the metaverse, but many young Americans seem clueless about those too.

According to the study, 45% of 18 to 24-year-olds have no idea about NFTs and even those who do aren’t that interested — 58% say they’d never invest.

And cryptocurrency isn’t fairing much better with 18 to 24-year-olds — 43% say they’re interested but aren’t taking any action, and 39% say they wouldn’t invest.

“What’s clear from this data is that businesses need to be aware of customer skepticism around concepts such as the metaverse, NFTs, and cryptocurrency before diving in headfirst,” said Ed Hallen, co-founder and chief product officer of Klaviyo.

“Instead, they should listen to their customers in a meaningful way and slowly introduce metaverse marketing into their business model,” he said.

Americans aren’t alone in their perception of the metaverse.

According to a study of 1,000 UK consumers Klaviyo conducted in January, 58% don’t know what it is either, and 96% of 25 to 54-year-olds said they wouldn’t shop in the metaverse.

The 29th edition of Sheffield DocFest, the United Kingdom’s biggest documentary and digital media festival, will take place from June 23 to June 28 this year — and it’s looking for submissions.

Sheffield DocFest’s Alternate Realities program has some upcoming deadlines if you’d like to apply, and applicants from the United States and other countries are welcome.

Alternate Realities is Sheffield DocFest’s program for exhibiting and showcasing non-fiction and immersive documentaries in all forms, whether using new technologies or creative techniques that push the boundaries of traditional documentary practice.

Commission

The Alternate Realities 2022 Commission is accepting applications for new digital works or projects in development that need completion funding, and it’s offering up to $20,000.

The deadline to apply is Sunday, February 27 at 7 p.m., Eastern time.

An accepted applicant will be included in the Alternate Realities 2022 program and exhibited at Site Gallery during the festival, possibly with an extended exhibition run.

The open call is for artists who work in digital non-fiction, create immersive experiences, or experiment with new technologies. Debut, emerging, and established artists and collectives are encouraged.

Exhibition

Applications are being accepted for the Alternate Realities Exhibition with late entry closing on March 4, 7 a.m. Eastern time.

Platforms considered for exhibition include virtual, augmented and mixed reality, 360 video, moving image, web interactives, sound art, artificial intelligence, games, and performance.

Alternate Realities Talent Market

Entries are also being accepted for the Alternate Realities Talent Market, and the deadline to enter is Friday, March 4, 7 a.m. Eastern time.

The Alternate Realities Talent Market exists to foster collaborations between artists, collectives, creatives, and organizations focused on using digital technologies, and it’s a space to pitch products that are in production or development.

Past meetings at the market have led to residencies, research partnerships, and exhibition features.

I searched around and tried several games on my new Oculus Quest 2, thanks to Maria Korolov, and came up with the following list of top VR games and experiences on the device.

1. Tea for God by Void Room

Also available on App Lab, Tea for God is a full-room scale virtual reality first-person shooter game in which you play a man heading out for revenge against God Emperor following the killing of his wife. It’s not easy as no one has left that land alive.

As a military man, you travel using rare and imaginary transport equipment to the location that’s supposedly the source of all technology. You face harsh resistance which you must overcome by shooting to reach the destination and advance to the next level.

One thing I realized is you need a lot of space to play this VR game freely. Another challenge is that you can’t play it for long because you must bend to be able to fit in narrow paths as you play. Otherwise, it will keep asking you to return to the correct orientation to continue. I think it’s a way of increasing difficulty.

Plus the weapons do not run for long before you are required to go back and recharge. But there is no motion sickness at all here no matter how long you play.

2. Gun Raiders

Gun Raiders comes installed on Oculus Quest 2 so you don’t have to download it, but it does require Internet to play. It quickly became my favorite in just a few days of exploring preloaded Oculus Quest 2 games.

I suggest you do a little initial shooting practice in solo mode before you arrive at the multiplayer hub. The multiplayer shooter game involves finding and using the best weapons to shoot and take out other players, and you earn points out of it. It has voice support so you can chat with other real players while playing. The weapon lobby has a huge selection of weapons — from basic to heavy guns — although you need to buy some with real-world money.

You can either play in solo or team mode working against other players although it is really difficult to trace them. You get ranked against other players and can see your scores in the Welcome lobby as you proceed to play. More points will also earn you weapons on sale. Also, you can modify your avatar however way you want.

For more VR shooter games on Oculus Quest 2, check out Onward, Larcenauts, and Population: One.

3. Anne Frank House VR by Force Field

Explore the real-life Anne Frank House as it was written about in the diary of a teenage Anne Frank — a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish heritage who is one of the most discussed Holocaust victims. You get a peep into her and her family’s day-to-day lives hiding from the Nazis before they were discovered and sent to concentration camps.

The experience takes you through Frank’s and her family’s harsh realities while in hiding and hoping not to be executed during the holocaust. It will even make you feel their fear of discovery and you’ll sympathize with the family’s situation, especially after Anne Frank’s death from illness inside a concentration camp.

4. Rec Room by Rec Room

Using the Rec Room app from a first-hand experience will tell you exactly why Rec Room is one of the most popular online VR social platforms, given it has 30,000-50,000 monthly active users on Steam alone. It has a lot to explore in terms of playing any kind of game in virtual reality using your own hands. It lets you connect to friends in these games, movies, and casual activities hosted in different rooms.

Unlike the VR Chat, I find Rec Room much easier to use, from the sign-up to navigation, which works great for beginners. For ardent users, there is much more to do. You can spice up an avatar by paying for in-world clothes with real-world money, or by creating your own stuff.

5. Echo VR by Ready at Dawn

Echo VR is also available on Steam, which means you can play it better by connecting the headset to your PC wirelessly through the Oculus Airlink. But it is also fantastic on the Oculus Quest headgear, first taking you through several training sessions before you can start playing games and meeting friends in the social VR platform.

The first training you go through is navigating your gravity-free floating virtual body in virtual reality, which is not as easy to do when playing the serious games hosted on the platform, as I found out, but it is interesting. Needs a little bit of experience.

On the Echo VR arena, you wear a customizable avatar then play an interesting disc scoring game competing with real people working as teams. You score and earn as many Echo points rewards as you can. The tournaments are pretty fast when competing with real people or the AI robot.

Nevertheless, I found Echo VR easy to learn how to use, especially with the audio guide robot from the time you start until you become a pro to play. But it is not easy to be a pro in the game. Given the guides, you can easily learn the game without having to wonder how it works.

6. Home After War by NowHere Media

Home After War takes you through a real-life glimpse of the aftermath of the famous Iraq war — the destruction, death, loss, fear of being attacked, and pain.

The real-life story is produced by NowHere media and makes you not only learn about the ins and outs of the Iraq war under the Islamic States and dangers of living in Fallujah after the war but also makes you deeply sympathize with the victims even though the war is over.

In the city of Fallujah, all this is evidenced in the home of Ahmaeid who does not hide his pain and tears while telling the story, having lost two sons in the war, in addition to his storied house being destroyed.

7. Pavlov Shack Beta by Vankrupt Games

Pavlov Shack is a fast-paced multiplayer shooter that lets you play with others. You need quick reflexes and aiming takes some skill. However, the game features near-realistic weapon mechanics based on videos from reviewers and the trailer. The game features four game modes, multi-crew operated tanks, community, voice chat, and radio communications.

Pavlov Shack is available through the App Lab which you must download on Oculus — and it’s a hefty 4 GB download. For that reason, I haven’t had the time yet.

Anyway, playing Pavlov Shack now doesn’t require you to sideload via SideQuest because you can download and install it directly on the Oculus Quest 2.

8. Bigscreen Beta

Bigscreen is a virtual reality social platform where can watch movies, play games, or hang out with friends inside virtual theaters. More advanced users can also take things further by creating their own content.

Bigscreen lets you watch your own content, stream movies, and other stuff on a VR big screen, from the Oculus Quest headgear or desktop. The app is a favorite for anyone who wants to convert their desktop into a big virtual reality screen, stream or use content from the desktop, and even share a desktop screen with friends online.

The best place to start is by finding content created by other users, either paid or free. Depending on where you are, it’s possible to rent VR movies on the platform and watch them alone or with friends. But that feature isn’t supported in all regions. Nevertheless, it supports over 50 channels including NFL, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, RedBull TV, and most of these stream live events including real football games from EPL or other leagues.

9. Gorilla Tag by Another Axiom

Gorilla Tag is a full room-scale experience that converts your VR avatar into a virtual gravity-defying gorilla that can explore vast spaces and play games on a virtual screen in a room. You run, jump, and climb to high or low locations with your hands — without using any teleportation or buttons.

The greatest drawback I found with this game is perhaps the motion sickness exhaustion, which you experience heavily when trying to cover vast spaces. The game is fit for a regular arm muscle workout for up to about fifteen minutes. Then you can chat and play tag with up to four players, either running away from an infected gorilla or trying to find uninfected ones to infect.

10. VRChat by VRChat

VRChat is a little bit harder to start off for beginners, requiring some signups or logins. You can log in with your existing Oculus account but must remember the date of birth used to sign up for the Facebook account.

I found it a little bit hard to start off after login because there is no guide on how to operate– and you must have space to walk while playing. Nevertheless, you should be able to find gamers, musicians, creators, artists, entertainers, and other people on the platform to either play with or explore their creations.

11. Elixir by Magnopus

Elixir delves into a virtual witch’s magical world in which, led by the witch, you manipulate magical stuff with hands and see all her little wonders. And there is a lot to play around with inside this little virtual world. The virtual reality game supports hand tracking so you do not use any controllers.

12. PokerStars VR by Lucky VR

PokerStars VR lets you play poker, blackjack, and even slots with friends, but it’s for those who understand the games already. Even with a slight grasp of poker, I found it hard to learn how to play, so beginners might have a harder time starting out. Plus I didn’t find any guides on how to. But PokerStars is extremely enjoyable because you get the natural feel of playing these games, especially with other people around the tables.

PokerStars also lets you customize your avatar from skin color, to hair, to facial looks. You can also choose other gaming assets from the shop, zoom in on all the tables available, and choose which ones to join and play. The app also lets you add friends and even use voice chat while playing with them.

13. Mission: ISS

The Mission: ISS lets you become a virtual astronaut in full 360 degrees. You’ll get a feel of how it is to work, move, and live inside the International Space Station — all in VR.

This experience lets you learn the different equipment in the space station, its surroundings on the outside, how the station works, its mission, and how astronauts run their day-to-day lives and errands inside of it. While you can move a few items inside the space station, the biggest drawback with the experience is perhaps you do not get to operate the space station in virtual reality.

14. Goliath: Playing with Reality by Anagram

Goliath: Playing With Reality guides you through the many realities of Goliath, a man who spent years isolated in psychiatric institutions. It explores the limits of reality and a true story of schizophrenia — the unending struggles with mental health and drug abuse, and how he deals with and overcomes those problems.

Under the narration of Tilda Swinton, the experience lets you understand in-depth the harsh side effects of drug abuse, makes you sympathize with the victims, and also lets you know that the problem can be cured. It is full of wonderful graphics, except that it can be hard to follow given the many controls you must learn.

15. Spatial by Spatial

Spatial is more of a virtual reality social media platform but also allows you to create or make stuff using available tools and templates. Although it’s extremely hard to find content if you just want to explore instead of creating something.

Nevertheless, once you’re in the welcome lobby, simply find and teleport to locations depending on what you would like to explore. With Spatial, you can virtually create and explore art galleries, games, events, exhibitions, and hang out together with friends. It has voice support.

Spatial also lets you host virtual events, parties, and meet-ups in private rooms which can hold up to 32 people. For creators, you can create anything in 3D, look up creations by other people and save them in the cloud.

16. VR Animation Player by Meta

VR Animation Player lets you create and explore animations using Quill tool, which was spun out from Meta. Besides that, there are a lot of existing animations, videos, games, and other content to watch on the platform. Simply click on the Browse tab and explore. It also supports channels like Bigscreen, Netflix, Facebook Watch, and Prime Video VR so you can watch or stream content from these channels. You can also download and save content for later.

17. Gravity Sketch by Gravity Sketch

Gravity Sketch lets you create, model, and design anything using basic and advanced shapes and design techniques in virtual reality. You can design all elements in any volume, surface, color, shape, and size. You can then place those models, products, and sketches in any orientation and space.

Within 10 minutes of practicing, I was able to design a representation of the solar system which means the tool is quick to learn to use. If you’ve ever used 3D design tools, then Gravity Sketch should be quick to grasp. But it brings the feel of it in the design to make the operation much more enjoyable.

18. Within by Within

Within lets you play immersive videos, games, news, and content of all kinds in full VR on your headset. Most of these are free to play. This simple app lets you search for content in categories with easy-to-find navigation and search tools. There is a lot of video content to enjoy for free on the app including AR game videos, space exploration videos, and more.

Plenty of people might want to load their virtual reality headset with content to watch offline later and this app is a good place to start with that. Instead of streaming on-demand, you can download the content on the device.

19. Traveling While Black by Felix & Paul Studios

Traveling While Black takes you back in time to the civil rights struggle in the US and how American society worked back then. You learn how African Americans survived and dealt with restrictions, hate, and discrimination from whites as they traveled throughout the United States and used facilities like hotels.

You also learn how Ben Chili Bowl restaurant in Washington DC — formerly a movie theatre — played the role of supporting and providing a conducive environment for them to survive. Produced by Oculus studios, the story takes you through real-life experiences of discrimination and survival told by real people in the United States, including the owner of Chili Bowl restaurant, Virginia Ali.

Additional cheap games to play and workout on Oculus Quest 2

Spaceteam VR, which costs $12, is a multiplayer shooting game in which the chances of survival depend on how much you shout instructions to friends.

Walkabout Mini Golf VR, which costs $14.99, lets you play golf on eight unique 18-hole courses either in solo mode or with up to five players in a room.

Golf+  costs $14.99 and lets you play golf on real-world courses with friends and hang out for a night of music and games.

Real VR Fishing costs $19.99 It lets you fish the ocean alone or with friends.

Eleven Table Tennis costs $19.99 and lets you play table tennis either against AI or real opponents online.

Thrill of the fight costs $6.99 — which you can pay by PayPal, credit card, or via the Oculus app, and requires a space of 6.5 by 6.5 feet.

Virtual reality headsets are bulky and two companies have collaborated to take the weight off your head for augmented and virtual reality — and put it around your neck instead.

Motorola yesterday announced a 5G neckband that’ll put connectivity, processing, and the battery in a collar and leave your heads up display light and comfortable. It’s partnered with Verizon on the neckband which is able to connect to their mmWave 5G network.

There are no details on the device’s name, pricing, or release date yet but Motorola and Verizon teased they were in talks with major partners including already in place retail channels that were doing things in AR and VR.

Motorola specifically mentioned enterprise and consumer users as its target customers.

The neckband can pair with ThinkReality A3 smartglasses, made by Motorola’s parent company Lenovo — but it’s meant to work with other smart glasses as well, the device being compatible with Microsoft’s Remote Network Driver Interface and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon VR platform.

“Motorola’s wearable neckband and ultra-lightweight AR smart glasses leverage Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network and mobile edge compute platform, enabling us to deliver immersive technology in many fields, such as sports training and fan experiences, as well as making VR theaters scalable,” said Brian Mecum, vice president of device technology at Verizon, in a statement on Motorola’s website.

The complete device consists of a rope-like cable that goes around your neck with a card-sized module that dangles in the front, and a trapezoid-shaped module in the back.

The front module weighs under 4 ounces and has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery, a touchpad, SIM card slot, and a charging light indicator.

It also has a gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer, GPS, and a 5G antennae, with more 5G antennas embedded throughout the neckband.

The back module weighs under 3 ounces and also has an antenna and stereo speakers.

The device is still goofy-looking, and not the first time companies have tried to move more weighty components off the head.

Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 glasses, for example, require a PC or mobile phone for processing power.

This year, metaverses and NFTs are all the rage, and one company’s doing both.

MultiNFT, a company that provides live shows and festival experiences to fans, launched a presale for its native token, $MNFT, and set up a club called Rage at Decentralandâ€s festival district.

The club will host in-world virtual music events featuring renowned artists. $MNFT holders can spend these tokens at MultiNFT arcades and events and will gain early access to special content, rare NFT drops, and earn cashback in affiliated marketplaces.

“$MNFT token is spendable at our events and affiliate shops across the metaverse in Decentraland where you can buy wearables and other merchandise and attend VIP meet and greets and other private activities,” Guy Goldenberg, CEO of MultiNFT, told Hypergrid Business. “And soon you will be able to access areas and drops only with the token.”

Decentraland is a blockchain-based web platform that lets users create, explore, and trade virtual land using digital currencies like Ethereum.

Microsoft‘s purchasing of Activision Blizzard was the largest sale in the history of video games at US$68.7 billion dollars making the company the third largest gaming company after Sony and Tencent. The acquisition could solidify the company’s position in the overly hyped metaverse because of the large gaming user base and gaming properties the platform already has, said Bob Bilbruck, CEO at Captjur, a technology consultancy.

“The transaction came down to build versus buy — they chose the buy angle and probably a good one sinse the metaverse will allow not only seamless transitions from the real world to virtual worlds in the metaverse and the melding of the two worlds together, but it will also help with transitional areas like work to play and play to work, ” he told Hypergrid Business. “So it makes huge sense for Microsoft to take this approach.”

The large gaming user base on the platform is already comfortable with immersive gaming environments and this would aid in the quick and smooth transition to the metaverse Microsoft needs, he said, now that gaming is expected to be a major driver of the metaverse. Games like World of Warcraft from Blizzard could develop into huge attractions in the metaverse if redeveloped further.

In addition, the acquisition will aid Microsoft gain a huge footprint in the gaming industry and it solidifies the company’s recent strategy to promote gaming subscriptions and revenues instead of selling gaming products.

“This ambitious investment has the potential to make Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service into the Netflix of gaming,” he said. 

But Microsoft’s corporate-first approach could also ruin the great traction Activision Blizzard has earned so far, he said.

Metaverse talent

By acquiring the platform, Microsoft is also acquiring a huge number of gaming creators that could create substantial and compelling content for metaverse, said Amir Bozorgzadeh, co-founder and CEO at Virtuleap, a company specializing in virtual reality training applications.

“Content is king and by the end of this year, which is when I expect the deal to be finalized, they will have have inherited an arsenal of triple-A creators that are bona fide wizards in constructing not only the 3D worlds, but 3D worlds instilled with enduring IP that will be able to most likely persuade large numbers of VR fence-sitters to jump on board the Metaverse bandwagon simply out of brand loyalty,” he told Hypergrid Business. 

Although the acquisition does not directly provide Microsoft with a competitive metaverse technology compared to the likes of Meta, Microsoft has potential to soon close that gap, said Leo Ama-Ferndandez, cofounder of the Panthera Leo NFT community.

“Microsoft has, however, framed the purchase as a metaverse play,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Needless to say, Microsoft has the know-how and technological heft to close this gap. If Microsoft is able to bolster cloud computing and augmented and virtual reality, this could provide a breakthrough avenue for Activision’s gaming portfolio to enter the metaverse.”

Microsoft’s popular gaming platform XBox and GitHub — which Microsoft acquired earlier on — could also offer it additional competitive advantage over Meta as pertaining the metaverse, said Eric Chen, CEO and Co-Founder of Injective Labs.

“Many may put their weight behind Microsoft’s take on the metaverse simply because it does not publicly suffer from the same negative stigma as Facebook with respect to data protection,” he told Hypergrid Business. “The metaverse is ultimately a data play for these tech giants and the companies that treat your data safely and adhere to the ethos of the transparent blockchain community will continue to thrive into the future.”

In acquiring Activision, however, Microsoft will need to deal with several challenges including a toxic workplace at Activision, complaints and legal allegations against CEO Bobby Kotick, and player frustrations with games like World of Warcraft.

While we still donâ€t have the flying cars, time machines, and holographic movies that sci-fi has long offered us, itâ€s not to say the genre hasnâ€t delivered on some promises. The Star Trek communicators became the Motorola flip phone. The gentle hum of electric cars in are now selling like hot cakes in the form of Tesla and others.

Jules Verne-inspired space tourism is now a thing, video calls are de rigueur, and we all walk around with powerful computers in our pockets that connect to an infinite web of data and information — and yet we use this incredible computing power to play diverting games like Candy Crush and Wordle.

One subset of science fiction, virtual fiction, or what I like to call ViFi, is having its moment in the spotlight as the tech world leans into a future it believes will be dominated by the metaverse. While there is no one, unifying definition for what the metaverse actually is, the general consensus is that it will involve a more immersive version of the current internet, likely an enhanced digital reality that enables users to connect and communicate in a virtual space — William Gibson called it cyberspace — and perhaps using interface tools such as goggles or headsets to offer a more immersive experience than todayâ€s flat-screen, 2D internet. The term itself was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash and popularized on the big screen adaptation of Ernst Clineâ€s 2011 novel Ready Player One.

I wrote my own ViFi novel, MetaWars, in 2010 after the Icelandic ash cloud grounded flights across Europe. That event inspired a story world where everyone interfaces digitally in a global metasphere using a brain-computer interface and is even able to upload their consciousness to the internet to achieve a type of digital immortality.

And while itâ€s easy to dismiss todayâ€s hardware as clunky and uncomfortable — I still loathe headsets and get nauseous after about sixty seconds into any virtual reality experience — itâ€s notable that in a way, weâ€re already living in the bunny hill equivalent of the metaverse. Anyone who spends their days working from home, on what feels like non-stop Zoom meetings or Microsoft Teams sessions, is living a type of virtual reality. We each project a version of ourselves, a type of avatar, to present our digital selves in a constructed way. My personal metaverse high water mark was getting a good score on Room Rater, but no one ever sees the laundry hanging on the rack just out of view.

Weâ€re all willingly living in the Matrix, eschewing parts of our real lives to give ourselves over to Big Techâ€s tools of virtual interconnectivity. And it shows no sign of abating. Last weekâ€s announcement of Microsoftâ€s takeover of Activision Blizzard was couched in terms of capitalizing on the metaverse. And last year, Facebook nailed their colors to the mast, rebranding themselves as Meta and declaring their intention to be a metaverse-first company.

All this was foretold in ViFi. Technology tends towards monopoly, or at least oligopoly, and the metaverse will likely not be different. The Pareto Principle applies here, in that there will be a few — or even one — big winners, and a lot of also-rans. Just look at search, mobile operating systems, social media, and virtual real estate micro-leasing to name a few verticals that are dominated by three or fewer players.

The great filmmaker David Cronenberg made an underappreciated film called eXistenZ, which portrayed a world dominated by a fully immersive computer game that required a bio-connection to play and two dominant companies fighting for the attention of the world’s gamers. I wonder if thatâ€s the direction of travel for Microsoft. Itâ€s not such a huge leap given that some ridiculous number of humans believe that Bill Gates has put microchips into vaccines. Maybe the next big game from Activision will require bio-connectivity — real life imitating Cronenbergâ€s art.

Of course, the virtual metaverse interacts with the real world in very concrete ways. The tap of an app can bring restaurant-quality food to your door in a matter of minutes. Calling an Uber sure feels like waiving a magic wand, summoning a chariot in the form a Toyota Prius. And the fact that I can snap a photo of my kids and share it instantly with their grandparents reminds me that when I was a boy  — in what my children teasingly call the nineteen hundreds — sharing photos involved two trips to the drug store to drop off film and pick up prints. These daily parts of our modern lives would have read like science fiction just twenty years ago.

Twenty years from now, will we look back at various ViFi stories as the road map for the way we live? Or, will the metaverse be the flying car, more dream than reality?