The Metaverse & Holodecks

[Yuli Ban]

Why Barbados’ Metaverse Embassy Matters

CoinDesk’s scoop that Barbados had become the first government to acquire virtual land and create a “metaverse embassy” was met with great interest, but a lot of quizzical looks as well.

The question some commentators asked was: What is the point? If Barbados is trying to digitally solve some problem – such as how to make issuing visas and permits more efficient – why use a blockchain when a simple e-government services website would suffice? The metaverse part seemed like a gimmick.

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Our own Will Gottsegen, who knows the nooks and crannies of non-fungible tokens and the metaverse far more deeply than I do, concluded a skeptical column on the topic by stating, “Not everything needs to be on the blockchain – in the absence of clarity, the metaverse embassy just feels like an empty ad campaign from a government official with a stake in the crypto industry.” He was referring to Gabriel Abed, Barbados’ ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, who is also the founder of crypto company Bitt and the person who brokered the deal between the government and blockchain-based virtual world platform Decentraland.

To Will’s point on clarity, we definitely need more information on what Barbados plans to do with this project. Still, I think there’s a lot more here than meets the eye. This raises some pretty interesting questions about how sovereignty is exercised in the digital age. And it has the potential to be quite disruptive.

To understand why, we need to go down the rabbit hole of property rights and state power, starting with how it currently works in real life.

[Yuli Ban]

South Korea embraces the proto-metaverse

The South Korean people and an increasing number of major companies in the country have begun to embrace and integrate the metaverse into their everyday lives in new and unexpected ways.

Two major retailers in the country have recently introduced metaverse and artificial intelligence elements to shoppers to enhance their shopping experience.

GS Shop introduced home shopping via the metaverse on Tuesda by showing the inner workings of a food production facility. It aimed to reassure customers of the quality of the facility and the food that was for sale.

GS Shop turned scans of the physical facility into 3D representations. This way, customers who had augmented reality devices, similar to the haptic gloves Meta previewed this week, could tour the facility in the virtual world to see the conditions under which their food was being produced.

Jason Ye, co-founder of multichain ecosystem accelerator DeSpread, has noticed the explosion of companies joining the metaverse in Korea. “It seems like every company is diving into the metaverse and play-to-earn these days,” he told Cointelegraph.

[Yuli Ban]

The metaverse is too important to get wrong, so it needs to be open

Open vs Closed has always been a key defining battle ahead of us when it comes to the next chapter of our lives with the internet. At its core, this is about our digital sovereignty. Science fiction has been illustrating dark visions of what a closed future can look like, but these were always warnings not prophecies. We are now living through it in real-time and we — the people — have some decisions to make. It requires action from all of us in the community if the metaverse is going to have an open future.

On June 24, 2021, Crucible, our company developing software blueprints for the Open Metaverse, took that action and established the Open Meta Association in Zug, Switzerland, next door to Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and another several billion dollar web3 networks. Open Meta exists to be an organizing principle for decentralized governance, driving us towards an open metaverse on web3 rails, owned and controlled by the community.

I believe the metaverse will touch nearly every person on earth over the next decade and be worth trillions. It will reshape the way people make their livelihood and it will be a powerful tool for social mobility. If done correctly it can be life changing for billions of people around the world, but it must be built open to achieve this.

This is all far too much for the closed corporate world to own like they do web2. Full stop.

[Yuli Ban]

VR Metaverse comes closer to reality as Meta previews haptic gloves

Meta — the company formerly known as Facebook — is diving straight into virtual reality with a preview of its latest research and development on haptic gloves, which give sensory feedback while in digital realms.

Facebook rebranded to Meta in late October to shift its focus from social media to metaverse and VR tech development.

In a Tuesday blog post, Meta shared the latest breakthroughs in haptic glove research from its VR tech firm, Reality Labs, noting that the product has been seven years in the making.

The firm shared a video that shows two people testing the haptic gloves in a demo metaverse, as they clench their fists, pick up blocks, throw objects, shake hands, knock over dominoes, and play Jenga together.

Meta said the gloves rely on haptic rendering to send “precise instructions to the actuators on the hand” that correspond with tracking technology that pinpoints the hand’s location and the properties of virtual objects in the metaverse.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a “multiplanet species.” That’s the dream of films such as Interstellar and Wall-E. Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced the premise of The Matrix, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and persist as flesh husks while reality decays around us. According to a report this week from The Verge, the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to “the metaverse.” [Update: He’s gone ahead and done it! One week after this piece was first published, Zuckerberg announced that the company will now be known as “Meta.”]

In a narrow sense, this phrase refers to internet-connected glasses. More broadly, though, it’s a fantasy of power and control.

[Yuli Ban]

A tech founder compared today's hype around the metaverse with Soviet propaganda he experienced as a child.

Phil Libin, the founder of the note-taking app Evernote and the CEO of the videoconferencing company Mmhmm, made the comments in a podcast hosted by the tech journalist Eric Newcomer, The New York Times' Katie Benner, and Insider's Tom Dotan released on Tuesday.

Libin expressed deep skepticism of tech companies touting the metaverse and drew a comparison with his experience growing up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Russia.

"I went to first grade in the Soviet Union," Libin said. "I was subjected to a lot of Soviet propaganda, and I was told as a little kid repeatedly: 'Communism doesn't exist yet. We haven't built communism yet. We're building towards communism. But it's not communism yet. What you see around you, this horrible, horrible place, isn't communism. We're building towards it. It's going to be great when it gets here.'"

Libin continued: "You know, you can smell a bad idea before it's fully built. So I don't want to hear 'Oh yeah, the metaverse doesn't exist yet. No, no, no, all this stuff, all this stupid, useless, crappy stuff that exists right now, that's not the metaverse. The metaverse is coming — it's coming.'"

[Yuli Ban]

[kimonlope]

Hey I am new here. I love Iron Man, He is my favourite one. Thanks for the video.

[kossmoss]

To help you get a sense of how vague and complex a term “the metaverse” can be, here's an exercise to try: Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.” Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change. That's because the term doesn't really refer to any one specific type of technology, but rather a broad shift in how we interact with technology. And it's entirely possible that the term itself will eventually become just as antiquated, even as the specific technology it once described becomes commonplace.gbwhatsapp

[Yuli Ban]

[ananyaa]

And so I just discovered that the Metaverse may actually be coming together after all, which means that I absolutely MUST create a news and discussions thread for it.

Metaverse

The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. The word "metaverse" is made up of the prefix "meta" (meaning beyond) and the stem "verse" (a backformation from "universe"); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe

Is it possible to go into Metaverse ?
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[weatheriscool]

Meta's Quest VR gear to let people 'hang out' in metaverse
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-met ... eople.html

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg sees the future of the internet as people working, playing and exploring in life-like virtual worlds using ever slimmer and more powerful headsets.

Meta on Friday said that it is adding the ability to easily socialize in virtual reality with an update to its Quest 2 headsets in another step toward the metaverse.

The tweak heading for the latest model Quest from Meta-owned Oculus will let wearers hop into virtual settings with friends, chief Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page.

"I'm here to announce the ability to, as soon as you put on your Quest 2 headset, to have people hang out with you in a social environment," Zuckerberg said in a video.

The software update will open a door to Horizon World virtual reality platform that Facebook-parent Meta opened to the public in North America at the end of last year.

Meta is also working on letting people create their own virtual worlds where they host gatherings of avatars, Zuckerberg said.

[Yuli Ban]

[Lorem Ipsum]

For me it's Batman.

[weatheriscool]

Meta CEO Says It Expects One Billion People to Be in The Metaverse by 20230
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/33 ... e-by-20230
By Josh Norem on June 24, 2022 at 9:15 am

In a recent interview with Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opined on various metaverse-related topics. As we all know, the metaverse is seen by the company as the next big thing in computing. So big, in fact, that it changed its name from Facebook to reflect its pivot towards virtual worlds. In the discussion Zuckerberg addressed how he envisions many aspects of the technology’s future.

In the interview, Zuck revealed Meta’s lofty ambitions. He said he hopes there will be at least a billion people in the metaverse by the end of the decade. In addition, he thinks each of those people will be spending hundreds of dollars a year on digital bobbles. He estimated people will be “buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves,” he said. These digital goods could also include avatar clothes, virtual home decorations, or items to adorn a virtual conference room. Doing the math, this means Mark thinks his company will be pulling in hundreds of billions of dollars in metaverse revenue eventually. That’s several factors beyond its current annual revenue, which is around $117 billion. Still, 2030 is a long ways away, so anything is possible.

[funkervogt]

What does it mean to be "in the Metaverse"? Does it count if you've created an account, tried it for one day, and then never use it again? If that's the metric, then there could be a billion Metaverse users by 2030. By the same token, I'm "on Twitter" even though all I did was create an account over ten years ago and then never use it.

[Ojisan]

Not gonna lie. When i first read the word Metaverse and see that pic of iron man on page 6, i through of Marvel combining all universe stories in one. WhatsApp Aero APKAnd damn, when i read the first post of first page, i was hit-bottom wrong.

[AndrewArthur]

I'm "on Twitter" even though all I did was create an account over ten years ago and then never use it.