August 2025 - Metaverse News and Links

 

Couple of interesting posts in the Guardian (and other media) this month:

- Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot - https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/10/artificial-intellligence-avatar-death-grief-digital-resurrection-fascination-deathbot

Deathbot seems an even more perjorative term than griefbot! What interests me though is what the bot means for the person making it more than what it means for those left behind. I'm writing something long form on this but looking the for the best way to publish it in due course.

- It’s missing something’: AGI, superintelligence and a race for the future -https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/its-missing-something-agi-superintelligence-and-a-race-for-the-future

In which it's reported that "Google’s AI unit on Tuesday outlined its next step to AGI by announcing an unreleased model that trains AIs to interact with a convincing simulation of the real world". Whilst it's not clear if this is real embodiment as we've described in Virtual Humans it's certainly a recognition of the greater issue that an AGI needs to exist in a "place" in order to gain all the awareness that AGI may need.

- Can an AI chatbot of Dr Karl change climate sceptics’ minds? He’s willing to give it a try - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/11/digital-dr-karl-kruszelnickic-ai-chatbot

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is dealing with 100s of questions about climate change so is making a Digital Dr Karl. It is trained on 40,000 PDFs.

New XRA Survey Finds 1 in 5 Teens Own a Virtual Reality Headset

 Interesting new survey out from the XR Association. Their blurb, and links,  below:

The XR Association's 2025 teen survey results give insights regarding teens' shifting opinions on the future of XR in their lives, the classroom and beyond. Titled "The Next Generation's Insights on Immersive Tech," the report found that 63% of teens express growing enthusiasm for XR technology, with VR maintaining a high level of favorability among them.

Serving as a follow-up to XRA's 2022 survey, this survey of 600 teens, ages 13 to 19, highlights the growing role of XR in their everyday lives.

View the Interactive Infographic Here

April 2025 - Metaverse News and Links

 

Items that have caught our eye:

- The Metaverse in China - nice roundup from Immersive Wire

February 2025 - Metaverse News and Links

 

Stories that have caught our eye about what is going on in the Metaverse right now.

• Microsoft moving away from Hololens and XR hardware - with Palmer Luckey's Anduril taking it forward for military use in the US Army's IVAS project, which we cover in The Military Metaverse
• Open-Verse has been set up as an EU funded project to promote "open, and ethically responsible European Virtual Worlds" and metaverse companies
• Schools use virtual reality to tackle gang culture - BBC News report of a project in a Birmingham school around knife crime - sounds very similar to a project we did in Lanarkshire in 2010 on knife crime and youth culture - creating NPC avatars that intimidated the player avatars was a challenge, but we did it.

- Not a great fan of out-of-world editors, but Meta has launched a desktop editor for their Horizon Worlds which may offer the potential for more democratic creativity and more interesting worlds to be created, might even give it  ago myself.

As ever, good sources for these and other stories are:

• Immersive Wire
• Simulation.news

January 2025 - Metaverse News and Links

 

This seemed to work OK last year so will continue to do it. One post per month, updating each month as we find links and news relevant to the series.

- Microsoft Introduces Trellis — An AI Model That Turns An Image Into 3D Objects - via Medium

December 2024 - Metaverse News and Links

 

• Decentraland's 2025 Vision
• Taiwan virtual world GOXR has closed, with the parent company focussing on its brand-new community platform XRSPACE. GOXR had a very nice 3D floor model of Taiwan and an AI driven avatar guide.

November 2024 - Metaverse News and Links

 

Some of the more interesting bits of news we spotted around the Internet about the Metaverse this month:

• VR Is Changing War & Sex, Why Are We Still Acting Like It Is Just A Game?
• https://www.auganix.org/xr-news-khronos-group-and-vrm-consortium-collaborate-to-expand-vrm-avatar-format-globally/ - extending the glTF standard into avatar design using VRM.
• Philip Rosedale appointed as CTO back at Linden Lab to help drive Second Life forward again:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Mu2Rpgpw4&t=1s&ab_channel=SecondLife
• https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/15941-philip-rosedale-returns-as-cto-to-help-build-the-future-of-second-life

October 2024 - Useful Links

 

Whilst I post interesting Metaverse news to my Twitter feed, I thought it might also be useful to post them here. But since they don't merit a whole post for each one I'll experiment with the idea of a monthly post that I add to during the month as news comes in. We'll see how it goes!

• EU's ideas for Web 4.0 and virtual worlds -  https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3718
• Using AI to turn old video game/virtual world machina (and other) footage into more realistic video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBrAomadM4c
• BMW's M Mixed Reality system - you drive a real BMW round a race track but wear an MR headset which augments the view around the track (as far as I can work out form the description!)
• Ready Player Me launches Player Zero - essentially NFT "collectible" outfits
• Nice summary from Immersive Wire about VR in China, particularly location-based VR.
• Ernst Kline (of Ready Player One fame) is backing a new Battle Royale world called Open (but bet it isn't!) from Readyverse Studios.
• Decentraland 2.0 White Paper, head of their 2.0 launch
• POC of using AR/MR to rewrite reality as you see it - https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/1g9iwcg/lifeskin_app_concept/?rdt=60673
• HeyGen demo video - virtual presenters - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3225dV0lyQ&ab_channel=HeyGen

Also always worth checking out Immersive Wire for a whole range of stories, only key ones of which I'll repost here.

VISPA Virtual World Closing

Seems the VISPA virtual world is closing on 31/8 according to a service email I've received. Had some novel ideas, particularly in the way that spaces were laid/created & hopefully we'll see some of them replicated elsewhere - directly or through in-world scripting.

New CITI Report - Mapping the Innovation Landscape

Interesting new report by CITI Global Insights on Mapping the Innovation Landscape - Comparing 100 Emerging & Disruptive Technologies, Business Models, and Ideas.

It shows the metaverse with a current market size of $90bn, but with a forecast growth to 2030 of over $1tn (which puts it about 6th, alongside AI). Note that there is also a separate entry for Virtual Reality. The report also suggests that investment in the metaverse is on the low side (given the log scale).

The metaverse is defined as "a proposed version of the Internet where you feel you are "inside" it, as opposed to merely looking at it" and virtual reality as a system which "covers  the field of view to give an immersive experience. Augmented reality uses computer-generated images superimposed over a view of the real world, allowing for mobility" (so seems to include AR, and MR - and is perhaps more focused on the hardware than the experience but this isn't clear).

VRChat Lays off 30% of Company, Citing Growing Pains Following COVID Platform Boom (RoadToVR)

We're aiming to post news stories about the Metaverse on this site to help keep the books up to date, as well as letting you know what is happening to the Series itself, and providing additional content that wouldn't fit in the books - like colour photos and videos!

So here's our first news story. It must be said that whilst VRChat has some nice features and has encouraged the creation of a lot of UGC it is very much an acquired taste!

https://www.roadtovr.com/vrchat-lays-off-30-of-company/