We're proud to announce that we'll be holding a physical launch for The Military Metaverse book as part of the DSET 2025 event, thanks to Tess Butler and the team at Ruddy Nice.
The first part will be Andy and David talking about the book at the DSET Industry Day on 25 Jun. And then during the physical conference and exhibition we'll be holding a prize draw for a signed copy of the book during an evening reception.
For more information and to sign up to DSET visit https://dset.co.uk/
Our author copies of the Military Metaverse arrived today! That makes #3 in the series, and I'm busy proofing what will probably be #4 or #5, we're now onto the books not written by Maggi or me.
The book is of course available from Routledge (20% discount til end Jun with code 25AFLY1), Amazon and other good booksellers.
Our microworld on the Military Metaverse is now open and links into the existing space on the series in order to build out our Metaverse Series Microverse.
You can access the world directly from your browser and without creating an account at:
https://framevr.io/militarymetaverse
The space has an area for each chapter of the book, including 3D models and illustrations, and even an AI bot who (should) know all about the book.
You can also flip the space from being about the book to showcasing a couple of higher-rez models and a large floor map of Estonia which starts to give some idea of how such spaces could be used for planning or wargaming spaces.
If you'd like a tour of the space (or the original one for A Critical Introduction) then just email me at david.burden@daden.co.uk.
The Military Metaverse is published today! Details at https://metaverseseries.blogspot.com/p/the-military-metaverse.html.
Sign up to our virtual launch on 7th May at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-military-metaverse-virtual-launch-tickets-1317151809519?aff=oddtdtcreator.
Available from Amazon or Routledge as hardcopy or eBook, 20% discount at Routledge with the code 25AFLY1
This is the third book in the series and we have more in the production pipeline, so look out for more releases in the second half of 2025.
Andy and I will both be there to answer questions and to chat to you, and the space is also set up to email me when people come in, so even if we're not in-world when you arrive one of us should be in shortly afterwards.
We'll post the URL to the space up on the day (and email to attendees), and the space will then persist for the foreseeable future as a way to explore the book and for us to engage with our audience.
We hope to see you there.
Update: I've now produced a Substack post which describes my experiences to date in mixed reality /XR wargaming with ShapesXR and other platforms.
I've been playing around with ShapesXR for the last couple of weeks and its looking really good as a general purpose MR collaboration platform. There is something very different, but also incredibly natural about having collaborators present in your own physical space but working with a mutual virtual toolset. The images below show Andy Fawkes (co-author of the forthcoming The Military Metaverse) and I testing out some prototype manual wargames in my office/game room and his VR space. But with the core ability to import 3D objects, rez objects from a library, move and place objects and add annotations ShapesXR could be used for a wide variety of use cases and is certainly the easiest to use that I've found so far for MR.
Note that both of use can scale, rotate and place the shared environment wherever we want in our own physical spaces, so at one point I had it scaled large and placed on my 8' x 6' table, where he had it shrunk down and sat on his lap. You can also use the scaling so that you can experience any build at eye-level/subjective mode, or loom over it in a more objective/god mode.
More posts (and maybe even some video) of our experiences in MR to follow.
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| Andy adding objects to the build |
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| Ignore the spurious grey avatar, but Andy's scaled down avatar is visible just in front - so to him the build is scaled right up and he's getting a street level view |
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| Andy scaled up to "god" mode looking down upon creation! |
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| My first playable MR manual wargame - a WW1 dogfight! |
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| Andy's view of me in VR mode. You can toggle at will between MR and VR. I can see the VR mode being the equivalent of blurring your background in Zoom. |
