metaverse

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, VIDEO REELS

Media And Information Experts Explain – What Is The Metaverse?

The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. Facebook is so sold on the concept that it is renaming itself Meta to highlight its push to dominate the metaverse. Metaverse is a portmanteau of meta, meaning ...

A Killer App For The Metaverse? Fill It With AI Avatars Of Ourselves – So We Don’t Need To Go There

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

AI, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

A Killer App For The Metaverse? Fill It With AI Avatars Of Ourselves – So We Don’t Need To Go There

Big numbers coming. Microsoft’s US$75 billion (£55 billion) acquisition of Activision Blizzard has landed – true to Call of Duty vernacular – “like a bomb” on the US$200 billion revenue video games industry. It heavily arms the Xbox giant for its vision of the metaverse, in which gaming is the marketing adrenaline of this much-touted online future that is to be experienced immersively through virtual reality (VR) headsets or augmented-reality (AR) glasses. The stock market knocked US$10 billion off Playstation maker Sony’s valuation on the news. The metaverse was also a big noise at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, branded “tech’s hottest trend” by Variety magazine. Product launches included Samsung’s new VR world My House, offering virtual home makeovers; a...

Working In The Metaverse: What Virtual Office Life Could Look Like

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

BUSINESS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Working In The Metaverse: What Virtual Office Life Could Look Like

In the context of work, the digital divide has become less about access to devices and connectivity and more about skills and mindset. Many experienced professionals have never learned more than the rudimentary basics of email, web search and Microsoft Office. Instead, they lean hard on nearby colleagues or the IT helpdesk when things go wrong. By contrast, young people have already demonstrated a competitive edge in the virtual workplace. They come equipped with a more intuitive grasp of digital technology and the initiative to troubleshoot problems via YouTube tutorials, social media and subreddits. As a generation, they’re also bigger gamers. As more and more work takes place in virtual reality (VR) – and one does not have to share the somewhat eccentric vision of the metaverse Mark Z...

The Metaverse Already Has A Long History But It Isn’t Here Yet

14Aug

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

The Metaverse Already Has A Long History But It Isn’t Here Yet

Nattie’s metaverse romance began with anonymous texting. At first “C” would admit only to living in a nearby town. Nattie eventually learned “Clem” was a man with a solitary office job like hers. For Nattie “lived, as it were, in two worlds” – the world of office tedium and an online world where “she did not lack social intercourse.” Texting drew them closer: “annoyances became lighter because she told him, and he sympathized.” Nattie soon realized “she had woven a sort of romance about him who was a friend ‘so near and yet so far’.” Their blossoming relationship almost failed when Clem’s co-worker visited Nattie’s office pretending to be Clem, but the deceit was exposed in time for their “romance of dots and dashes” to succeed. With that last sentence I gave away the ending to “Wired Lo...

Is It Really Such A Crazy Idea? – Real Estate In The Metaverse Is Booming

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Is It Really Such A Crazy Idea? – Real Estate In The Metaverse Is Booming

The idea of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to buy fictitious “land” in a virtual world sounds, to be frank, absurd. But in recent months, we’ve seen significant investments in virtual land within the metaverse. PwC is among the latest to dive in, having purchased real estate in The Sandbox, a virtual gaming world, for an undisclosed amount. If other reported sales are anything to go by, it would have been a handsome sum. One person recently bought a plot of land in the Snoopverse – a virtual world rapper Snoop Dogg is developing within The Sandbox – for US$450,000 (around £332,500). Meanwhile, the Metaverse Group, a real estate company focused on the metaverse economy, reportedly bought a piece of land in Decentraland, another virtual platform, for US$2.43 million. Let’...

Why You’ll Be On A Blockchain When You’re Virtual-World Hopping – The Metaverse Is Money And Crypto Is King

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Why You’ll Be On A Blockchain When You’re Virtual-World Hopping – The Metaverse Is Money And Crypto Is King

You may think the metaverse will be a bunch of interconnected virtual spaces – the world wide web but accessed through virtual reality. This is largely correct, but there is also a fundamental but slightly more cryptic side to the metaverse that will set it apart from today’s internet: the blockchain. In the beginning, Web 1.0 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform – for example, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Around the turn of the millennium, Web 2.0 came to be characterized by social networking sites, blogging and the monetization of user data for advertising by the centralized gatekeepers to “free” social media platforms, including Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter an...

For Terrorists And Extremists The Metaverse Offers A Future Full Of Potential

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

For Terrorists And Extremists The Metaverse Offers A Future Full Of Potential

The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely from one virtual environment to another. It can also involve augmented reality, a blending of virtual and physical realities, both by representing people and objects from the physical world in the virtual and conversely by bringing the virtual into people’s perceptions of physical spaces. By donning virtual reality headsets or augmented reality glasses, people will be able to socialize, worship and work in environments where the boundaries between environments and between the digital an...

The Metaverse Scares Me – How To Make The Next Iteration Of The Internet Inclusive

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

The Metaverse Scares Me – How To Make The Next Iteration Of The Internet Inclusive

I’m a Black woman and the metaverse scares me – here’s how to make the next iteration of the internet inclusive. Marginalized people often suffer the most harm from unintended consequences of new technologies. For example, the algorithms that automatically make decisions about who gets to see what content or how images are interpreted suffer from racial and gender biases. People who have multiple marginalized identities, such as being Black and disabled, are even more at risk than those with a single marginalized identity. This is why when Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the metaverse – a network of virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects – and said that it will touch every product the company builds, I was scared. As a researche...

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Media And Information Experts Explain – What Is The Metaverse?

Rabindra Ratan, Michigan State University and Yiming Lei, Michigan State University The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. The best-selling science fiction novel ‘Snow Crash’ gave the world the word ‘m...