A weekly roundup of what’s happening in the digital land(scape). Metaverse ethics, governance and interesting trends from crypto, gaming and regulation.
Jessica Stocker of Season two of Bravo’s ‘Winter House’ talks about selling virtual land in the metaverse, flipping houses in the real world, and why no one should buy land in ‘any metaverse’ right now.
Update, October 17: Carmack later acknowledged that Rec Room and VRChat do make money for Meta via 30% commissions on in-app payments. However, as most free-to-play multiplayer games/worlds monetize at under 10% (usually much less), it's still likely the case...
Warner Records enters the web3 space in collaboration with Probably Nothing, 'Probably A Label,' releasing exclusive content with Diddy.
Meta says it plans to connect Horizon Worlds and Crayta in ‘meaningful ways’ which will bring the first inkling of cross-platform interoperability to the company’s metaverse plans. Meta may be all in on the metaverse, but to date hasn’t done much to actually build one. Sure, the company has Horizon Worlds, which is no doubt a great …
K-metaverse 2022, a massive project being implemented by the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning along with the National IT Industry Promotion Agency, aims to promote globally competitive companies specializing in the Metaverse by selecting and providing customized support to 70 K-metaverse companies that have developed strong technological capabilities.
The Metaverse Music Festival returns for its second year in the blockchain virtual world, Decentraland.
MicroLED gives displays four times the resolution, and better color fidelity. That's great in situations where the screens are close to the eye.
Quest Pro’s face-tracking capabilities will be quickly put to use to make Meta’s avatars more expressive, but next-gen avatars stand to benefit much more from the new tech. One of Quest Pro’s big new features is a face-tracking system that uses internal cameras to sense the movement of your eyes and some parts of your …
A new mod for Oblivion allows you to order real pizza in-game via an NPC - although you'll need to be in the US for it to work.
Nonfungible tokens are struggling amid a crypto "winter". In sectors from art to gaming, trading volume for NFTs across all sectors has plunged about 90% since this time last year, according to data from the crypto websites The Block and CryptoSlam.
Essays written by AI language tools like OpenAI's Playground are often hard to tell apart from text written by humans.
I've been following a woman around the internet. Turns out she's a deepfake created by AI. And she's not alone.
The recent history of creative AIs and music has been a tale of fledgling startups and huge technology companies alike.
Over the past 10-20 years, and particularly in recent years, the computer vision research community has produced an abundance of frameworks capable of taking a single image and using it to perform 'deepfake puppetry' – the use of the facial and body movements of one person to simulate a secondary, fictitious identity.
“A new computing platform like AR requires a new way to interact with our devices. We believe EMG will be critically important. By combining machine learning with neuroscience, this low-friction input will be able to work with each person to adapt to their unique differences.”
Cameras inside the device that track eye and face movements can make an avatar’s expressions more realistic, but they raise new privacy questions.
"A new study has utilized virtual reality to demonstrate that moderate-to-vigorous effort influences the perceived pleasantness of human faces with neutral expressions. Findings have recently been published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise . ".
"Results showed that higher perceived effort was associated with lower pleasantness ratings of neutral faces, with this effect only emerging at moderate-to-high levels of perceived effort".
Physical effort biases the perceived pleasantness of neutral faces: A virtual reality study
"The Metaverse of Cognitive Surveillance" 
