This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse - Issue #5

A weekly roundup of what’s happening in the digital land(scape). Metaverse ethics, governance and interesting trends from crypto, gaming and regulation.

What's going on:

What a WEEK!!!! From the launching of the XRGuild at #AWE, to Neal Stephenson himself (snow) crashing the speculation hype and disrupting the metaverse players with the annoucement of LAMINA1, to neurorights in RigthsCon (say it twice fast, I dare you!), to a... robot finger covered in living skin...

Buckle up for a supercharged #ThisWeekInTheMetaverse !!!

What is it?The XR Guild is an association of professionals in the field of XR, Spatial Computing, Metaverse and web3 (and related) who support a common set of ethical principles.

Hosted by Micaela Mantegna from BKC Harvard, with Celia Hodent, Albert Fox Cahn and Dylan Urquidi, the RightsCon session: "Every breath you take, every move you make: neurotechnology, XR, and the metaverse of surveillance", raised the alarms on the risks that employing neurotechnology in metaverse contexts present for mental privacy, agency, anonymity and self determination.

Meta Platforms has scaled back its plans to release a series of augmented reality glasses over the next several years as part of an effort to trim heavy investments it is making in its Reality Labs hardware and AR/VR division, employees were notified Wednesday. Meta has decided to not ...

Marc Andreessen has claimed that Web3 technology and programmable blockchains are experiencing the same type of adoption and development as the original internet.

The OMG! award of the week goes to...

There is hope for the Open Metaverse!

"In brief, I think of it as the base layer for the Open Metaverse: a place to build something a bit closer to Neal’s vision — one that privileges creators, technical and artistic, one that provides support, spatial computing tech, and a community to support those who are building out the Metaverse. 

The author is working with a number of crypto veterans on a new metaverse-focused base layer, Lamina1.

NFTLand:

Alexa, play "Sorry, Not Sorry"

An NFT of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet originally sold for $2.9 million in 2021. However, it now has a highest buy offer of only $29, which is a colossal drop of 99.9999%.

There's been a vibe shift in the world of NFTs post-crash.

For Science!!!

Japanese innovation thought to have potential to ‘build a new relationship between humans and robots’ 👀

(⚆_⚆) I don't know where to start with this one. Yeah, a "finger"... (⚆_⚆)

Meme corner:

"that's the way ha ha I like it"

Ending nugget:

The assumption that the Metaverse is primarily an AR/VR thing isn't crazy. In my book it's all VR. And I worked for an AR company--one of several that are putting billions of dollars into building headsets. But... I didn't see video games coming when I wrote Snow Crash.

I thought that the killer app for computer graphics would be something more akin to TV. But then along came DOOM and generations of games in its wake. That's what made 3D graphics cheap enough to reach a mass audience.

Thanks to games, billions of people are now comfortable navigating 3D environments on flat 2D screens. The UIs that they've mastered (e.g. WASD + mouse) are not what most science fiction writers would have predicted. But that's how path dependency in tech works.

We fluently navigate and interact with extremely rich 3D environments using keyboards that were designed for mechanical typewriters. It's steampunk made real. A Metaverse that left behind those users and the devs who build those experiences would be getting off on the wrong foot

But modern engines help devs manage the challenges of building for multiple targets. My expectation is that a lot of Metaverse content will be built for screens (where the market is) while keeping options open for the future growth of affordable headsets.

Neal Stephenson at @nealstephenson Twitter thread, Jun 8